Brandon Shimoda writes, "One defense of internment,"
and he's speaking of Japanese internment
during the Second World War, "One defense of internment
was that it kept the Japanese safe during the war.
There is an element of truth in this otherwise dubious defense,
but only because it exposes a much darker truth.
If the treatment of the Japanese-Americans
outside the camps was more hostile, more reactionary, more
openly threatening than their treatment inside the camps,
then where exactly was internment located?
Internment was a facet of an even more pervasive and more
barbarous national disposition, which
is why I locate the mass incarceration
of Japanese-Americans in the heart, conceived
and constructed in the end by the human heart, which
is superlatively, endlessly capable of manifesting out
of inexpressible, often corrosive feeling,
the longest, most convoluted yet most comprehensive path
to the grave."
Brandon Shimoda