Kimiko Guthrie & Kiku Hughes discuss their novels, Block Seventeen and Displacement

Kimiko Guthrie & Kiku Hughes discuss Block Seventeen and Displacement, their novels reflecting on the experience of Japanese and Japanese Americans in U.S. concentration camps during WWII

It DID Happen Here. It IS Happening Here. & Never Again Is NOW.

Part of “Revolution Books: 60 Defiant Days, The Trump/Pence Must Go”

In Kiku Hughes' graphic novel Displacment, a teenager is pulled back in time to witness her grandmother's experiences in the World War II-era when the U.S. rounded up 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans and forced them into concentration camps. Living alongside her young grandmother in the camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class.

Block Seventeen by Kimiko Guthrie first presents as a mystery novel: its protagonist, Akiko “Jane” Thompson is confounded by a series of disturbing mysteries: Why won’t the neighbor’s baby, whom she’s never seen, stop crying? Why is her boyfriend, who works for the Transportation Security Administration, suddenly obsessed, to the point of paranoia, with government surveillance? And why can she only find her mother online, in the elusive world of social media? These mysteries unfold/unravel as she confronts her family's history in America, how they survived the camps, and how fear and humiliation can drive a person to commit desperate acts.

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