July 2018 Episode of Solidarity Is This

Deepa Iyer:

Hello, everyone and welcome to Solidarity Is This. I'm your host Deepa Iyer. Solidarity Is This is a monthly podcast that explores how we practice solidarity at a time when bans, walls and raids have become commonplace in the United States. Each month, I speak to people around the country; activists, organizers, students, educators, and more, about how they show up for each other. How they build shared values and how their practices of solidarity are transforming themselves and their communities. You can subscribe to this podcast via iTunes or any other platform where you check out your podcast. You can also download the solidarity syllabus at www.solidarityis.org, which contains information and resources for each episode to deepen your thinking and catalyze your actions. This month's episode of Solidarity Is This, is called Never Again Is Now. In homage to a viral campaign that the Densho Project is using to stand up against the injustices of the family separation policy.

Deepa Iyer:

Many believe that the separation of children and the mistreatment of family members and asylum seekers at the border is similar to of the government's incarceration of Japanese Americans under executive order 9066 during World War II. At the time, Japanese Americans were seen as national security threats, forced to leave their lives behind and remain in camps around the United States. Japanese Americans who endured in incarceration and their descendants, have been reminding us of this history, especially since September 11th and particularly since the Trump administration took office, especially when we have policies such as the Muslim ban and now family separation. As you listen to this podcast and I'll admit that it was an incredibly powerful and moving conversation for me, I want to offer a few themes for you to reflect upon. I have long believed that the Japanese American incarceration offers a landscape for us to understand systemic racism, to understand the trauma that stems and spreads from it, to understand the act of remembering and the reclaiming of language to more appropriately and accurately reflect what occurs when people are oppressed.

Deepa Iyer:

And of course, to understand the examples of resistance and solidarity. So as you listen, I want to encourage you to reflect on those themes and think about what the role is of historic trauma and memory. What is its afterlife and how does it get passed down through generations? And how does collective resistance become a form of healing? Joining me to have this conversation are two fierce members of the Japanese American community and the activist community at large. Dr. Satsuki Ina and Brandon Shimoda. I am so humbled and grateful to speak with both of them this month. Let me introduce you first to Dr. Satsuki Ina. Dr. Ina was born in 1944, inside the Tule Lake incarceration camp, where her parents were imprisoned. Dr. Ina is a professor emeritus at California State University in Sacramento. She has a private psychotherapy practice in Sacramento and Berkeley, and she specializes in the treatment of trauma. She's produced two award winning documentary films about the Japanese American incarceration called Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon. Welcome Satsuki.

Satsuki Ina:

Thank you for the invitation to speak with you.

Deepa Iyer:

Also joining Satsuki is Brandon Shimoda. Brandon is a poet and a writer. His most recent book books include Evening Oracle and The Desert, which is forthcoming from The Song Cave this fall. His first book of nonfiction called The Grave on the Wall is a memoir about his grandfather, whom you'll hear about on this podcast and is forthcoming from City Lights in 2019. Brandon is working on a book about the ongoing afterlife of Japanese American incarceration. He lives in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome Brandon.

Brandon Shimoda:

Thanks so much for having me.

Deepa Iyer:

So I want to start actually with you Satsuki, I want to start with something that I've read you say. You've said before that you carry lifelong legacy of the internment experience. And I was wondering if you could share with us a little bit of your own personal story.

Satsuki Ina:

One of the things that is coming into our consciousness is first of all, just use of terminology. So I have stopped using the word internment because it's clear now that is a legal term for incarcerating enemy aliens during time of war. And what happened to us was not internment. It was an illegal incarceration of innocent people. So I refer to our experience more as incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, prison camps, concentration camps. And my lifelong legacy actually has two parts. One is actually kind of the victim profile. I grew up feeling very pressured by my parents to excel, to not make any mistakes, to not offend anybody. And I realized many years later that was necessary for them to feel like once they were released from prison, after more than four years, to be assimilated into mainstream, required us to accommodate and to not offend.

