The Question of Loyalty by Mitsuye Yamada - Essay Example

 “The Question of Loyalty” by Mitsuye Yamada Mitsuye Yamada is considered an important Japanese American poet, even though the body of her work does not have the numbers that some of her contemporaries have put out. Much of her work is highly influenced by the experiences that she had while detained with her family in an internment camp within the United States during World War II (Oh 326). The nature of both being and not being American because of her ethnic heritage affected her in such a way to have infused her self-explorations through poetry with the meanings of having been a member of the camps. Through the reading of her poem, this duality is evident as she discusses her feelings about being determined outside of national acceptance and the cold with which her status was handled by the American government. Even though the poem is not very long, it clearly discusses the pain that her family, primarily her mother, felt at having to deny her heritage to be a part of the nation she currently called home. The poem says a great deal through the use of only a few words, leaving a wide emotional wake of details that did not a great deal of exposition. The poem by Mitsuye Yamada titled “The Question of Loyalty” is a commentary on one of the darkest moments in World history as it portrays some of the prejudices that fueled that war as they were expressed by the American government and experienced by Japanese American citizens. Mitsuye Yamada was born in Japan to Japanese parents who were legal citizens of the United States, but living abroad. She did not become a naturalized citizen of the United States until 1955. In 1926, she and her parents immigrated back to the United States, allowing a significant amount of time to have passed so that she and her family were firmly entrenched in the culture of the United States which allowed for them to express and experience great shock when their adopted country deemed them a threat and placed them into the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho merely because they were of Japanese descent. In the fear that their heritage would open the country up to vulnerability in regard to the conflicts that were occurring between the United States and Japan, Japanese citizens were sent to camps through Executive Order 9066 which allowed for the incarceration of whole Japanese families (Oh 326). According to Ng, “Before World War II, Japanese Americans formed tightly knit, self sufficient communities within a society filled with anti-Asian sentiment, inherited from the Chinese who settled in America before them” (1). The Japanese-Americans formed groups and communities in which they could live within their own traditions, but still enjoy the new freedoms of the American national culture. In 1941 when Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, the fear was so powerful within the American culture that they resorted to incarcerating 120,000 Japanese Americans with the intent of protecting the American people from a feared threat that Japanese-Americans would open up vulnerability and exploit it to the ends of the Japanese government (NG 1). The historic result, however, is to have an event within the Japanese American cultural memory that serves to haunt their acceptance as American citizens. In order to secure freedom, the inmates of the camps were eventually offered the opportunity to sign oaths of loyalty to the United States, denouncing their loyalty to the emperor. This conflict between ethnic heritage and current national pride created a crisis of identity, to an extent, as the people involved had to sign away their associations to their past, which was connected to their traditions, family, and friends (Oh 326). Bow writes of this dynamic in saying that “The poem signals the difficulty of reincorporating the national division produced by the war into a subject who must contain national antagonism” (Bow 12). This antagonism that is defined by the duality of their loyalties is central as their personal feelings of home and country is in conflict with the loyalties that are being demanded of them. As the people in the camps were given an ultimatum, their true loyalties were not adequately given the freedoms that they expected within the borders of the United States. They had to choose between the comfort of their heritage and their freedom. This was not a choice between Japan and the United States as that choice had been made when they migrated, but a choice between their beliefs and traditions, and their ability to move freely within the nation. The poem written by Yamada explores the dynamics of identity as it relates both to heritage and national participation. The first stanza declares that the requirements made of the Japanese Americans to report their presence were met, their lives identified by seemingly arbitrary markers such as a number and fingerprint registration. She declares that she met her requirements, but then more was asked of her in order for her release and freedom to express and behave in ways that identified her with the cultural group of Japanese Americans was questioned and put under an unnatural scrutiny. She states “I met the deadline”, a declarative sentence in which a sense of resentment can be noted. She puts in the third line the statement “once before”, suggesting that she had already done this once (Patterson 198). Yamada portrays herself as having done all that was asked of her and that the loyalty oath that they are wanting from her is a redundancy to the loyalty that she has shown. The poem reads of resentment, the circumstances of her life leading her to question why she is being questioned and accused. It is within the framework of resentment that the poem can be read. She is not being unreasonable and she does not denote a strong sense of embitterment, but it is clear that her bewilderment of her predicament is affecting her ability to truly swear to her loyalty to the American nation. This is understandable as she has been segregated and selected, not for her actions, but for the familial history of her birth. The second stanza denotes her action. She is told she must swear an oath of loyalty to the nation by swearing that she has no allegiance to the emperor. As she is a young adult, this has no bearing on her feelings of family but it is clearly painful to her mother. Her mother is forced to choose between the love she has for her homeland and that she shares with her new home. Beyond the sense of loss in regard to her familial heritage is a sense that her identity is being questioned over and over. She has no love for the government of her homeland, but it is created