An expose of Japanese internment camps post the Pearl Harbour bombing in the USA

THE EXECUTIVE Order 9066 signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, which took away the rights of 120,000 Japanese Americans and condemned them to life in internment camps remains a blot on the collective conscience of America. Once in a while, this worm called conscience wriggles in sleep and all that America values—justice, liberty, equality—is exposed, belly up, for the world to see.

America’s double standards have been questioned time and again by the thinking public, its acts of omission and commission held up for microscopic scrutiny followed by public outcries. However, at certain times it seems the people of America and their governments speak in a single voice. For example, during the recent diplomatic row over Devyani Khobragade episode, the vocal US media was found pussyfooting around the issue. Lindely’s pre-World War II America is a similar one. United by war hysteria of Pearl Harbour bombing, the Americans are also one in their visceral hatred of all things Japanese. “Half-half” Satomi Baker, the half American, half Japanese protagonist of the novel, is forever trying to locate the logic behind the blind spot of this bourgeois mentality. A highly intellectual being herself, she just cannot fathom the reasons for their brutish injustices. Lindley’s research led her to a serendipitous discovery of this dark chapter in America’s ‘white’ history. This led to the writing of the story of Satomi Baker and the exposition of the Japanese internment camps. For today’s generation, this piece of history would be shocking. However, it is a well documented chapter.

Lindley’s sketch of small town America is depicted painstakingly in Angelina, California, the home town of the Bakers. She is brilliant in the details and it seems as though Angelina and its people are being seen in 3D technicolour. You feel the oppressive heat with Satomi, hear the thunder, feel the first drop of rain, the stares of the people, you see through her eyes her parents framed forever in candle light as they undress to make love. The Manzanar camp where the Japanese community is interned is again painted in barren colours of despair and devastation. You duck down with residents to escape the worst of the swirling duststorms, can barely prevent yourself from retching at the description of the community latrines in monsoon and the infestation of the roaches, tremble with them at their fear and laugh at their half-hearted jokes. Yet, the warmth of inmates like Eriko and Tamura warms the heart at humanity’s dignified strength. Caged like animals and fettered with barbed wires, Manzanar residents are patrolled by armed guards round the clock. But America is not dead. There are Americans like guard Lawson who find some reprieve in the act of giving to the camp inmates and there is Dr Harper who is collecting evidence of the extremities to use as an indictment against America at an opportune time.

Satomi Baker’s personal journey of discovery of identity is paralleled in her relationship with her nativity. Hers is an existential dilemma than an identity crisis. She knows her parentage—an all American father and a Japanese mother. It is an intellectual crisis. She revolts against what she perceives as the bulldozing male domination of her father (America) and the unquestioning acquiescence of her mother (Japan). Japanese girls are taught to be obedient, her mother Tamura often tells her; like Tamura is to Aaron. Both her parents have forsaken their families to be together and Satomi often feels like the invisible third wheel.

Lindely’s exploration of Satomi’s emotional and sexual growth is a letdown. The reader is left wondering as to what Satomi exactly wants. Lindley leaves Satomi a teenaged widow at a seaside cottage with a young orphan she had promised to take care of at Manzanar. If we are to take her existential dilemma as a metaphor for the battle of supremacy between her American and Japanese roots, it would seem Lindley means Satomi to emerge as a symbol of liberty, justice and equality on a mission to right the wrongs done to the Japanese by the Americans. Yet in this avatar, she is neither American nor Japanese but Japanese-American—an American with a new identity.