Satsuki Ina:

And so I felt that tremendous pressure to be successful according to the criteria for belonging in mainstream America, since we had been essentially, cast out because of our ancestry. And the second part of that lifelong legacy then, is a constant feeling of discomfort of wanting to challenge that message that I received from my parents and this part of my life has really been reserved for the later part of my life. I'm 74 years old now and only now really speaking out and protesting and recognizing what had been done to us and how it's actually being done to another group of targeted people today. So it's this both victim and dissident, I feel like, has been a main of my life legacy.

Deepa Iyer:

I'm curious to know also, Satsuki, I know that you have been working a lot with people, especially children, throughout your whole life, who face trauma in different ways. And can you talk a little bit about how you think communities, including Japanese Americans have coped with both the individual and collect trauma of incarceration?

Satsuki Ina:

What I've shared about my lifelong legacy is very typical of Japanese Americans who have connection to having been incarcerated. One of the most tragic outcomes is in my generation, third generation, there are only a handful of people who were able to break through the barriers and really pursue a creative career. So Brandon, as a poet and a writer is a beacon of light about the next generation breaking from the bondage of having been persecuted and victimized. I think the way that we coped, my parents and grandparents and then passed on to me, was to be the 110% American citizen. My father talked about never missing his opportunity to vote, to get straight A's as a student, to never talk back, to turn your cheek if someone and offends you or insult you, in essence kind of lay low.

Deepa Iyer:

Right.

Satsuki Ina:

I think that has led to mental health issues of depression and anxiety. Then, I think the up side of the coping has been to turn to each other, find solace in our specific communities to provide support to each other that way and to succeed.

Deepa Iyer:

I want to bring Brandon into the conversation as well. Brandon, tell us a little bit about your own family's story as it relates to the incarceration of Japanese Americans and as Suzuki's already alluded to, whether that story has influenced you and the direction you've taken, how it's done so especially in your artistic work.

Brandon Shimoda:

Sometimes I feel like I am the reincarnation of that silence or the part of my responsibility is to acknowledge my grandparents and my ancestors' silence and carry it forward in some way that can be meaningful. So my grandfather, he was not an American citizen at the time of incarceration. So the legal term for him would be that he was interned. He was an immigrant and a photographer and was imprisoned in the department of justice prison in Missoula, Montana. I also had other family members, I had an aunt who was in a camp in Arizona, and I had an uncle and cousins that were in a camp in Wyoming. My grandfather has really been my portal into this history and he passed away about 20 years ago. And he also had Alzheimer's for most of the time that we coincided.

Brandon Shimoda:

So I grew up knowing next to nothing about his experience and his experience wasn't really translated very fully or at all really, through my father, for example, who never spoke about this history and didn't seem to have any real interest in it. And I'm still trying to understand why that is. And I think the work that Satsuki has been doing, maybe answers some of those questions. But what I grew up within was both a lack of knowing and again, that silence that came out of shame or I guess, this need to assimilate to whatever it might have been. So I knew very little, and I didn't even know that I had other relatives that were incarcerated. I didn't know that my grandfather was not a citizen. I didn't know that my grandfather could not legally become a citizen, because he was an immigrant.

Brandon Shimoda:

He didn't become a citizen until 1955. So my relationship to it was one of unknowing and confusion in a sense that something was being hidden. And then also within that, that there was something that was haunting our family and then myself, in particular, as I got older, I felt like there was something unsettled. There were more questions than there was information. And I think that part of why I became a writer and a poet, in particular, is because I felt like there was something within that silence that was fertile. It wasn't a silence that had been foreclosed upon. It was a silence that actually had a lot to say and because my grandfather had passed away and my father was disinterested or refused to address the past, I sort of felt like it fell to me. And that fertility was something that became a sensation that I needed to deal with.

Satsuki Ina:

I love both of those words, haunting and fertility. I think you really capture what fell into the hands of the fourth generation.

