Download The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest

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The
Poet
and
the
Silk
Girl A Memoir
of
Love,
Imprisonment,
and
Protest
Description
A compelling and prismatic love story of one
family's defiance in the
face of injustice8212an how their story echoes
across generations.quotItis both overwhelming
and affirming to imagine, in the midst of their
darkest hours, and in the middle of a country and
a war that willfully misperceived them as enemy
aliens, that the
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future, for Itaru and Shizuko Ina, was not only
possible, but would deliver redemption in the
form of the intimate, inexhaustible attention of
a daughter.quot8212Brndon Shimoda, author
ofnbspTheGrave on the WallIn 1942 newlyweds
Itaru and Shizuko Ina were settling into married
life when the United States government upended
their world. They were forcibly removed from
their home and incarcerated in wartime American
concentration camps solely on account of their
Japanese ancestry. When the Inas, under duress,
renounced their American citizenship, the War
Department branded them enemy aliens and
scattered their family across the U.S. interior.
Born to Itaru and Shizuko during their
imprisonment, psychotherapist and activist
Satsuki Ina weaves their story together in this
moving mosaic. Through diary entries,
photographs, clandestine letters, and
heart-wrenching haiku, she reveals how this
intrepid young couple navigated life, love, loss,
and loyalty tests in the welter of World War
II-era hysteria.The Poet and the Silk Girl
illustrates through one family's saga the
generational struggle of Japanese Americans who
resisted racist oppression, fought for the
restoration of their rights, and clung to their
full humanity in the face of adversity. With
psychological insight, Ina excavates the
unmentionable, recovering a chronicle of
resilience amidst one of the severest blows to
American civil liberties. As she traces the
legacies of trauma, she connects her family's
ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the
U.S.-Mexico border. Lyrical and gripping, this
cautionary tale implores us to prevent the
repetition of atrocity, pairing healing and
protest with galvanizing power.