asianamlitfans | A Review of Satsuki Ina’s The Poet and the Silk Girl (Heyday Books, 2024).

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

So, I was turned on to The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest via Brandon Shimoda’s work The Afterlife is Letting Go. Shimoda’s encyclopedic approach to that work listed a bunch of Japanese American authors and artists, including the aforementioned Ina, whose memoir I had not yet had a chance to read. As readers of AALF might have seen recently, I’ve been on a fictional palate cleanse, or at least balancing my fictional reading with creative nonfiction. Let’s let the official marketing description get us moving: “A compelling and prismatic love story of one family’s defiance in the face of injustice—and how their story echoes across generations. In 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.”

The opening to this memoir is really important. Ina reveals that, in an earlier draft, her storytelling position was reduced. The editors who pushed her to include more of herself were spot on: the reason why this memoir gains its full heft is precisely because of her positionality as an archivist, contextualist, and analyst of her parents’ crucial archives. We are in a very fortuitous moment in the sense that the tide has absolutely turned. The descending generations of the incarceration experience refuse to be silenced and instead have worked to preserve the pasts that so many decided to hide or erase precisely because of racialized traumas. This excavation work is partly a need to repair the past, on the one hand, while also acknowledging more complicated family histories, on the other. Thus, Ina stands alongside so many others, including the aforementioned Shimoda, as well as the many emerging sansei and yonsei writers, who have offered what we might call representational correctives of incarceration. The openings of each chapter always involve Ina’s storytelling positionality, as she helps clarify the importance of a given chapter or provides an overview of what we are about to read. Much of the memoir is filled with letters, both in English and translated from the Japanese, that Itaru and Shizuko wrote to each other throughout their lives. Part of what Ina gets from these letters is a more fully figured sense of who here parents were, especially her father, who was so reticent about sharing the full range of his emotions. The time that it took to collate, translate, and then edit the letters themselves into this work is itself extraordinary and noteworthy. As a side note: one of the cleverest things that the husband and wife do to skirt censors is to sew some of the letters up into clothes. The upheaval that Ina’s family must go through in order to survive the incarceration is just catastrophic. Despite having read so many of these narratives, the level of xenophobia and racism that the US produces on its own subjects never fails to amaze me. In this sense, Ina’s work, as important as it is archivally, is also crucial right now, in this moment of heighted political polarization, rising white supremacy, and increased scrutiny at the border. Finally, I did want to praise Heyday Books for not scrimping on the production value in this volume. The hardcover is an incredible work of art, which includes high resolution pictures and high-quality page materials, the likes of which should remind us that analogue is far from dead. A+ on this one. Certain to attract both critical, popular, and pedagogical attention.

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