Deepa Iyer:

I'm also sitting with what both of you talked about around, I think you mentioned shame and silence, Brandon, and then this 110% American citizen assimilation that you mentioned, Satsuki. And also just reflecting on the fact that happens with so many communities who faced trauma, thinking particularly about communities who are Muslim, Arab, Sikh, South Asian, in the wake of 9/11, who I think have also had those sorts of responses of either we're waving our American flags and putting on our pins, right? To show that we belong here. And at the same time, we're not able to really talk about how pained and hurt we are, at the core, for being denied our humanity. So I feel like there are so many ways in which we can learn from each other's stories of the sort of oppression as well. And I'm curious to know if you all have been having those conversations with other communities beyond the Japanese American community.

Satsuki Ina:

Absolutely. I think there was this kind of immediate recognition about what was happening post 9/11, and many of our Japanese American organizations, churches and social service agencies reached out to the targeted communities, the Muslim community in particular that was in Sacramento at the time. And one of the things that didn't happen for the Japanese Americans that were so aware of is that there was nobody that stood up for us. There was no organized protest, there was no collective voice on our behalf. So I think there's this feeling that more than ever, our stories of what happened 75 years ago needs to be told and shared and we need to reach out to communities that are being targeted so that we can join in solidarity to strengthen the protest.

Deepa Iyer:

Yeah, absolutely. Brandon and your thoughts on that?

Brandon Shimoda:

So I'm biracial, I'm half Japanese and I'm half white and I have quite a few relatives that were on the west coast in 1942 on both sides. So thinking about that lack of a response. Well, the white community, of course, was in large part motivated incarceration, but also the people who were either confused or felt like it was unjust, who did remain silent, there's a way in which I feel that history on both sides of myself. Not that I exist as two halves, but I often think about the people in my white ancestry that did nothing, if not, were a part of the movement to remove Japanese people from the west coast. It's an added layer of confusion. And I feel like there has to be space within myself, as well as within my community, to acknowledge that opposing silence.

Deepa Iyer:

Part of what I was really moved by, Brandon, was your recent essay and we'll link to this in our solidarity syllabus on the 30th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Liberties Act. And I think it's aligned with this conversation on history and silence and voicing and speaking up. And just for folks who might not know, the Civil Liberties Act was a milestone law, when you look back at Asian American history, because this piece of legislation actually acknowledged and apologized for the injustices that the government had perpetrated during the incarceration and provided restitution in the form of monetary payments. It did some other things as well, but Brandon, you wrote this powerful essay which actually calls in to question the motivations of this legislation and perhaps why it is moot in today's environment. So can you tell us a little bit about your observations and then Satsuki, I'm curious to know what your take is on some of the points that Brandon makes, in terms of this conversation around history and solidarity.

Brandon Shimoda:

Yeah. I'm curious too, [inaudible 00:16:25] what Satsuki has to say. Anniversaries are always arbitrary, but they a kind of give us a sense that we should have learned something through these arbitrary increments of time, 30 years or 25 years. And it occurred to me that it was the 30th anniversary of this law, about which I knew very little and I was only 10 when it was passed. My first question, I guess, was to think about, well, there was an enormous amount of energy and effort and work that went into Civil Liberties Act being passed, particularly by the Japanese American community. So I was just thinking, as a fourth generation Japanese American, having been alive but not conscious through that movement, what is its value now? And 2018 feels like both and especially auspicious and just the despairingly inauspicious anniversary because all of the things that the Civil Liberties Act was addressing in terms of the motivations for Japanese American incarceration still exist today.

Brandon Shimoda:

That was sort of the underlying premise of what I was writing about and what I continue to write about. So if all of these various elements and all of the explicit motivations that the Civil Liberties Act named, still exist today, then what does that law mean? Or what does that act mean? Of course, that had enormous value to the Japanese American community. But again, as a fourth generation person who didn't partake in that, who feels still sometimes overwhelming amounts of anger and confusion and outrage, but if the afterlife was outlaw and it occurred to me, among other things, that the United States creates laws for itself, that it can use and abuse at its own discretion. And I think an example of that is the recent Supreme Court decision to uphold the Muslim ban, simultaneously citing Fred Korematsu's case. So the fact that Fred Korematsu's case has been brought back into the open in 2018, the fact that family detention centers are being reinstated or renewed or revitalized in 2018 really makes me question the afterlife of such a law.

