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    I Call to Remembrance
    Toyo Suyemoto's Years of Internment

    Toyo Suyemoto (Author), Susan B. Richardson (Edited by)

    9780813540726

    Paperback / softback, published 13 July 2007

    256 pages, 50
    22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.34 kg

    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.
    - Traise Yamamoto (associate professor of English, University of California, Riverside)

    Toyo Suyemoto is known informally by literary scholars and the media as "Japanese America's poet laureate." But Suyemoto has always described herself in much more humble terms. A first-generation Japanese American, she has identified herself as a storyteller, a teacher, a mother whose only child died from illness, and an internment camp survivor. Before Suyemoto passed away in 2003, she wrote a moving and illuminating memoir of her internment camp experiences with her family and infant son at Tanforan Race Track and, later, at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, from 1942 to 1945.

    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.

    Berkeley
    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)
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