Displacement by Kiku Hughes

 

On a trip to San Francisco with her mom, Kiku suddenly finds herself thrown back in time. She's landed in the early 1940s, to the incarceration camp where her grandmother Ernestina, along with hundreds of other Japanese Americans, was held during World War II. 

Faced with no choice but to survive the camp along with the rest of the internees, Kiku begins to learn what exactly it felt like to be torn from your home and thrown in prison simply because of your race. As she forms friendships and connections with the other internees, Kiku sees a pattern of courage and resistance in the camp community that inspires her to finally speak out when she returns home to the present day. 

This magical realism/memoir/historical fiction graphic novel deserves a spot on shelves alongside George Takei's They Called Us Enemy. Hughes seamlessly weaves together past and present to create a moving narrative about historical wrongs and modern-day injustices such as the imprisonment of undocumented immigrants and Trump's Muslim ban.

This book was especially personal to read as my grandparents, like Kiku's, were incarcerated during World War II. A few weeks after reading this book for the first time, I spotted it in the gift shop of the Japanese American National Museum in LA, where my family honored our relatives by stamping their names into the museum's sacred book of the names of all (recorded) Japanese American internees. While I pressed the little blue stamp into the thousand-page book, I wondered for the hundredth time what it was felt like for the thousands of Japanese Americans who were held prisoner. I may never fully comprehend the pain they went through--for my own sake I hope that I never experience it--but Hughes' book helped me empathize more deeply than ever before with my incarcerated ancestors and their community.