Deepa Iyer:

The illusion that you just made, that the Korematsu case is so important because in the Muslim ban Supreme Court case, while upholding the Muslim ban, the majority also, many people believe, may have held that the case of Korematsu was unconstitutional. But I also want to bring you in, Satsuki, on your thoughts on Brandon's essay and sort of the afterlife of laws like the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

Satsuki Ina:

I loved the article that you wrote, Brandon, and I felt like you really brought into question something that many of us may have taken for granted. Passages, the Civil Liberties Act, from the communities put interview was, as you say, a huge heroic effort on the part of the Nisei, the second generation in particular, to mobilize and spend years organizing to get the Civil Liberties Act passed. In other ways that you brought out in your writing is that granting the Civil Liberties Act could serve as a erasure, a way of neutralizing the trauma and the injustice that took place and how important it is for us to not assume that because that momentary insight about the wrongs that were committed against us could mean that it wouldn't happen again. It's clear that that's not the purpose that it served. I thought it was outrageous that the Supreme Court, on one hand, would approve the Muslim ban.

Satsuki Ina:

And on the other hand, overturn the Korematsu case, as if to complicate the issue and erase the injustice that had occurred so many years earlier. So writings like yours, Brandon, is really important that the perspective of questioning and challenging that I think is growing with each generation. And I felt very optimistic about the voice of the future in your writing, feeling that you can be, in some ways, my generation would probably see that as kind of outrageous and yet, heroic and so important. So I'm really grateful to you for your perspective.

Deepa Iyer:

Yeah, I agreed that the Redress movement, which led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 has been a model for, I think, many communities who have looked back to see how do we organize in this way to receive an acknowledgement, an apology, and then reparations of some sort. And I think it is so important to see it still as a model and an example, but at the same time, complicated, as you said, Satsuki, and say "In light of the Muslim ban or the separation of children at the border, what is the real effect and impact of a law like this and how do we make sure that it actually lives up to what it says?"

Deepa Iyer:

And that leads me to this quote that I want to pick out that, Brandon, you said in your essay, where you write quote, "The memory of incarceration is going to pass very soon into the province of those who were not there, the Sansei, Yonsei and Gosei children and grandchildren and great grandchildren" end quote. And so I'm curious to know, Brandon, perhaps you can go first, to ask you, why did you write that? And what do you think is the responsibility of the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren to preserve and give a voice to this memory?

Brandon Shimoda:

I think the younger generations and of course, grandchildren and great, great grandchildren are... Some of them are yet to be born. They're going to be born into the question and they'll have a completely different way of dealing with it. And especially within the circumstances of their own time, if they live in the United States or elsewhere, for me, and maybe Satsuki, maybe I would defer to her on the idea of post memory or intergenerational trauma.

Brandon Shimoda:

But I know for myself, that it sort of feels like every generation has to, in a sense, reinvent the wheel. By that, I mean, to become aware of and confront the history, to become aware of and confront all of the contradictions and all of the lesions within the history and to hopefully share what they discover with each other, their community, their families, even their parents and grandparents who underwent a certain experience. How that is processed or metabolized in a younger generation is both an individual and a collective thing. I think one thing that I have been really surprised by, both within myself and within my communities, is that anger is something that is still an emotion that is increasing. And I don't mean to be flippant when I say anger, but I know that if I think about my father's generation and my grandparents' generation, and even the generation below me, kind of not just anger, maybe dissident spirit or dissatisfaction, or the ways in which people feel like they need both body, mind, and soul to confront the powers that be, it's not on the wane.

Brandon Shimoda:

Even in relation to this history, it seems like people still have questions that they want answers to. And I think that what happens maybe in subsequent generations is that the specific story of Japanese American incarceration starts to open out to encompass all of the injustices in which Japanese American incarceration very needly fits in terms of the grand scheme of the United States. So these wider connections are being made and communities are forging relationships with each other to simultaneously address injustices that didn't necessarily pertain to one's own community, realizing that the history is ultimately one about the United States and its relationship to its non-white populations.

