SOURCE: Schweik, Susan. “A Needle with Mama's Voice: Mitsuye Yamada's Camp Notes and the American Canon of War Poetry.” In Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, edited by Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merill Squier, pp. 225-43. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Schweik analyzes the poems of Yamada's Camp Notes, focusing on their evocation of a suppressed Japanese-American woman's voice during wartime.

A recent, useful bibliography of American war literature by David Lundberg acknowledges one of its significant gaps in a note: “There have also been no studies of Japanese-American war literature, even though a number of memoirs and novels about the relocation experience have appeared in recent years.”¹ At least one widely available scholarly study of the literature of relocation, a section of Elaine Kim's ground-breaking Asian-American Literature, was in print at the time of...