Sunday, November 29, 2015

Reflections On His Recollections: A Book Talk About Allen Say's Drawing From Memory

James Allen Koichi Moriwaki Seii, more commonly known as Allen Say, was born in Yokahama, Japan in 1937 to an American-born Japanese mother and China-raised Korean father who was adopted by a British family. Say first dreamed of being an artist at the age of six. His dream came true as a 12 year old when he began an apprenticeship with his favorite cartoonist, Noro Shinpei. After four years of study with the reknown artist, Say moved to California with his father. Studying art in high school, a stint in the military, marriage and a host of other events filled Say’s life and his imagination.

Allen Say pursued a career in commercial photography, and at the age of 35, his first book, Dr. Smith’s Safari, was published. For the next decade, Say alternated between using writing and illustrations with his photographic works. In 1988, at a half a century old, he won the Caldecott Honor for his book, Boy of the Three-Year Nap. It has been said that at this time that Allen Say truly recaptured his love of writing and illustrating children’s books. Having written works as early as 1974, some of his most widely known titles include:

The Bicycle Man (1982)
El Chino (1990)
Grandfather’s Journey (1993) Caldecott Medal
Tea With Milk (1999)
Drawing From Memory (2011)

Say, A. (2011). Drawing From Memory. New York: Scholastic Press.

Note:  In my opinion, the excerpts that I will read marked the turning point in Allen Say’s life. Throughout pages 17-27, we learn that Say entered a middle school where he was supposed to begin life as a “normal” student—studying and taking exams. Therefore, he was expected to forgo his artistic pursuits and get serious about his education. Naturally, adhering to his true calling, he settled into his own apartment which he had immediate plans to transform into an art studio. While out for dinner on his first night alone, Say read an article in a newspaper that supported this decision and forever altered the course of his life (and ours as well).

As emotional as it is artistic, Drawing From Memory is a memoir by Allen Say that beautifully recalls his relationship with his mentor, Noro Shinpei, the renowned Japanese cartoonist. Throughout the book, Say unreservedly recounts the roles that his mother (who eventually encouraged his artistic leanings) and that his maternal grandmother and father (who both considered artists’ attributes—they are “lazy and scruffy people”--to be unrespectable) played in his life and events, great and small, through sketches, cartoons, water color paintings, black and white photographs and maps. According to Say his mother taught him to read before he began school because she was afraid that he would drown in the Sea of Japan. Her fear became the force that propelled him into the world of comic books. He was safe at home reading; he found comfort and security in his drawings. So he drew and drew. Neither of his parents were really pleased, but his father really expressed his disdain for his son’s decision.

At the age of eight, Allen began first grade. His teacher, Mrs. Morita, was the first to praise his drawing abilities. World War II, his parents’ marital problems and the family’s dissolution, separation and relocation signaled the start of Say’s new life with his grandmother. It also meant that he would soon leave her house, start a middle school and be expected to abandon art.

According to a simplistic psychological definition of memory that I retrieved from Wikipedia, memory involves:

encoding--receiving and processing information
storage--creating a permanent record of the encoded information, and
recollection--recalling back that stored information in response to a cue

Drawing From Memory is well-organized and well-developed. Though he is not one I would consider a wordsmith, I really enjoyed reading Say’s book because of the free and public way that he expressed private, personal details of his life through mere memories. He presented us with the good, the bad and the in-between in the language he knew he could fully express himself—art!  What is remarkable, reflecting the reasons that he is revered, is that Say did this by taking us on a journey through the rudimentary stages of his artistic expression and then allowing us to settle in with him as he became firmly rooted in his ultimate level of artistic sophistication. That is truly praiseworthy!

While trying to recall the memoirs that I had recently read and/or owned, two very well received ones came to mind:  Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie and Night by Elie Wiesel. Neither of them involved a single person who had experienced a creative, emotional, physical and/or spiritual awakening in ways similar to Allen Say’s as did another favorite work by author and poet Maya Angelou.

In her 1969 autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Angelou took us on a journey from childhood to near adulthood that paralleled Say’s. Both Say and Angelou experienced disappointment and rejection at a very young age. Nevertheless, they were inspired, encouraged and elevated through the professional and ultimately more personal relationships with a teacher. Maya had Mrs. Flowers who encouraged her to read, but more importantly to speak. Allen had his sensei, his teacher/mentor, Noro Shinpei who set an example for him and motivated him to reach even higher heights.

