Displacement

Kiku gathers herself and walks back into her house where her mother is still watching news about Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential elections. On the news, a reporter and spokesperson talk about Trump’s proposal to “reinstate a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries” (228). The spokesperson for Trump claims that the proposal is legal, and he believes it will pass “constitutional muster” (228). He claims that there is precedent for such a registry and lists the examples of Iran and the Japanese during World War Two, at which point Kiku’s mother mutters: “oh my god.” Kiku asks her mother if she thinks something like the incarceration camps will happen again. Her mother admits she has been worried about it, in the 1970s, during the Bush administration, and now.

Kiku decides to tell her mother about her displacements. To Kiku’s surprise, when she explains that she has been back in time to the camps, her mother says: “it’s happened to me, too” (232). Kiku’s mother explains that, in the 1970s, her mother (Ernestina) was afraid because “there was talk of reopening the camps for political dissidents, communists, Black Panthers” (232), and during this time she traveled in a “displacement” to the camp three times.