Displacement - Graphic Novel

 

From the Publisher:

A teenager is pulled back in time to witness her grandmother's experiences in World War II-era Japanese internment camps in Displacement, a historical graphic novel from Kiku Hughes.

Kiku is on vacation in San Francisco when suddenly she finds herself displaced to the 1940s Japanese-American internment camp that her late grandmother, Ernestina, was forcibly relocated to during World War II.

These displacements keep occurring until Kiku finds herself "stuck" back in time. Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive.

Kiku Hughes weaves a riveting, bittersweet tale that highlights the intergenerational impact and power of memory.

My Thoughts:

Graphic novels are attractive gateways to longer texts, and with this historical fiction, it is a gateway to primary research and reading oral history projects. Since I grew up with my grandparents, I am a good listener of stories. But at their funerals, I realized that my stories are not always the same as the stories that they told their children, or my parents and uncles and aunts. Some stories my maternal grandmother told me while the two of us ate breakfast in the morning were stories that my mother did not know. I don't think it is the story that changes, but the shift in perspective and the time to reflect that changes. Their stories offered up a way to travel back through my grandparent's stories. That is what this book is about. It is not a time travel book, but a memory travel book.

For those of us that have gaps in our history, the premise of these "displacements" as a way to learn about our own history is so appealing. I would love to see my grandmother as she was sent to Japan to learn to be a seamstress. I would love to see my grandfather, who at 8th grade became the man of the house, as he struggled to make a living for his mother and four siblings on an 8th grade education and a love for mechanical manuals. 

This book gives those of us with our own gaps of history a way to heal through someone else's story. It is a mirror, a window, and a sliding glass door.

Suggestions for Curriculum & Classroom Use

Thematic currents:

• Internment camps
• Effects of war
• Racism
• Large scale ethnic policies
• Family history

Activty:

Genre Studies: There are many historical fiction or memoir accounts of World War II written in different genres. Add this graphic novel, Displaced, to others. This is just a very small sample, but it can be used for an i-search project or work with your 8th grade social studies or US history high school colleague to do a social justice project based on this research and current events:

• Graphic novels on internment: 
•  They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, about his own experience in the internment camps from a perspective of a young child
• Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo - one of the earliest, published in 1946 just as the camps were being closed, Ms. Okubo was documenting and drawing her experiences as they happened. This is a documentary of the evacuation and relocation told in real time.

•  Picture books:
• The Bracelet by Yoshiko Uchida, illustrated by Joanna Yardley
• Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki, illustrated by Dom Lee 

• YA books: 
• Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston (older memoir from a nisei who was in high school in the camp)
• We Are Not Free, by Traci Chee, a contemporary historical fiction, if that makes sense (in multiple voices) 

Oral History Project: Use  any of these books as mentor texts to doing an oral history project around students's own family histories. Use their research to create their own oral history project, or a podcast with transcript (similar to StoryCorps.org) This allows you as the teacher to also have your students switch genres and add writing, oracy and art. 

Publication Information:

 Author: Kiku Hughes

Publisher: First Second; Illustrated edition (August 18, 2020)

Paperback: 288 pages

ISBN-13: 978-1250193537

Grade level: 7-9