I would definitely recommend Allen Say’s Drawing From Memory. Though at first glance, it may seem to primarily be a children’s picture book. After all, it is full of cartoons. However, it is far more than that. The content is mature. Issues of unrest, abandonment, rejection, dreams chased and dreams captured would meet the social and emotional needs of readers as young as preteens who are may be experiencing similar issues in their lives. An artist who is considering giving up his or her pursuit of happiness should consider drawing from their own memories, reminding themselves what made them fall in love with art, encouraging them to renew that relationship. I really like Drawing because it makes me think of how I keep my grandmother’s memory and our shared love alive. She passed away four years ago, so by constantly crocheting and recalling our crafting stories, like Say, I am proving that our projects as well as our passion can be passed on to our posterity. I, too, have been drawing from memory.

Family, Faith and Hope For The Future: A Comparison Of Night By Elie Wiesel and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's Farewell To Manzanar

Before I selected Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel’s Night and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell To Manzanar, I viewed them a completely separate books with their independent value. I had chosen them as part of my “Super Six” as I like to call my book list for this course because I had either read or heard of both books during my undergraduate days. It was not until I began to read Houston’s autobiography did a rush of memories flood my mind. “Wait a minute!” I said out loud while reading on the bus. “I remember now! Elie Wiesel was talking about so much of this, too, with Jewish people, of course. And to think it was all born out of the same war, happening to different groups of people at the same time!” That was the beginning of the comparison that I now present to you, the reader.
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From the beginning of time, we have been distinguishable from one another by skin color, language, physical location and a host of other natural and fabricated phenomena. Empty rhetoric this is not--I firmly believe that no matter what the eyes tell us when we look at one another, no matter how strange other’s words sound to our own ears, we are, in essence, far more alike than different. Unfortunately, it often takes unspeakable tragedies to acknowledge what I sincerely regard as fact. So is the case with Wiesel and Houston. Though they were separated by geography, we see profound similarities in the ways their settings helped shape their experiences, attitudes and beliefs-- their character. In many ways, Elie and Jeanne’s lives were united, paralleled by “the human condition”. Though complex, rich and quite unique in their own right, the main character’s lives in both Night and Farewell To Manzanar are wrought with struggles of similar important issues, like community (including “self” and “the other”), faith and family. Elie Wiesel and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston contended with internal and external forces for a relativity short chronological period of time, the profundity of which caused indelible long-term effects.
The style of Farewell To Manzanar is easy to identify. Jeanne’s voice, with assistance from her husband, was her own. Written thirty years after leaving Manzanar, Houston wrote Farewell… as if she were recounting her life to a friend who stopped by for a long weekend. It is clear that she told us of the hard times her family and others in the camp faced, but her true understanding of the events were relayed as if a child (as she was during the internment) were telling them. That is because “at seven, I was too young to be insulted.”
Houston’s life saddens us insofar as the reader is able to sympathize with her for being an innocent child who suffered cruelties that were disguised as protection for a greater cause, a different group of people.  It is free from the true criticism that I would have liked to have seen, but its absence is acceptable because of the perspective from which Jeanne spoke. Her telling of her experiences is as engaging as it is tolerable. You actually feel drawn in, wanting to learn more about this little girl, her family and the other Japanese families who were subjected to unconscionable indignities sanctioned by the United States of America, the land of the freedom and the home of the brave.
By contrast, in recounting the tragic circumstances of his life, Elie Wiesel spoke through Eliezer, a fictionalized characterization of himself. That does not make the events less true. Can we really blame him for creating a proxy to distance himself from the physical and emotional abuse he suffered and witnessed? Night, gives us unfathomable insight into the inner struggle of a man, a fight that was caused by the atrocious acts that were carried out by individuals who tortured and slaughtered millions of innocent people. It is not difficult to see, from my previous comments, that the tone of Wiesel’s memoir is primarily gloomy, sad and serious which left me feeling angry, despondent and in utter disbelief.  I continued to read because like Elie/Eliezer (and scores of other readers), I unrelentingly grappled with every horrific physical and emotional blow that was dealt while somehow continuing to cling to a fleeting morsel of hope.  
Family
