Loyalty (1943)
I am a citizen—
Let no slander
Slur my status.
In the other war,
I stood with countless others
Side by side
To fight the foe.
My arm was just as strong
My blood fell
As bright as theirs
In the defense of a new world
More precious far
Than any tie of land or race.
If in this holocaust
It be decreed
My loyalty be tested
By submission,
What is the difference
If the end be same?
My reason may be tested—
Not my heart.
O, what is loyalty
If it be something
That can bend
With every wind?
Steadfast I stand,
Staunchly I plant
The Stars and Stripes
Before my barracks door,
Crying defiance
To all wavering hearts.
I am a citizen—
I can take
The bad with good.
—Sada Murayama
- Title
- Loyalty (1943)
- Description
- This poem was published in a book commemorating the first year of the Tule Lake Relocation Center, a concentration camp operated in California by the U.S. government to incarcerate Japanese Americans who had been forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast. While the author of the poem, Sada Murayama, was herself an Issei immigrant (first generation of Japanese immigrant) and thus ineligible for citizenship, two thirds of the people incarcerated in these camps were U.S. citizens. The speaker of the poem is one of these Japanese American citizens, grappling with what it means to be loyal to a country that is not loyal to all of its citizens.
- Date
- 1943-05-27
- Related Documents
-
Executive Order 9066 - Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas (1942)
- Document Type
- Newspaper
- Document Category
- Primary Source
- Archival Source
- Library of Congress, Serial and Government Publications Division
- Bibliographic Citation
- Sada Murayama, "Loyalty," in A Tule Lake Interlude, Newell, California: Tulean Dispatch, 1943.
- Digital Repository
- Library of Congress
- Contributor
- Kaci Nash
- Item sets
- Japanese Internment
- Title
- Loyalty (1943)
- Description
- This poem was published in a book commemorating the first year of the Tule Lake Relocation Center, a concentration camp operated in California by the U.S. government to incarcerate Japanese Americans who had been forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast. While the author of the poem, Sada Murayama, was herself an Issei immigrant (first generation of Japanese immigrant) and thus ineligible for citizenship, two thirds of the people incarcerated in these camps were U.S. citizens. The speaker of the poem is one of these Japanese American citizens, grappling with what it means to be loyal to a country that is not loyal to all of its citizens.
- Date
- 1943-05-27
- Related Documents
-
Executive Order 9066 - Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas (1942)
- Document Type
- Newspaper
- Document Category
- Primary Source
- Archival Source
- Library of Congress, Serial and Government Publications Division
- Bibliographic Citation
- Sada Murayama, "Loyalty," in A Tule Lake Interlude, Newell, California: Tulean Dispatch, 1943.
- Digital Repository
- Library of Congress
- Contributor
- Kaci Nash
- Item sets
- Japanese Internment