Departures: Poetry and Prose on Bainbridge Island Japanese American Relocation After Pearl Harbor - Historical Literature for Book Clubs & WWII Studies
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SKU:55878738
Product Description
The narrative of poetry and prose begins on the eve of Pearl Harbor. An old Croatian fisherman rows across Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island to light the kerosene lamps to guide the ferries in, as he does each night. Christmas lights decorate the cottages scattered around the harbor. The lights of Seattle glow to the east. A star falls “from the wayside of infinity.”The next morning, a Sunday, brings the bombing of Pearl Harbor.The owners of the Bainbridge Island Review, Walt and Milly Woodward, work into the wee hours to publish a special edition. Walt Woodward reminds his neighbors, “I am positive every Japanese family on the Island has an intense loyalty for the United States of America and stands ready to defend it.” Up and down the West Coast, however, hatred is stirring.Little more than two months later, President Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066 authorizing the removal of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast of the United States.On March 30, 1942, 227 Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island, under bayonet guard, are marched aboard the ferry Kehloken bound for Seattle and a train waiting to take them to Manzanar, a barbed-wire camp in the central California desert. Many of their island neighbors turned out to see them off. Not a few of them weep.The author, using historical sources and family recollections, has crafted a poetic narrative of one of the most conspicuous injustices in American history, and explores how the healing goes on.
Customer Reviews
One take-away from anything Mike Dillon writes is you can be sure it is thoughtful, finely and deliberately wrought and always with a twist, a turn of phrase, historical fragment, that brings you to an admiring stop. This book deserves to be read in one sitting because it is, in the end, a story. Mike uses poetry, prose and journalism to tell this sad and not told enough shame and after four one-sitting readings, I am still struck with the total absence of recriminations or rancor from the dispossessed who got a week's notice to leave their homes, allowed one suitcase and no assurance they would ever return, no train ticket with a destination marked. You positively cannot set this book down and not be moved and maybe ashamed by what we did. Barely three months after Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066 sent American citizens into what we must properly call concentration camps. Dillon looks at this dispassionately (the journalism in this book) but there is no hiding, Gaman or not, the depth of this misguided executive order. The understory of everything Mike Dillon writes is a precise use of language that will sneak up and surprise you or simply quietly smack you into a silent appreciation of his skill. 'Departures' is worth several reads and reading it cover to cover with a hot cup of morning coffee or afternoon glass of wine is recommended. Bonus! Mike has also just published (Bellowing Ark Press) 'Suquamish And Other Poems' and here Dillon can get Roethke in a headlock and sometimes gets him to the mat with people, earth and sky -- and always the water -- intersecting and the subjects dissected and deftly laid open for examination and, if you dare, conclusions. Two wonderful new books. You get to decide which to read first.
