SOURCE: Graham, Renee. “A Poet Speaks Painful Truths of Her Past.” Boston Globe (5 December 1992): L21.

In the following essay, Graham offers historical background to the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II as the impetus to Yamada's collection Camp Notes and Other Poems.

Mitsuye Yamada was still huddled around the radio listening to the crackling reports of death and destruction near Hawaii when FBI agents came to the door looking for her father. He was an interpreter for the Immigration Service, but his fluency in Japanese and English made him a suspect, an enemy of the people, on a Sunday afternoon more than 50 years ago.

Within hours, her father was accused of being a spy, and incarcerated as a prisoner of war.

It was Dec. 7, 1941. And this was how life would be for thousands of Japanese Americans in a nation gone mad with fear and...