They Called Us Enemy
And now, I return to the Japanese internment camps in World War II,* this time in the form of George Takei’s graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy, written in collaboration with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker.**
Jumping back and forth in time,*** They Called Us Enemy tells the story of the camps from the inside, both through Takei’s eyes as a young boy and then through his growing understanding of what he experienced as a result of conversations he had as a teenager with his father about their times in the camps. As the book’s narrator, Takei explores the disconnect between his childhood memories of happy moments and humor as well as confusion and trauma and his later understanding of the events he lived through. He contrasts his experience as a child with that of his father—both as he saw it at the time and later. (In one particularly powerful scene, the teenaged Takei accuses his father, and Japanese Americans as a whole, for cowardice in not protesting their treatment. That scene is immediately followed by his later shame for his outburst.) Takei’s personal experiences are clearly set against the historical context of the internments—some of which I was not familiar with.****
The art is a powerful element of the story. Grey-scale drawings evoke the details of the camp. Children are drawn with less detail than the adults and setting around them, in a style reminiscent of Peanuts characters or the earlier Campbell Soup kids of Grace Drayton, evoking the childhood innocence that is a critical part of the book. Small details add to the whole, such as the subtle and brilliant use of guard towers and barbed wire in the title. (Click on the image in your browser to see this detail clearly.)
They Called Us Enemy ends with a montage of “clips” of Takei’s later activism. This section looks at the racism and fear that led to the camps in comparison to modern issues, specifically action against Muslim Americans taken during the first Trump administration and the detention of Mexican Americans in camps along the U.S. border. (The book was published in 2019.)
*Despite my claims that the beginning of the month that I wasn’t going to read more about the internment camps.
**And yes, I know I also rejected the idea of reading celebrity memoirs by Asian-Americans, but Takei spends only a few pages on his role as Lieutenant Sulu of the Starship Enterprise. This is not a book about Takei’s rise to fame in the face of adversity.
***FYI, some reviewers complained about this when the book came out. Personally, I did not find it distracting.
****Or perhaps I had seen those elements before, but needed to read another book about the subject to make me remember them.
****
They Called Us Enemy has been compared to two other powerful graphic historical works: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize- winning Maus, which draws on his father’s experiences in the Holocaust, and Rep. John Lewis’s three volume graphic memoir, March, which tells the story of Lewis’s life in the civil rights movement. Both are worth your time.
If you are interested in a slightly more hopeful graphic work about the internment camps, I strongly recommend the graphic novel Love in the Library by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, which is based on the story of her grandparents who met in an internment camp in Idaho. It is a story of joy, love, and resilience, though Tokuda-Hall in no way minimizes the racism that placed her grandparents in the camps, or the trauma related to it.
