Manzanar is located in the midst of a harsh and desolate desert, defined by wide expanses of scraggly shrubbery and dust. It is not a place fit for people.
I know this now because I've finally been there.
Last Saturday marked the 38th anniversary of the Manzanar Day of Pilgrimage. I almost ended up not going; I had a lot of things to do that weekend. But I decided that in the grand scheme of things, going to the Manzanar pilgrimage with the UCLA Nikkei Student Union meant far more to me than meeting academic deadlines - even if it did involve waking up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning.
The Manzanar Day of Pilgrimage started back in December 1969, when a group of mostly young, mostly Japanese American students embarked to look for Manzanar, one of the ten concentration camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. This first pilgrimage inspired a chain of events that finally gave this former abandoned camp the recognition as a National Historic Site on Feb. 19, 1992, the 50th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066.
In spite of the snow-covered peaks looming in the distance, the day was oppressively hot. As clouds of dust got kicked up in the footsteps of the visitors, no amount of sunscreen, free water bottles and shades could prevent us from sweltering like pigs. We wondered out loud how people could possibly live in a place like this for years at a time.
The Day of Pilgrimage began at noon, where people sat in foldable chairs at the Manzanar cemetery to listen to taiko drummers, speakers and musicians on a makeshift stage decorated with bouquets of origami paper cranes. Representatives from the Muslim American and African American community vocalized their support for the continuing remembrance of Manzanar. Many of the speakers dedicated their speeches to Sue Kunitomi Embrey, a former Manzanar internee, writer, activist and educator who passed away last year, known for leading the effort to make Manzanar an official historic site.
After dusk, people gathered at the Manzanar Interpretive Center for the evening program. The crowd was a diverse sampling of young Nikkei, schoolteachers, local residents, college students, Muslim Americans, political activists and former internees, all there to participate in a night of film, open-ended discussion and spoken word. Former internees spoke to younger generations about their memories from the camp. A Muslim American college student performed an intensely personal spoken word piece about the injustice of racial profiling in the light of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks.
Czech writer Milan Kundera once said, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Events like the Manzanar Day of Pilgrimage remind us that the very act of remembering is not simply paying homage to the past. It is also to inspire political action against the greater forces that threaten to rob our personal freedom as free citizens of the world. Without remembrance, social progress cannot possibly exist.
As people filed out of the Interpretive Center, someone had set up a multimedia installation outside. A large-scale slideshow of black and white photographs from the internment camps flickered against the outer wall of the museum. Grandparents, mothers holding babies, childhood buddies - many long deceased, their faces now loomed over the visitors and under the desert stars while oldies music played from someone's portable stereo.
For one night in the barren desert, someone's desire to remember brought the forgotten back to life.
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