Писательница Autumn Krause превратила семейную травму из японских лагерей времен Второй мировой войны в исторический роман

Ink Against Silence: Crafting Family Trauma From the WWII Japanese American Camp Into Historical Fiction and Folklore Author Autumn Krause discusses the process of crafting family trauma from a WWII internment camp into historical fiction and folklore. If you saw my family tree, you would see branches stretching fearlessly to the Los Angeles sun and roots tangling down to the Pacific Ocean. You’d find a variety of faces and an indexical list of names from Japan, Mexico, Lithuania, and Hawaii. You might think such a complex family tree grown from faraway seeds all crossbred in Southern California might create a complicated heritage or perhaps a full-blown identity crisis because Kikkoman soy sauce is half your water weight and your Nana is always talking Spanglish to the locals while you take high tea, a treasured ritual for the women in your family, none of whom are remotely British. But for me, its complexity resulted in one of those peculiar math problems in which overblown numbers reduce to simple ones. I always knew exactly who I was. A Chicana Wasian from Los Angeles whose siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins were and are deeply enmeshed in each other’s lives. To this day, most of my family lives within blocks of each other and my mother-in-law recalls how my mom told her sadly that I’d moved “very far away” after getting married (ie, 30 minutes away up the 91)—what’s funny is that I feel like I did move very far away from the place and people that hold my heart, despite the fact that expert-level/I-was-raised-in-the-cauldron maneuvering around the infamous chokeholds of Los Angeles traffic means I can sometimes even get home in 20. It’s out of this that I am formed and probably even more so than most because my family homeschooled, which meant our closeness was heightened, and the sound of my nana and grandpa’s keys in our side door was as familiar a jingle as our own. The liturgical activities of our family were deeply engrained in me, along with assorted relics. One such activity was pulling off along the side of the road as a caravan after our family trips to Mammoth at a specific spot—Manzanar war relocation camp—and an assorted relic was a paperback copy of Farewell to Manzanar that, though it traveled from shelf to shelf, was always on our bookcase. I grew up knowing that my grandpa and his family and several members from my nana’s side of my family were forced to leave their homes, sell their possessions, and go wherever the US government in horrific overreaching fashion decided to put them…which ended up being horse stalls at the Santa Anita racetrack and barbed-wire encircled camps in Arizona (Gila River) and Arkansas (Rohwer). This astounding atrocity was spoken about in my family without any great theatrics and anecdotes from camp lived alongside all the other ones I grew up with. However, this history has always haunted me. When I was young, I noticed tons of WWII books at the bookstore featuring covers of women in vintage dresses underneath warplanes and knew my family’s history fit right into this timeline but that it was a given that I wouldn’t find any set in the war relocation camps which populated my family’s journey. Stories always filled my head, and I knew, someday, I would write one inspired by us and our mass displacement from sunny Southern California to the bleak and isolating confines of the camps. I thought endlessly about writing this book as I grew from a teen into a young woman pursuing traditional publication. I knew certain things—I wanted it to capture the grim realities and depth of this atrocity along with the enduring spirit of those incarcerated. I also knew I wanted it to feature the beauty and intricate magic of Japanese folklore. In one way, I felt very equipped to tackle the subject as a direct descendent who’d spent a lifetime experiencing the various personalities within her family and fixating on the things that made each one distinct, yet similar. This history was a living and breathing ghost in my life and it took on the different voices and perspectives of my elders, transforming to be a young mother (my great-grandma Toshi) in the camps with four children at one point only to morph into a great-uncle taking his nephew fishing outside of the barbed wire the next (my great-uncle Jiro and my grandpa). I would say this is what gave The Gods Will Sing Our Song its life, while copious and meticulous research gave it its structure as I was aware that many readers might be encountering this history for the first time or only have a vague textbook’s footnote knowledge. I crafted the narrative around two young lovers—a lone wolf named Ren from an abusive family and an imaginative artist named Violet from a very close-knit family—meeting and falling in love behind barbed wire. I think I was drawn to center the story on lovers because my family has a grand tradition of falling in love young and having intense marriages predicated on passion, lots of babies, extreme devotion, and probably a clinically diagnosable amount of inextricable co-dependency (I myself have carried on this tradition). Love occurring despite being surrounded by such hate is an important theme of The Gods Will Sing Our Song and one that grounds the story in the perplexity of being human—how you can face terrible circumstances and yet find goodness and something so intangibly priceless in another person. Throughout their time in the camps and during extended separation as my great-grandpa Shigemi fought in the 442nd while his family was incarcerated back home, my great-grandparents remained unfalteringly in love and wrote each other hundreds of letters, a legacy which greatly shaped The Gods Will Sing Our Song. It was a great honor and privilege to write The Gods Will Sing Our Song, and I think one of my life’s greatest accomplishments. In the lead up to publication, it has gotten hate online after my posts about it have gone viral several times and while I, as a very sensitive author struggle with that, I’m grateful it is getting reach and that this history lives again despite the online trolls trying to drown it out. I hope that if the premise of this book at all interests you that you will pick it up and hear my family’s song and that you will find in it the same mysterious lyrics of love that fears no hate, hope as defiance, and magic. Check out Autumn Krause's The Gods Will Sing Our Song here: (WD uses affiliate links)