I Call to Remembrance
Toyo Suyemoto's Years of Internment
A uniquely poetic contribution to the small body of internment memoirs, Suyemoto's account includes information about policies and wartime decisions that are not widely known, and recounts in detail the way in which internees adjusted their notions of selfhood and citizenship, lending insight to the complicated and controversial questions of citizenship, accountability, and resistance of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans.
Suyemoto's poems, many written during internment, are interwoven throughout the text and serve as counterpoints to the contextualizing narrative. Suyemoto's poems, many written during internment, are interwoven throughout the text and serve as counterpoints to the contextualizing narrative. A small collection of poems written in the years following her incarceration further reveal the psychological effects of her experience.
This illuminating and moving memoir adds to the literature of internment by providing invaluable insight into how the raw facts of governmental decisions are perceived and experienced by the subjects of those decisions. Most importantly, Toyo Suyemoto shows us how it is possible, under conditions of duress and degradation, to retain one's dignity, compassion, and imagination.
April 1942
Morning of departure
Growing up in Nihonmachi
Intake at Tanforan
Tanforan days
Tanforan High School
Kay's illness
Another move
Entry into Topaz
Settling in
As 1942 Ended
Block 4-8-E
Schooling in Topaz
Topaz Public Library
Sensei
Into another year
Registration for loyalty
Weighed in the balance
We be brethren
In the length of days
The dust before the wind
The Dispersal
Tree of the People (Topaz community)