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Janice Mirikitani (B. 1942) : For My Father

Janice Mirikitani is a Japanese American poet born in 1942 who was interned in camps during World War II where she experienced sexual abuse. She writes about her experiences in the camps and the effects it had on her and her father in her poem "For My Father." The poem describes how her father tried to grow strawberries in the unfertile camp lands, but they could only steal berries and were punished for it while white people ate the berries. Through this metaphor and direct experiences, the poem conveys how the internment created distance between Mirikitani and her father but also her growing understanding of his strength and sacrifices to preserve their culture and provide for their family during hard times.

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Zeynep Beydeş
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926 views

Janice Mirikitani (B. 1942) : For My Father

Janice Mirikitani is a Japanese American poet born in 1942 who was interned in camps during World War II where she experienced sexual abuse. She writes about her experiences in the camps and the effects it had on her and her father in her poem "For My Father." The poem describes how her father tried to grow strawberries in the unfertile camp lands, but they could only steal berries and were punished for it while white people ate the berries. Through this metaphor and direct experiences, the poem conveys how the internment created distance between Mirikitani and her father but also her growing understanding of his strength and sacrifices to preserve their culture and provide for their family during hard times.

Uploaded by

Zeynep Beydeş
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Topkoru 1

Janice MIRIKITANI

(b. 1942)

For My Father

Janice Mirikitani was born in California in 1942 just before the Second World War. She and
her family were put in internment camps along with other Japanese-Americans, where she
was sexually abused. In the year of 1942, more than 110.000 Japanese Americans were
carried to relocation centers, 70.000 of them were Nisei, native-born citizens of the United
States. Their crime was their ethnic origin – the fact that they were of Japanese descent.

The internees were sent to flood-damaged lands at Relocation, Arkansas; to the intermountain
terrain of Wyoming and the desert of western Arizona; and other desolate spots in the West.
Although the names were evocative – Topaz, Utah, Rivers, Arizona, Hearth Mountain,
Wyoming, Tule Lake – the camps were bleak and demoralizing. Behind barbed wire stood
tarpapered wooden barracks where entire families lived in a single room furnished only with
cots, blankets and a bare light bulb. Toilets, dining and bathing facilities were communal;
privacy was almost non-existent. Besides their freedom, the Japanese-Americans lost property
valued at $500 million, along with their positions in the truck-garden, floral and fishing
industries.

Mirikitani was married to a Caucasian man first. Her marriage to Reverend Cecile Williams
was her second. They have a daughter called Tianne. Her family opposed both of her
marriages because there were not from Japanese origin.

Mirikitani is a poet, dancer and a teacher, social and political activist. She graduated from
UCLA and attended SFSU as a graduate student in English. A committed activist in the civil
and human rights arenas, she has organized numerous marches and demonstrations. She is the
program director of the Glide Church/Urban Center since 1967 and director of the Glide
Theatre Group. She is also the founding member of Third World Communications; she has
been instrumental in organizing and promoting Third World writers, artists and musicians.
Topkoru 2

She edited several anthologies including I Have Something to Say about This Big Trouble:
Children of the Tenderloin Speak out and Watch out, We are Talking: Speaking about Incest
and Abuse, Third World Women, Time to Greez, Incantations from the Third World, AYUMI,
A Japanese-American Anthology.

She is the recipient of more than 35 awards and honors including Lifetime Achievement
Award for Literature, Woman Warrior in Arts for Literature, Woman of Words Award.

Her works are Awake in the River (1978), Shedding Silence (1987), We, the Dangerous: New
and Selected Poems (1995).

Her voice is often angry, aggressive, blunt and direct, but sometimes it can be elegiac as well.
She uses free verse in her poetry. She writes of her childhood in internment camp and of the
sexual abuse she suffered. She takes her time to explore her family history and anchors her
identity in the details of Asian-American experience. Her commitment to Third World
positions against racism and oppression is reflected in the present content in her Awake in the
River and Shedding Silence.

For My Father

In this poem, Mirikitani talks about her feeling she had about the internment camps and also
the effects she saw in her father. At the very beginning of the poem, she says “He came over
the ocean/ carrying Mt. Fuji/ on his back/Tule Lake on his chest” (1-3) Mountain Fuji is a
very important in Japan culture. It is something holy. In the United States, the father tries to
preserve the Japanese culture while he suffers in the internment camp, Tule Lake. As stated
before, the internment lands were the deserts of the west. The poem says that the father tried
to grow strawberries in this non-fertile land. The narrator of the poem, probably Mirikitani
herself, states that they “stole berries/ from the stem/ [they] could not afford them/ for
breakfast” (8-11). It can be concluded from here that the economic status of the family was
not bright, the father was growing strawberries for the “hakijunes” (22), the white people. The
narrator states that the father’s eyes “held/nothing/as he whipped [them]/ for stealing” (12-
15). It means that father tries to convey strong moral values. The narrator, as a child, reflects
her feelings towards the class difference. She says that the father sold the berries to white
people “whose children/pointed at [their] eyes” (23-24). While they could not afford the
Topkoru 3

berries for breakfast ,got punished from the father for stealing them, the white people were
eating them with cream. The lines “Father/ I wanted to scream/at your silence./Your
strength/was a stranger/I could never touch” (28-33) reflects the resentment of the narrator to
her father’s seeming passivity about the situation. Father’s strength is within, the speaker is
distant from her father at the beginning but it is evident that through the end of the poem, she
grows to understand him at the end. She comes to understand the sacrifices of her father,
which is stated in the last lines of the poem: “iron/in your eyes/to shield/the pain/to shield
desert-like wind/from patches/of strawberries/grown/from/tears” (34-43).

Strawberries here symbolize the Japanese-American father’s toil and hardship to produce a
fruit he and his children could never eat. Food is used as a subtheme for communication, in
fact lack of communication here between the father and daughter. In order to give a sharp
effect of the situation, Mirikitani used words appealing to senses such as “hacked, whipped,
dried, rich, full, ate, pointed, scream, cream, shield”.
ZEYNEP TOPKORU

07035509

American Poetry

Janice MIRIKITANI

For My Father

June 2006

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