Camp Notes and Other Poems by Mitsuye Yamada
"Camp Notes and Other Poems" by Mitsuye Yamada is a poignant collection that reflects on the author's experiences as a Japanese American interned during World War II. From April 1942 to September 1943, Yamada and her family were held in an internment camp near Minidoka, Idaho, where she captured her thoughts and feelings in poetry. The collection is divided into several sections, beginning with poems that honor her ancestors and family history, then transitioning into powerful reflections on the internment experience.
The "Camp Notes" segment features some of Yamada's most emotionally charged works, addressing themes of justice, equity, and the absurdity of the language used to justify the camps. Through vivid imagery and sharp irony, she conveys the humiliation and despair of captivity while also confronting the broader implications of fear and racism that led to her internment. The collection is enriched by the contributions of Yamada's family, including calligraphs from her husband and illustrations from her daughters, as well as a translation of a poem by her father written during his own internment. Overall, "Camp Notes and Other Poems" serves as a profound exploration of identity, resilience, and the impact of injustice on individuals and communities.
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Camp Notes and Other Poems by Mitsuye Yamada
First published: 1976
The Work
The poems in Camp Notes and Other Poems originated in the experience of a concentration camp. Mitsuye Yamada and her family were interned with other Japanese Americans from the West Coast during World War II. Yamada spent April, 1942, through September, 1943, at the internment camp near Minidoka, Idaho. Inmates could have few possessions; Yamada brought a tablet of paper on which she recorded her reflections on life in the camp. To the poems from this period she later added others concerning the time preceding and the time following the camp experience.
At the beginning of the book are poems about ancestors and parents: great-grandmother’s box of treasured souvenirs, a young bride in a new and precarious environment, a folktale related by a sophisticated father. Following the poems about internment are poems related to the poet’s later life. These poems frequently have themes that are a feature of the center section about the internment: justice, equity, and generosity. These themes are continuing threads in these poems, which occasionally have a feminist perspective.
The middle, or “Camp Notes,” section contains the angriest poems. With irony, the speaker in the poems expresses and conquers the rage, humiliation, and despair of unjust captivity. A photographer’s instruction to “smile” as internees are collected at staging points, the bus ride to the camps, a guard tower seen through the eyes of a child, makeshift furniture of packing crates and straw mattresses, stuffing rags into cracks in the shacklike barracks during a dust storm—each of these moments is crystallized. The poem titled “Curfew” ends in a particularly vivid commentary: After quoting the “block head” giving orders for lights out, the speaker simply remarks, “There must be no light.” One of the briefest poems, “In the Outhouse,” is also one of the most powerful. The stench of the outhouse becomes a metaphor for the entire camp and the mentality that created it; fear and racism relegate a whole group of people to the domain of “refuse” and “outsider.” Many of the poems focus on the absurdity and duplicity of the language and thinking used to justify the camps. In “Desert Storm” the speaker notes the euphemisms that attempted to disguise injustice, noting how the reality of imprisonment was “sanitized” by the term “relocation.” The speaker notes in “The Trick Was” that the “mind was not fooled.”
Camp Notes and Other Poems is actually a cooperative and family project. Yamada’s husband, Yoshikazu Yamada, contributed the calligraphs that translate titles and text for some of the poems. Her daughters, Jeni and Hedi, produced illustrations for some pages. Yamada also includes a translation of one of her father’s poems, written while he was interned apart from his family in a different camp.
Bibliography
Schweik, Susan. “A Needle with Mama’s Voice: Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes and the American Canon of War Poetry.” In Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, edited by Helen M. Cooper, Susan Merrill Squier, and Adrienne Auslander Munich. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Yamada, Mitsuye. “A MELUS Interview: Mitsuye Yamada.” Interview by Helen Jaskoski. MELUS 15, no. 1 (1988): 97-108.