Asian North-American Children’s Literature About the Internment: Visualizing and Verbalizing the Traumatic Thing

Abstract

Examining six texts about the traumatic experience of the internment either in Canada or the United States during World War II, we focus not only on their stylistic shift from visualization to verbalization as targeted ages of readers increase, but also on the effects, both historical and personal, social and domestic, on children of their perception of the traumatic Thing. We propose an answer to essential questions: How can we deal with the dark page in human history and overcome its haunting memories? How can we most effectively share the tales of terror with younger generations? These questions will be approached in the light of a Lacanian reading of the six texts. Instead of using these texts as a surrogate for a Lacanian psychoanalysis or demonstrating how therapeutic reading these stories can be, we explicate the concept of trauma and the meaning of the successful “healing” according to Lacan’s assumption regarding the end and the aim of psychoanalytic treatment.