On Memory and Kiku Hughes's Displacement

There are corners of United States history that have been successfully -- but incompletely -- papered over. These are the events and circumstances that have passing familiarity among most high school students or adults. For years, we have heard these terms - internment camp, Jim Crow, Trail of Tears - and understood that the appropriate response is one of serious but mild dismay. We provide the requisite disapproval, the mournful look backwards that carries with it a sense of relief that at least we're past that.

Of course, the reality is we're not past that. We're only just now beginning to reckon with it. Books like Displacement by Kiku Hughes do the excellent work of bringing the past to the present, in this case quite literally.

On a trip to San Francisco, Kiku unexpectedly finds herself transported back in time, participating as her grandmother is transported and incarcerated with her family and the other Japanese Americans then viewed as a threat to the United States. As Kiku lives through what her ancestors experienced, she realizes that her knowledge of this piece of her personal history is mostly absent.

Kiku's time in the temporary camp (Tanforan) and the permanent relocation center (Topaz) reveals to her (and to the reader) the truth of the deplorable conditions as well as the efforts to improve their surroundings; the reality of resistance and the very real fear of death or danger; the uncertainty and unknowing that led to a feeling of hopelessness; and the possibility of finding friends, fun, and even romance despite the circumstances.

When she finally is returned to the present, Kiku somehow musters the courage to tell her mother what has happened to her, and together, they consider the weight of memory and the importance of unearthing those stories. Kiku's mother realizes,

I think sometimes a community's experience is so traumatic, it stays rooted in us even generations later. And the later generations continue to rediscover that experience, since it's still shaping us in ways we might not realize.

And Kiku, too, vows to hold their memories, to recognize the strength possible through bringing trauma to light:

But when a community comes together to demand more, when we do not let trauma stay obscured but bring it up to the surface and remember it together -- we can make sure it is not repeated.

By folding Kiku's story into the events surrounding the 2018 "zero-tolerance" immigration policy that resulted in family separations and prolonged incarceration in immigration detention facilities, Hughes is able to draw a clear line between the past and the present, insisting that we hold these stories in our collective memory, always working toward a better tomorrow.

The Lexicon - Fissiparous

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Word: Fissiparous

Definition: (adj) tending to break up into parts: DIVISIVE

Origin: L fissus, pp of findere + E -parous

Source: Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, quoting Saul Dubow's Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa.

The conception of race as "type" encouraged a belief in the existence of ideal categories and stressed diversity and difference over similarity and convergence. This was overlaid by binary-based notions of superiority and inferiority, progress and degeneration. One of the many problems associated with the typological method was its fissiparous character. The search for pure racial types could not easily be reconciled with the evident fact that, in practice, only hybrids existed.

This text, a standard in the field of Information Sciences, concerns itself with the ubiquity of classification. Its opening pages declare with confidence, "To classify is human." And maybe Bowker and Star are right in this assertion. Maybe the earliest humans were as prone to sorting as we are, driven to dividing and grouping as a means of survival.

I would argue classification has always been a tool, a utility employed for a specific purpose. Hence the bibliographic organizational systems (like the Dewey Decimal System) that were developed within the existing parameters of physical books in need of physical shelf space to be interacted with physically by users. Hence also the wild variation employed by book lovers in the organization of their home libraries. There is no need for a broad, standardized classification scheme when the collection is local and known intimately by its users. There is also no need for classification when there is no storage, no multiples, no need for search and retrieval.

When classification schemes get applied to humans, those, too, are tools, likely employed to secure or maintain power and profit. This word, fissiparous, arrives during a discussion of apartheid and the mental gymnastics that must be performed in order to construct an ideological concept of "race." Though the word was new to me, it wore its definition in its parts: fiss- (see: fission, fissure) always refers to splitting or division, -par (see: parent, apparition) denotes a bringing forth or making visible. In biology, the -parous prefix refers to the means of reproduction - ovaparous (by egg), viviparous (by live birth), or in this case fissiparous (by division).

To describe a classification scheme used to create policies that will subjugate and dehumanize as fissiparous is to say it will produce something repeatedly by division, which is to state the obvious. In no way would I dismiss the atrocities of apartheid, but when we apply a critical eye to foreign systems of racism that have been ostensibly defeated, it is all too easy to pat ourselves on the back and say, "look at that horrible thing we did," with a wry shake of the head. But there are countless classification systems in place in the United States today that are just as fissiparous and just as damaging, quietly doing their sorting work to preserve and protect power structures.