SOURCE: Yamamoto, Traise. “Embodied Language: The Poetics of Mitsuye Yamada, Janice Mirikitani and Kimiko Hahn.” In Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body, pp. 198-261. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Yamamoto explores Yamada's chronicle of Japanese-American life and the need to recover from the sexist and racist assumptions of American society in her collections Camp Notes and Other Poems and Desert Run.

Mitsuye Yamada's two collections, Camp Notes ([1976] 1992) and Desert Run (1988), explore the possibilities and problematics of a subjectivity defined by both race and gender, and the complex relations between language, power and agency. But at their most basic level, these poems witness moments of national and personal history, often locating themselves in the space where the two histories collide. Interned at Minidoka, Yamada experienced firsthand the attempted erasure of Nikkei society, culture and language. In her work, the internment...