through the reaction of her mother. More than her reactions to the foreswearing of her emperor, she is affected by having to do more than she has already done to prove being worthy of staying within the United States. Her resentment comes from knowing she has done nothing to warrant being treated the way she is being treated. The history of her experiences are frightening as she had to worry about not gathering the wrong type of attention from the guards and these resentments can be seen in the way in which the poem is written (Oh 326). As her sentiments continue, it is clear that there is a confusion that attaches to her identity through the events that she must endure. She suggests that by signing the paper that forswears her loyalty to the emperor she has given away her identity. She does not state this directly, but the embittered commentary on her identity as she asks “What will I be?” suggests that she is not only being questioned about her identity, but that she is having something of her identity taken from her in the process (Patterson 198). She is loyal to her own people, but not as much to those outside of her circle. Yet, she is forced to sign a piece of paper that strips her of that loyalty. She claims she is doubly loyal to those of her own, but she is told she must sign a paper that says she has no loyalty to those who are her kindred. She questions how it is that her double loyalty can be stripped; leaving her nothing as an answer to those she is loyal. She turns the conversation to the futility of war. She wants everyone to come out ahead, but in the end, she reveals that no one truly wins where a war is played out. She states “I wish no one to lose this war” then counters her desires with the reality that “Everyone does” (Patterson 198). In these two simple lines a whole host of questions and answers come to light. Within these two lines the whole nature of war is summed up. She moves the line “Everyone does” to indicate that this thought is different than the rest of her thoughts. It seems to indicate that there is a resignation, that the event is not personal and that all do it as they must do it because to be socially accepted they must comply. The aim of war is that someone wants to win, but her wish is that no one involves will lose. The reality is that everyone involved will suffer. In that sense of suffering is the embodiment of her existence within the space and time in which she is living. She has been segregated from the population, put into a cage and kept there with her freedoms curtailed. She is in a position of vulnerability, her own life having been subverted to the beliefs about her loyalties affecting her ability to exist within the world. She is not herself, not the person they want her to be, nor is she the person that she was before the internment. She is not of her culture, nor is she trusted enough on face value to be of the American culture. She wishes that no one loses the war, but she realizes that there is no real winner and that everyone within all the cultures involved will have lost a piece of what they were. In the end, she is resigned to her fate. She says she is “poor at math”, creating the shrug of the shoulders at the end as if the loss is only summed up in the inability to understand what it all means. She was a young adult when these events occurred to her, and while the depth of the meaning is clear, the simplicity reflects how she has less attachments to Japan than does her mother. She verbally shrugs her shoulders and says she could not understand – “I was poor at math”, she says as she finds her inability to understand how this adds up as a part of the overall ambivalence that she finds herself giving to the situation. He mother is profoundly affected, but she is only inconvenienced. It is through the reaction of her mother that the true importance is revealed. Her mother cries when she has to sign the papers, but the daughter only has a vague connection and understanding of the meaning. However, the ironic way in which she produces the events for the reader suggests that she has a realization of how her identity has been affected. Her mother expresses the emotion while she expresses the sardonic reaction to the events. The last line of the poem states “I signed my only ticket out” (Patterson 198). This reveals how she has come to understand that she is being asked to sign away her identity in exchange for her freedom. The poem could have waxed long about how she had been forced to sell her identity to the American government as the price of her freedom. She sets her commentary on her skills with math with the event that gave her the freedom that had such a high price. She makes it clear that she has signed away something of value in order to create this freedom. She shrugs her shoulders at the event suggesting that she has decided to devalue that which she signed away in order to gain the freedom that meant more to her than her heritage. She has given into the pressures of the American people to assure them that she was not covertly conspiring against them. Even in this act of courage and loyalty to the American people, she knows that she has sold out her own heritage, giving this signature with the understanding that in doing so she was renouncing her loyalty to the Japanese people. The poem “The Question of Loyalty” by Mitsuye Yamada discusses the emotions and reactions of a time in American history where the loyalty and honor of the Japanese people is questioned. In creating this distrust, the Japanese people were put into a position to chose between the loyalties to their families and history and that of their present relationships in their new homeland, America. The poem shows how she received the events as a young adult having spent most of her life in the United States, but also provides context for how she is now perceived by the population of her new homeland, a homeland to which she is not actually new. It affects her mother profoundly, but she only sits back as events unfold as they have only a cursory meaning. She is arbitrary in how she feels about the events. As such, she presents her story in few words filled with embittered irony. Works Cited Bow, Leslie. Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2001. Print. Ng, Wendy L. Japanese American Internment during World War Ii: A History and Reference Guide. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2002. Print. Oh, Seiwoong. Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature. New York: Facts on File, 2007. Print. Patterson, Anita H. From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and Politics of Protest. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997. Prin Read More