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COLD SHOULDERS & EVIL EYES : STEADYING GAZES & WARM EMBRACES
Inclusion and Exclusion in Our Daily Lives
PART V:  FAMILY & HISTORY

JODI L. HOTTEL


SWEEPING


Our battered suitcases stand by the door
ready to go, but they will have to wait
while I try to sweep away
the desert dust, one last time.

Three years we've been forced
to live behind barbed wire.
Now, Papa and I are being forced out—
too old for farming,
no home to go back to,
our children already gone—
Sam to war in Europe,
a college in Chicago for Mei.

I pause in the doorway
of the barrack, our only shelter
from the bitter winds, dust-driven heat.
No need for a last look
at the sentinel of Heart Mountain.
It will never
be far enough away
that I don’t see it.

I return to my sweeping,
shoving the broom hard
into empty corners, shaping
neat piles of sand.
Papa chides—
Why clean? No one will live here again.
But I don’t listen.

Whoever comes to demolish
these empty walls will see—
we Japanese kept our homes clean,
did our best to get rid
of the shame,
the stigma
we wear on our faces.


DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

What happens in us when we go back and actively try to imagine the social injustices our ancestors experienced? 

Does this imaginative identification ease or intensify the experience of exclusion or inclusion for us now?  How?



AUTHOR'S COMMENTARY

My mother has always had a movie star’s smile. Even now, although she’s 82, people comment on her radiant smile. When I was young and pressed her, she would tell me tidbits about her childhood. She would giggle with embarrassment as she related that people used to tell her that she looked just like Shirley Temple, her favorite movie star.

At age sixteen, she and her family were removed from their farm in the Yakima Valley of Washington and interned at a concentration camp in Wyoming during WWII because they were Japanese. She was reticent to discuss this part of her life, as were most Japanese Americans of her generation because it brought back too many painful memories. But I was always yearned to know more. I came to understand that she felt shame for being Japanese, although she had done no wrong.

My motivation for writing this and other poems about the Japanese American experience is to understand my mother but also to tell the story of a passing generation of men and women, to serve as a reminder so that loss of liberty due solely to race will not happen again.




JODI  L. HOTTEL is a writer and retired English teacher, living in Santa Rosa, CA. Her work has been published in the English Journal, The Dickens and anthologies from the University of Iowa Press, Tebot Bach, and the Healdsburg Arts Council. At age 16, her mother was interned at Heart Mountain, Wyoming.


Copyright Wising Up Press 2009

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Universal Table   Finding the We in Them, the Us in You.   Wising Up Press
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Universal Table   Finding the We in Them, the Us in You.   Wising Up Press
www.universaltable.org      P.O. Box 2122, Decatur, GA 30031-2122      404-276-6046