Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
‘Displacement’ by Kiku Hughes is an engaging mix of fact, fiction, and fantasy, which allows the author to time-travel to the time her grandmother was at an internment camp in the 1940s.
The graphic novel opens with Kiku and her mother searching for the place where their family once lived in San Francisco. There, Kiku suddenly finds herself transported back in time, watching her grandmother Ernestina playing the violin as a young teenage girl. Kiku explains to the reader that she has no control over these bouts of time travel, so she prefers to call each episode a ‘displacement’, until one particular displacement leaves her trapped in an internment camp for months.
There, Kiku learns firsthand how Japanese Americans, including rightful U.S. citizens, were forced from their homes across the country and incarcerated in heavily guarded camps. All of this was fueled by a wave of hatred, resentment and fear directed at Japanese Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II.
It was only after reading George Takei’s graphic novel memoir ‘They Called Us Enemy’ in 2022 that I first learned that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed an executive order that led to people of Japanese ancestry being forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast and confined in heavily guarded camps. It’s a slice of history that even several American readers admit to being unaware of, so of course, as an Indian, it’s certainly not something I would have come across unless I was reading widely.
While Takei’s graphic novel is more factual and sombre, Kiku Hughes’ book is heavily fictionalized, imagining the author transported into the past to experience firsthand a painful chapter of history that many Japanese Americans who lived through it would rather forget. Interestingly though, Kiku never quite works up the courage to talk to her grandmother’s younger self. That might be disappointing to some readers, but in a way, it’s also understandable: it can be overwhelming to cook up a fictional conversation with a dead ancestor.
Instead, the graphic novel focuses on Kiku navigating the isolation of being stranded without her family in an unfamiliar and turbulent time, while forging new friendships that make life at the camp more bearable. In fact, my biggest complaint with ‘Displacement’ is that it almost unwittingly sanitizes the experience of incarceration. The anger over their unjust treatment is certainly there, but everyday life at the camp often seems surprisingly tolerable, almost like an underfunded, overly strict boarding school where the residents nevertheless manage to socialize, form friendships and carve out a reasonably content existence for themselves.
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On the flip side, the fact that this graphic novel isn’t exceedingly dark or grim also makes it a good primer for younger readers on the subject. So, ‘Displacement’ is a reader-friendly book that approaches a difficult chapter of history with a relatively gentle touch, through the lens of a young woman trying to understand what the Japanese side of her family endured during the war and how the experience forever altered them.
One of its most lasting effects was the complicated relationship many Japanese Americans developed with their own heritage. Those born and raised in America, with little connection to Japan, were nevertheless persecuted because of their Japanese ancestry, leading some to distance themselves from the very language and culture that had made them targets. Ernestina, for instance, never teaches her children Japanese, which eventually leaves Kiku disconnected from the language as well.
Through the time-travel narrative device, the author not only revisits how Japanese Americans became victims of racial prejudice, fearmongering and hyper-nationalism, but also draws parallels with the treatment of immigrants in present-day America. And she’s quite vocal against the Trump administration, which probably guarantees her a healthy collection of angry one-star reviews.
My Rating for Displacement: 4 stars on 5.
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