The disruption of the Wakatsukis’ and Wiesels’s lives was caused by events well beyond their imagination or control. World War II (1939-1942) was being fought on a global scale. Battles raged overseas as well as on the home front. Whether for issues of religion or race, people were imprisoned around the world for being different from, which made them an imagined threat to, the ruling majority. The effects of the war hit home when in 1942, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, the United States government ordered the Wakatsuki family and over 100,000 other Japanese-Americans and resident Japanese “aliens” to leave their homes and relocate to one of ten remote, military style camps. (Italian- and German-Americans were also affected by this decree because we were at war with Germany and Italy as well.)
If we briefly turn our eyes from California where the Wakatsukis lived, we can focus on the tragedy that struck thousands of miles away in Europe when Eliezer’s, his family’s and the lives of other Jews were quite literally ripped apart. In 1944, they were forcibly removed from their homes, thrown into concentration camps including Auschwitz/Birkenau (in modern-day Poland) and Buchenwald in Germany and further separated by sex-- men with men and women with women. (Elie stayed with his dad while his three sisters remained by their mother’s (Sarah) side. Sarah and Tzipora, his little sister, died in the war. Hilda and Beatrice also later died.)
One saving grace is that the Wakatsukis were able to stay together during their dislocation.  Jeanne makes us smile as she recalled how her once close-knit family lived in relative comfort and enjoyed simple pleasures at home like dinner time together. All thirteen of them could fit around the large wooden table and enjoy noisy conversations while eating delicious, home-cooked food.  We are quickly overcome with sadness and disgust when our attention is brought back to their crowded, unsanitary barracks in Manzanar, a camp about 230 miles outside of Los Angeles, CA, the scene of many events that drastically altered their lives.
Papa Wakatsuki had been arrested on suspicion of being a spy before the family was relocated to Manzanar. With the head of household gone, and after a few weeks in the mess halls (typically rooms where soldiers eat together), the remaining Wakatsukis stopped having their meals as a family. (It was hard for her elderly grandmother to leave their barracks; Jeanne and her siblings tried to find better food in other blocks or simply passed time eating with their friends.) This undoubtedly undermined Wakatsuki’s unity and contributed to the disintegration of their family structure. The physical proximity of her family became irrelevant as the emotional distance between them could be measured in miles.
After spending a year in Fort Lincoln detention camp near Bismarck, ND, Papa returned to his family a broken man. Like the cane he used to support his leg, he began to turn to alcohol to brace himself against his inner demons. Papa became so out of control that his threat to beat Mama with his cane was only thwarted by a punch in the face by Kiyo, the family’s youngest son.  
Similarly, though he was comforted by the companionship, the time that he spent with his father contributed to Eliezer’s emotional and spiritual conflict as much as the harsh conditions led to his father’s physical decline and ultimate demise. The beatings, the torture, the experiencing of and witnessing to the brutalities in Auschwitz and Buna, another labor camp, had all but destroyed both men-- mind, body and soul.  Sadly, Eliezer’s father died shortly after arriving at the last concentration camp. He succumbed to a culmination of beatings he sustained because he was sickly and audibly in pain caused by dysentery, an inflammation of the intestines. In a cruel twist of fate, the United States liberated Eliezer and the surviving Jews from Buchenwald in 1945; Shlomo died several months before his freedom.
Faith
To some, night is a time of reflection, rest and rejuvenation. Others fear the night for the unseen ominous creatures and events lurking in the dark.  Throughout the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, we are reminded that only God’s light can drive out darkness.  Eliezer arrived at Birkenau/Auschwitz at night. He questioned who God really was as he entered an unknown, dark world. 
As the war raged on around him, Eliezer fought furiously with the one that raged inside of him. We know that he constantly prayed. He believed in an omnipotent God. He believed that nothing seen could be shaken. If nothing existed without God because God created everything, what kind of God would have created an abyss like Auschwitz? Was he that unabashedly cruel? Worse than that, he probably was no God at all. The fact that he continuously prayed and struggled with these questions makes us understand that Eliezer maintained a measure of faith in God even though God may have revealed himself as disloyal to Eliezer.
Jeanne did not subscribe to religion in the way Eliezer did. Faith was not an issue of keeping her family together, and its lack was not to blame for her family falling apart. She noted that her family followed some of their ancestor’s Buddhist traditions when they lived Ocean Park. It was not until she was in Manzanar that she began to be gain an interest in Catholicism much to her father’s disapproval. It is likely that because of their deplorable living conditions, Jeanne identified with the female saints who were horrifically martyred for their beliefs. In that way, religion (or faith) would not be seen so much as something Jeanne depended on to make sense of the world she lived in; she embraced it to provide herself with another world to which she could escape.
Community (and “Self” Vs. “The Other”)
