“Talking to us,” “inside our silence,” “a recent history”: The Internment of Japanese Americans in Amy Uyematsu’s Poetry

Abstract

Amy Uyematsu is a Sansei (third generation) Japanese American poet from Los Angeles, who has been deeply affected, like many other Japanese-American writers, by the experience of the World War II internment camps, even if she was born after the war. The tragic event, which was officially acknowledged as the fruit of racism in 1981, was hushed for a long time. The five books of poetry she has published strive to remedy this absence and denial, in which the original uprooting of immigration is being replayed. Her poetry recreates stories and history from life fragments repressed into silence—the stigmatizing silence which has shaped the stereotype of Japanese and Asian Americans as passive and subservient, and which their children have revolted against. For young activist Uyematsu, writing was indeed a weapon for “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America” (1969). Cut off from her Japanese language, culture, and roots, she has succeeded in overcoming “the silence of fathers,” and reconnecting with the Issei (first) generation of her grandparents, by learning Japanese, one word at a time, improvising songs for her son, and reinventing what she wants to pass on to the next generation. The third generation Sansei women are the ones, especially the artists like her, who dare break the silence and transmit their hi/story through song and poetry, but also “rhythm, gesture and memory.” Silence thus becomes a path to reconciliation, understanding and connectedness with ancestors. In her increasingly meditative poetry, Amy Uyematsu offers a healing from within and a re-union of generations, “talking to us,” “inside our silence.”