The Afterlife is Letting Go

A memoiristic travelogue illuminates how the history of Japanese American incarceration lives on in the present -- in the lives of descendants, and as part of an ongoing pattern of the detention and dispossession of non-white peoples in the U.S.

Poet Brandon Shimoda has penned an incisive and moving follow up to his award-winning memoir, The Grave on the Wall. Here, he explores "the afterlife" of the incarceration of Japanese Americans in WWII, excavating the ways in which that historical event continues to resonate today -- in its influence on the lives of the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who were incarcerated; and more broadly, in the ways in which it is remembered/misremembered and represented/misrepresented in literature, film, art, legislation, the imagination, and so on.

This series of reflective, multi-layered essays are an attempt to answer a pivotal question: How do we memorialize an event that is ongoing? How do we meaningfully connect our past to our present? How might official memorialization cause us to forget? Informed by years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, along with interviews, conversations, and correspondence with over 200 descendants of detainees, these essays take us along with the author on a physical and metaphysical journey of learning -- and not learning -- about the past. Along the way, we become increasingly aware of the infinite connections between the incarceration of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, current and historical.

Ultimately, this is a book about ancestors, who they are, and how we spend time with them. And this a book about memory, how we remember, and how we forget, how remembering often takes the form of forgetting.