Satsuki Ina:

I think you say it very well, Brandon and I think that I go back to your word haunting. When a entire community is traumatized, that collective trauma is healed by generations. And the typical symptom of trauma is to compartmentalize the abuse and the degradation that the person experienced. So that leads to the secrecy and that feeling of being haunted by the history, I think, will change. And Brandon is a good example of that, that rather than being haunted by it, when you're haunted, you're in fear. And rather than carrying the fear, which I think was very prevalent in my generation, the next generation will move out of that fear into having more sense of anger and protest and more entitled to express the repressed feelings that the generations before had to swallow in order to survive. And then I think, with that, and I so agree with Brandon on this, that with that outrage and anger, to add our voices to other groups that are being stigmatized and oppressed today. When my mother received her $20,000 symbolic Redress reparations, I asked her what it meant for her.

Satsuki Ina:

And somewhere on her desk was the $20,000 check. But on her wall, she had framed the apology from the presidents. What she said was, "I feel like I finally got my faith back." So she had been living with this humiliation and silence, and I think our parents and grandparents for Brandon, the silence is part of the trauma. And the healing is going to be in the voice of people like Brandon, who are speaking out and joining with other communities in this more open, entitled way. I'm feeling very optimistic. And even as we're speaking, I'm thinking, gosh, we need to have more dialogue between our generations, before this third generation is gone.

Brandon Shimoda:

Right. I think often, well, I think every day, maybe every minute, about the fact that I am an uncontested citizen. In my daily life, I don't experience the kind of... Yeah, my citizenship is uncontested.

Satsuki Ina:

Right.

Brandon Shimoda:

And the work that I do and also the life that I live is in probably disproportionate amount devoted to the memory of my grandfather.

Satsuki Ina:

Right.

Brandon Shimoda:

It's not our relationship. And when I say grandfather, that's also somewhat... He's kind of the ambassador of all of my ancestors in a way, because he's the one whom I'm the closest. The first half of his life, at least, was a fight to become a citizen of a country that did not want him to become a citizen. He sort of organized his life in a way that would make it possible for him to become an American.

Brandon Shimoda:

So fast forward to generations to myself and I don't have that same sort of struggle, I feel like the things that he was not able to say, and the things that he was not able to do, I have the body and mind and the citizenship to attempt to do any of those things.

Satsuki Ina:

Yes.

Brandon Shimoda:

Whether that was actually in his consciousness or not, I'll never know, but he certainly passed something on to me of his struggle and I feel it. So yeah, I think that's an enormous part of what it means for me to be a citizen is to redress that in my life.

Deepa Iyer:

Satsuki, you said earlier that you feel that this generation, that Brandon is part of is the one that is giving voice and speaking up and healing the silence. But you are doing that as well. And I wanted to specifically ask you to tell us a little bit about the Tule Lake pilgrimage that happened this year, which maybe also tell us a little bit about Tule Lake for those who might not know. And this year in particular, when that pilgrimage happened, there was a very explicit set of messages that people made to connect the incarceration and the zero tolerance family separation policy. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about that.

Satsuki Ina:

It was a remarkable pilgrimage. It takes place every two years. It's my birthplace actually. And it was the maximum security prison for people who were identified as dissidents or disloyal. And this is in quotes, "disloyal." It's right on the border of California and Oregon, just below Klamath Falls, Oregon. Registration takes place in within three days for the last several years has been filled. Maximum capacity we can handle is 400 people. So there were 400 people, multi-generational. And what was remarkable about this year was there were three things. One was the number of Yonsei, fourth generation young people that took leadership roles in making presentations and sharing their stories in organizing events and performing in our cultural program in the evening. The second thing that was very moving is that we've been working hard over the past several years to reach out to the Modoc Indians in the area and included them in our programming.