Polish-Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman spoke of social death as a condition of groups not being accepted by society as fully human. This phenomenon is evident in regard to blacks who were victims of American slavery and Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Likewise, Eliezer could see that the brutality inflicted by the Nazis had also caused the prisoners to engage in a type of social suicide.
Seeing the extent of a group’s degradation at the hands of other human beings weighed heavily on Eliezer’s soul. With all of his might, he fought to fall victim to the newest form of cruelty realized as Jews rising up against Jews. It was a barbarity born as the direct offspring of their abominable circumstances.
Eliezer was horrified by the way he saw men treating their own fathers. On the train to Buchenwald, he was an unwilling witness to a son beating his father to death. He was once told by a Kapo, or fellow prisoner-turned-supervisor, that in the camps, “there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends”. Though he did often think of him as a burden, (would he really mind if, in his weakness, his father laid down in the snow and died?), Eliezer’s love for and solidarity with Shlomo reactivated his innate drive to maintain his humanity and try to keep himself and his father alive.
Being forced to prove their loyalty to the United States via a two-question oath continued to further weaken the Wakatsuki family, and it turned the Japanese prisoners against each other.  Jeanne’s father and her brother Woody answered “yes” and “yes “on the questionnaire, agreeing to serve in the US armed forces and swearing allegiance to this country while renouncing any allegiance or obedience to Japan. When he went to a town hall meeting to defend his decision, Papa was branded a traitor, and a man attacked him. Liked the feelings that swelled inside of Eliezer, I can only imagine the war that raged inside of Papa as he publicly declared his allegiance to the very country that had imprisoned his family, accused him of being a spy and refused him citizenship. Back at the barracks, he cried as he sang the first line of the Japanese national anthem.
The concentration and internment camps caused dissension among family members and for those individuals forced together. They were united by not by blood, but by ethnicity and religion as well as the fear and hatred others had for them. Nonetheless, it is important to note that the circumstances brought about a degree of creativity with forged a sense of community. Through Wiesel, Eliezer spoke of the organization that existed in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. They identified individuals who served, among many things as cooks, hygienists, police officers and social workers. At Manzanar, there were also cooks, (who took pride in the long lines they saw outside their barracks), along with makeshift construction workers and seamstresses who made do with the supplies issued by the United Stated War Department.          
            The Wakatsukis left Manzanar after about a two-year stay at the camp. Jeanne tried to gain a sense of herself while also trying to figure out where she fit in within the larger American community. Mixed messages of kindness as well as unspoken prejudices made her realize that neither she nor others really knew who she had become. One time, trying to be the exotic “other” only led tension between her and her father as he accused her of using her sexuality to win a school contest. It was not until later in life when she reflected on her experiences at Manzanar as an adult with her own family did Jeanne see how her life, simultaneously Japanese and American. It was where her life began and her father’s life began to end.
Through Eliezer, we learn that Elie Wiesel being a victim of and witness to man’s inhumanity against his fellow man did not lead him to take another’s or end his own life. He suffered long and hard for no fault of his own. Elie’s relied on his faith in God to persevere and protect his and his father’s lives. I imagine that the inner strength gained from the memories of his mother and sisters, his relationship with God and his tireless love for his father gave Elie the will to live. When his father died, we know that Elie felt a strange sensation of relief. As Eliezer, he told us that “I have nothing to say of my life of this period. After my father’s death, nothing could touch me anymore.” That is probably why Wiesel experienced a 10-year period of introspection and reflection before writing Night. How grateful I am that the Holocaust did not silence him forever! What an invaluable resource filled with examples of faith, personal conflict and courage than can be used by members of any community!
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According to TeachingBooks.net, the Lexile measure for Night suggests a readability for 2nd-3rd graders. However, I would not share such a content-specific and emotionally difficult book with 8 and 9 year olds. I recommend reading it with junior high and high school students, particularly during the spring in conjunction with Holocaust Rembernace events. Because it is less complex and told from the perspective of a young girl, Farewell To Manzanar may be appropriate for a 6th grade interdisciplinary Language Arts/Social Studies unit at any time. It might be more meaningful if share during units on communities, while exploring various multicultural books on girls coming of age, Asian American heritage celebrations or as part of Women’s History Month in March. Before reading either Night or Farewell To Manzanar, it would be wise to activate students’ prior knowledge with lessons and activities on World War II and related issues like the Holocaust, Judaism, concentration camps, ethnocentrism, nationalism, etc.


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