In “Displacement” (First Second), Kiku Hughes avails herself of several gifts of comics craft to imaginatively inhabit the hard and human history of the WWII Japanese American incarceration camps, which Hughes’ grandmother endured as a young woman, where a time-displaced Hughes winds up by a magic of fiction. “Displacement” utilizes how comics can bend time and space, how they can reflect aesthetics of nostalgia while projecting possible alternatives, and brilliantly forges a subjectively rich but historically rooted re-encounter for descendants of survivors to draw strength from the past to resist oppression today.
Written and Illustrated by Kiku Hughes.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.
Literary accounts of the World War II-era “internment” of Japanese Americans have grown in range and depth, expanding out from works like No No Boy and Farewell to Manzanar of past decades, to more recent and tonally diverse representations like When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka and this year’s We Are Not Free by Traci Chee. Specific to comics, last year’s George Takei graphic memoir “They Called Us Enemy” received due recognition, but illustrated works like “Citizen 13660” by Mine Okubo in 1946 or Kevin Pyle’s “Take What You Can Carry” (2012) had already rendered the camps with that evocative power of drawn imagery.
So I must admit, although I had no doubt there were more stories to be told of the period for Japanese Americans, I wondered if “Displacement” was going to bring anything new to this terrain.
As it turns out, “Displacement” is remarkably, refreshingly, inspiringly new. From cover to cover, from a flip-through to a close read, relative newcomer Kiku Hughes already shows a masterful command of cartooning craft. Hughes is gifted. And in “Displacement,” Hughes leverages these powers to tell a compelling story with beauty both subtle and forceful. The result? A masterful demonstration of the opportunity– and maybe the responsibility– of creators to re-encounter history with the gifts and burdens that cartooning offers, to meet our past with the courage of our imaginative selves.
Those gifts include the time-bending powers readily available to comics storytelling that allow Kiku in the comic to wind up face-to-face with her grandmother in the camps, loosening the constraints on authors to encounter history with their full subjectivities. Those gifts also include the powers of digital auteur art, as Hughes gets to bring a vibrant visual language of animation-influenced comics (with Eastern and Western inheritances) to her tale. And she also brings the gifts of a Yonsei (“fourth generation”) perspective, a generational stance beyond survival, acknowledgment, reparation, and healing, to ask the lasting questions of legacy and responsibility for individuals with both diaspora and belonging in their blood.
The book opens with a young Hughes visiting San Francisco with her mother in June 2016, both grasping for a sense of connectedness to her Nisei grandmother Ernestina’s Japantown’s artifacts of memory while the noise of Trump’s xenophobia blares in the news as backdrop. Neither Kiku nor her mother are effusive in their first reactions to the trip. There’s a fog of silences, and Hughes’ first feat is drawing a very believable recalcitrance in their relationship with each other and with the history they’re trying ot make contact with.
But the “displacements” begin, when Kiku suddenly finds herself transported into the WWII-era community of her grandmother. The displacements are brief at first, but soon Kiku more permanently winds up among the Americans of Japanese descent who are removed from their homes, eventually to the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah. The inhumane expulsions of families, the cruelties of armed guards and bare barracks, the organized resistances and tricky politics… Hughes manages to present these many dimensions of the communities’ experiences with organic rhythm, never jammed in or de rigueur.
Continued belowThe mechanism of time travel to bring about this very direct confrontation of experience between the present-living POV character (Kiku herself) and an unimaginable past owes much to Octavia Butler’s Kindred and books like it. In fact, Hughes’s shout out to Butler in the Acknowledgments embeds “Displacement,” distinct from other books like “They Called Us Enemy,” in the universe of imaginative historical sci-fi with particular social purpose for marginalized people, researching and re-encountering the past with an activist, revisionist, and futurist vision in mind. This kind of genre mix is still in search of a widely adopted name beyond “historical fiction” that places it alongside Afro-, Latinx-, Indigenous, or Asian Futurisms, but it’s right at home in comics and their propensity to bend time and space in service of stories that smash categories we artificially keep apart, like our subjectivities and present politics with history and memory.
Such stories can feel ham-handed with too many ideas, but no one could accuse “Displacement” of overstuffing. The cartooning does much of that work, often spacious and silent, with color-held borderless panels and rounded corners. The characters speak with directness, but also deeply without words, grief or resignation drawn on faces and postures, and pan-outs to the spare objects and simplified landscapes of the camps, or moody winds or impressionistic architectures. Cartooning this clean has that ability to convey an essence that is almost more real in the consciousness than a photograph could.
Hughes’ color palette, characterization style, and storytelling pace all appear remarkably refined. Some pages are breathtakingly beautiful, and yet capped with a tonal presence of the stark reality of the characters’ confinement, even under spacious skies. Other pages zing with liveliness, crowds amassed and opinionated, Ernestina’s violin music encircling scenes as a thin but transforming refrain. It’s cartooning so good that I’d exhaust my limited vocabulary of flat pastels and mise-en-scene, borderless balloons and negative space, and still be gasping for descriptive language (and an art school master’s) to describe it.
What I can say about the art is that for me as a reader, also Asian American, having dwelt long in the emotional visual idioms of Glen Keane and Ghibli, Chris Ware and Alison Bechdel, I am struck that Hughes’ style is simultaneously warmly familiar–to the point of evoking nostalgia– and yet I can think of no one I can compare it to, exactly. What the aesthetic choices accomplish, by my lights, is an understated harmonizing of the indefinite subjectivity of memory and the durable and tangible concrete of history, well suited to invite us to stare long and reflectively at the material and social consequences of authorities dispossessing human beings.
And the Hughes character herself, as rendered, embodies that subjectivity in the story for us. For many, elements of Kiku as a self-portrait, over-the-shoulder character will provide fresh perspective, camped as she is with the women, finding a confident queer attraction and relationship, reckoning her modern politics to the wide-ranging politics of the Japanese Americans around her (and mostly realizing how little she knew of history, a wise humility). For others, Kiku might be read as too muted or quiescent as a character, but I’d challenge that as a really individualistic and atomistic reading on her, given the strong sentiments and stances she’s clearly forming in dialogue with others like her mother or Aika or, really, us as listeners. The overwhelm of the past as not just facts and tidbits but a swirling world around you, out of your control, definitely comes across effectively.
There were times when that retrospective subjectivity jarred me, when I cringed at 1940s characters sounding dubiously 2020, like when Kiku’s roommate declares Japan “even more fascist than America.” But I also remind myself that it’s precisely that kind of pedantry that the story’s design circumvents. This is not (the chimeric) objective history. Never claims to be. This is Hughes re-encountering past truths with present-day imagination and future-oriented moral vision.
