Displacementby Karen MaedaReviews may contain information that could be considered 'spoilers'. Readers should proceed at their own risk. Publisher
Credits Grade: 10 Right now, Asian Americans are under attack again for simply looking different and being from Asian descent. (There is WAY more politically to unpack here, but for this review's purpose, I just want to keep it simple.) Most of the attacks that have happened are targeting Asian women, which in itself is horrible, and likely reminds a lot of the Japanese Americans of the time when their families were incarcerated by the American government in "internment camps" for WWII. This moment in history left a lot of gaps because the Japanese who were incarcerated often do not like to talk about this period of history, and even worse, neither did the American government or history books.The story begins with teenage Kiku and her mom visiting San Francisco and wind up looking for Kiku's grandmother's childhood home when Kiku gets a weird feeling and realizes she has been whisked away into a different time and place. She finds herself at her grandmother's school, probably January 1942, listening to her play violin, one of the few things that Kiku knows about her grandmother. She does not get to say hi. Kiku gets whisked back to reality and goes back home with her mother to Washington. The displacement happens again to Kiku, and this is where the majority of the story happens. She lives as an interned Japanese citizen in two different internment camps, makes friends, gets a girlfriend, witnesses the fear and uncertainty the people in the camp faced, and understands first hand why the three different generations acted the way they did in response to the whole situation. Again, she does not get to say hi to her grandmother. As a Japanese American, this book was hard to take because it made a lot of points that the Japanese hid their culture in order to look more American. They did not pass their language down and a lot of the stories about living in the internment camps purposely did not get shared because it was a huge black mark on the USA and on the Japanese who lived there. Kiku returns from her displacement and discovers that her mom had the same kind of displacement happen to her when she was growing up. The two join forces and go to anti-Trump protests that were happening in the USA which focused on immigration and Muslim issues. There have been two powerful graphic novels on the Japanese Internment camps in the past 12 months. I found that Displacement is a bit more personal to me than They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, but purely because I am in Kiku's shoes and have lived with the missing gaps in family history. Both are incredible works of art with amazing story telling and I think you cannot have one without the other. Written: March 23, 2021
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