Book Highlight: Displacement by Kiku Hughes
Book Highlight by Emma Rosales, Friends of Minidoka Undergraduate Summer Intern
Have you ever been listening to one of your grandparents' wild stories from back in the day and thought, “Huh, I wish I could travel back in time and see what it was like?” For a young girl named Kiku, this really happened. However, sometimes history isn’t just fascinating or stays in the past. It can be complicated, painful, and leave lasting effects long after the moment has taken place. Kiku Hughes brings a blend of fiction and nonfiction to life in this graphic novel that explores the unjustified forced removal of Japanese Americans following Pearl Harbor. Hughes serves as the main character and is startled to find herself shifted through time back to 1942, when the United States government began removing American citizens and immigrants of Japanese ancestry to incarceration camps due to irrational growing fear of espionage and sabotage during wartime in the States.
The story first takes place in 2016, with Kiku and her mom traveling from Seattle to San Francisco to visit the house where Kiku’s grandmother grew up before World War II. Unbeknownst to them, the house had been torn down and rebuilt as a contemporary structure. While they travel around the neighborhood, Japantown, Kiku begins to understand just how unaware she is about her grandmother, their history, and her culture. As she waits for her mom to return from the mall, she experiences her first episode of “displacement,” which is how Kiku refers to the time periods when she is shifted back to when her grandmother was experiencing incarceration. At first, she is startled to see her grandmother at a young age, playing violin for an audience, but she soon returns to the present day.
On her third displacement to the era, she is transported to Tanforan, a temporary incarceration camp in California. There she meets Aiko, her courageous and strong-willed bunkmate, who helps navigate Kiku through her intense journey at the camp. As Kiku and other Japanese Americans are forced to live their lives through constant surveillance and limited freedom, the detainees build a sense of community through friendship, education, and events to alleviate their living conditions. However, just a few months in, the occupants were relocated to permanent internment camps across the country. Kiku was sent to Topaz, a camp in Utah with much harsher weather conditions than Tanforan.
As the Nikkei try to figure out ways to be released from the camp, they fight with the moral complexity of demands to stay loyal to a country who has destroyed their communities. After spending a few more months in the camp, Kiku and others begin to find a new routine in Topaz. As more and more people begin to be released, however, Kiku wonders about how she will resettle her life on the outside, which is now more unfamiliar than life in the camp. Many people had to begin again, now sent off with no tools or resources to survive in a world where they were not allowed in for years. Kiku is then surprised when she finds herself waking from the displacement and back in modern time. She then tells her mom, and they transport back in time to see Kiku’s grandmother perform. At the end of the book, Kiku reflects on what she witnessed in the camps and is determined to stand up against injustice to ensure that history never repeats itself.
Overall, this book was incredibly powerful and insightful. Despite being targeted to a younger audience, it had a raw and authentic appeal that creates a compelling book for any age group to read. Kiku Hughes reflects on the importance of telling stories and combatting silence. Governments may be able to conceal documents or intimidate schools into dispelling this part of history, but they are never able to silence the real stories of those who faced discrimination. This quick yet impactful story will help readers understand the violation of civil rights and the lasting trauma during this overlooked chapter of history.