A MELUS Interview: Mitsuye Yamada

Abstract

Yamada's own words are the best introduction to her life and work. In 1986 she wrote this statement for Amnesty International: My writings generally express my ethnic experiences; my literature and writing courses are taught from a multicultural perspective; and my community activities reflect my human rights interests. With these activities I have been working towards integrating the complex fragments of my life into a profound whole throughout most of my adult life. I have tried to contribute towards making our society a truly multicultural one in which our institutions would eventually reflect the experiences of women as well as the working class and ethnic minorities of both sexes. Born in Kyushu, Japan, spent most of her childhood and youth in Seattle, Washington, until in 1942 she was removed with her family to a concentration camp in the dry, windswept valley of southern Idaho. That experience was the basis for many of the poems collected in her first book, Camp Notes (Shameless Hussy Press, 1976). Her second collection, Desert Run (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1988), explores a return to those unforgettable events: a physical return and re-experiencing of the desert environment, and a re-visioning of the tragic upheaval of removal and relocation. In 1981 she was featured with Nellie Wong in a documentary film, Mitsuye and Nellie: Two American Poets, which was shown on public television. The film places the artistic work of the two poets in the context of the historical experience of immigrants from Japan and China, and it offers a unique distillation of Mitsuye's life work as expressed in her statement for Amnesty International: the integration of the art of poetry with the activist's commitment to work for change in the outside world.