Satsuki Ina:

They did a workshop, they made a presentation, and what we've been... Tule Lake, we've been in, I could call it negotiation, but in conflict with the possibility that the federal aviation agency would support the building of a fence around a small crop dusting airport, that would cut right through the historical site. So we've been fighting that and our Alliance with the Modocs, whose land it originally belonged to, is an important part of our goal to work together and to include in our preservation efforts to preserve the Modoc story as well. The third thing that happened that was so extraordinary was the protests that organized on June 30th. There were actually organized by the young fourth generation with the support of older folks like myself to make a public statement. So it's right after the memorial service in front of the jail, that was a jail built within the prison itself.

Satsuki Ina:

And my father was actually held there for protesting his incarceration. We gathered together. It might have been 150 of us that made posters and signs in the common theme was No, No, 1942, Not Again, 2018. It was the Yonseis that taught us how to tweet and use social media to the maximum to get the word out so that we could join in solidarity with all the other groups across the nation that were speaking out in protest of the Muslim ban and the separation of children from their parents. It was an incredible experience.

Deepa Iyer:

That is remarkable. And I'm really thankful and grateful to you for sharing how you all are also building bridges with the native communities, the Indigenous communities in that area. I think that's so important because... And I think that this is something that the Japanese American community has done, which I think is so powerful in still telling the history and the story about really looking at these sites as sites of conscience and making sure that people understand that they aren't just places to visit, right. That there is a deep history in the land and in the stories of people who were both incarcerated there, but whose descendants continue to live and which is why I think it's so shameful also.

Deepa Iyer:

And I'm curious to hear both your thoughts on this, about the United States government's plans to potentially use one of the sites of incarceration, this one in Arkansas, as a potential facility to hold families under the zero tolerance policy. Brandon, if you want to start, just to talk a little bit about how you're processing something like that from your own vantage point, as someone who's living with the legacy of your grandfather.

Brandon Shimoda:

Did you say sites of conscience?

Deepa Iyer:

I did.

Satsuki Ina:

Yes.

Brandon Shimoda:

Yeah. That was beautiful. Honestly, I feel like the United States makes Indigenous land available for any kind of form of detention. It doesn't surprise me at all that the United States is considering a site in Arkansas or anywhere. All of the proposals seem to be taking advantage of land that has been prepared for exactly this kind of situation. The United States also chooses sites that can be improved. And one way to improve land is to find cheaper, free labor. And one way of doing that is to create a prison population. So just thinking about the relationship between the bureau of Indian affairs and war relocation authority, which managed the concentration camps, they shared personnel. So the things that were being used in terms of controlling the native populations were the same exact things that were being used to control the Japanese American population and vice versa.

Brandon Shimoda:

Those tools or those weapons that were employed are still available. They're still active or inactive, but they're waiting to be used again. Unfortunately, as I process this, I'm not surprised. Instead, I think sunk into some form of active depression, like a depression that wants to produce some form of question, potentially some kind of answer or some direction.

Satsuki Ina:

You can be sure that many of us are going to show up there. If it goes any further than just talk, we already-

Deepa Iyer:

Yeah.

Satsuki Ina:

Yeah. We're mobilizing and discussing what it will take to show up and make a huge protest. And this is what, I think, is an important part of the healing from our trauma is action. We're ready and willing now, to show up where we're needed to show up-

Deepa Iyer:

Right.

Satsuki Ina:

Not just speak up, but to show up. We're watching this very closely to see the right moment to call on everybody, to pack their bags and show up there.

Deepa Iyer:

Yeah. I recently saw something that the Densho Project had put out with the hashtag #neveragainisnow. And-

Satsuki Ina:

Yeah.

Deepa Iyer:

Never again is something that Japanese Americans have long said about the incarceration and Never Again Is Now is very clear that this is it. This is the moment. So, as we end and I don't want it to end. I feel like I could talk to both of you for days. I want to ask you, this is a podcast on solidarity practice, and we've obviously talked about solidarity in different ways. I just want to know a little bit about your call to action. When you think of the communities you work in, as well as younger generations, what would be a call to action around history or an issue or current political concerns that folks are having, that you would want to send to people out there?

Brandon Shimoda:

I have maybe this dream of a counter nation that is informed in large part by a people's history, right? I think something that's really basic that we can all do within our communities is to expose those sites of trauma, those sites of exception, those sites of detention and transform them, as you said, into sites of conscience, which I think is a really beautiful idea. I envision rewriting every map so that the maps now illuminate true history, so that they now illuminate all the places where people have been raised, where people have struggled, where people have been eliminated or excluded or exploited. And I think that can happen.

Brandon Shimoda:

That's a very practical thing. I've been involved in groups of people where even here in Tucson, where we talk about things that have happened in certain of the city, that have been paved over or have gone completely missing from the historical record, because once those things can be brought back to the surface and named and located, I think the haunting that we've been talking about can be given the home. I think about haunting obviously evokes the idea of a ghost and it's not that the ghost needs to be pacified. I think the ghost needs to just be cared for, given a home. And then maybe a new kind of history can be written and a new kind of nation can be formed within the nation that we're living with it.

Deepa Iyer:

I like that a lot. When you were talking about the counter nation, I was also thinking about Octavia Butler and the ways in which these new communities can be formed, right? And rewriting history or writing our own history. So thank you for that. I think it's a vision that because there is so much, you mentioned active depression earlier, I share that. And I think we need these hopeful visions of action and also actually pictures in our heads of what we can create. Satsuki, what about you, call to action?

Satsuki Ina:

I think one of the effects of trauma on various communities is the fractionalizing of all of us where we're siloed and working, have been to survive. And now I think the call to action is that we need to reach out across all of these boundaries, all of these divides, to organize ourselves as a massive response to what's happening. And I think there's still some reluctance to cross those boundaries because we've all been on survival mode, but the call to action now, I think, is that we have got to speak out and we've got to take action together that we mobilize in numbers and across religions and race and histories to form a strong opposition to what is happening today. So speaking out, reaching out, taking action, I think, showing up is going to be really important, showing up for each other.

Satsuki Ina:

Working as a psychotherapist, one of the most profound healing effects is when a compassionate witness shows up on behalf of the victim, who is powerless at the moment. This idea of a compassionate witness as a community for others has been very healing for the Japanese American community to be able to say, "We have a voice and we protest what's being done to these children and to people from these Muslim countries."

Satsuki Ina:

So I think solidarity is a important goal.

Deepa Iyer:

Yes. And I definitely agree that it is the strategy that we need to invest more time and intention to. And I think the two of you have given me so much to think about, and I know that our listeners also are going to feel the same way. So I want to just say how grateful and humbled I am to be in conversation with you, both. And our conversation ranged from the haunting of history to the afterlife of history, to the healing. And I definitely am feeling more hopeful and more optimistic about what is possible, especially in this moment. So greatly indebted to you, both of you for your work, your voice, your art, your courage, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Satsuki Ina:

Thank you, Deepa. And thank you, Brandon. And I plan to be in touch with you.

Brandon Shimoda:

Yes, that would be great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the invitation, this opportunity and just the occasion to listen. It's wonderful.

Deepa Iyer:

If you're listening, I know that you are just as moved as I have been, in terms of this particular conversation with Satsuki and Brandon. I hope that you'll learn a little bit more about the incarceration and also how to address the current family separation policy. You can find more details and resources over the solidarity syllabus at www.solidarityis.org. for this particular episode. I'm ending the podcast with a quote from an activist who is beloved among many communities, Yuri Kochiyama. Yuri, her mother and brother were evacuated to a converted horse stable at the Santa Anita Assembly Center for several months during World War II and then moved again to an incarceration camp at Jerome, Arkansas.

Deepa Iyer:

Many of you know about Yuri's work with Malcolm X and her support of the Black liberation movement. One of the quotes that Yuri said is this, "The movement is contagious and the people in it are the ones who pass on the spirit." This quote is particularly powerful in light of the conversation that we just had on this podcast. And it makes me think about how people like Satsuki and Brandon and all of you who are listening are really passing on that spirit, the spirit of healing and liberation in the movements that we're part of today. Thank you so much for listening and for all the work that everyone is doing right now. This is Deepa Iyer. You've been listening to Solidarity Is This. I'll speak to you next time.