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Post by Dr. Nemmers on Jul 26, 2024 19:10:00 GMT
I found it jarring and ironic that Okubo begins her narrative not in the United States during the war, but in Europe before it.
As we learn, she becomes a refugee when WW II begins in 1939; she flees to Switzerland, then to France, and is only barely able to escape France on a ship before the Nazis invade France and she would have been trapped there. On returning to the United States, she attempts to resume normal life; she writes that "I had a good home and many friends. Everything was going along fine" (7).
Then Pearl Harbor happens, and WW II arrives in the continental United States, and now she faces another threat to her freedom: the U. S. government. I suppose she could have tried to evade capture and detention here, but that would have just made her another refugee, this time from political persecution.
What do these successive episodes tell us? Are all humans just refugees fleeing from one crisis to another? There's a sense of "homelessness" that accompanies existentialism, and I wonder if this gestures to that...
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Post by jarelyrebollar on Jul 29, 2024 14:08:20 GMT
By setting her story in Europe before WWII, Okubo sets a global context for displacement and freedom's fragility. Her escape from the Nazi invasion, followed by a seemingly normal life in the U.S., contrasts sharply with the sudden upheaval after Pearl Harbor and her internment.
These successive crises in Okubo’s life evoke a profound sense of existential "homelessness," as you mentioned. Her story reflects the idea that humans may continuously flee from one crisis to another, never fully secure. This aligns with existentialist themes where the search for meaning and stability is often thwarted by external forces beyond one’s control.
Her narrative challenges the notion of a fixed, safe homeland, suggesting that home can be illusory or temporary, especially for marginalized individuals. "Homelessness" here, I believe to be, both physical and existential, as individuals grapple with identity, belonging, and the relentless pursuit of freedom amidst chaos. Okubo’s experiences underscore resilience in the face of constant uncertainty, highlighting the quest for a sense of home and self in a tumultuous world.
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Post by mjunious on Jul 31, 2024 0:31:28 GMT
I put myself in Okubo's place as I read the beginning of the novel. The portion leading up to the internment, contextualizing with what was happening in Europe, and then in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor, made me feel like the dangers happening in the world was closing in around her; kind of a feeling of claustrophobia. I think framing it in this way of being cornered, in my mind anyway, made it more plausible that the people would be willing to go to the camps. Without knowing the background, it might be less comprehensible that they would go.
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Post by connorswauger on Jul 31, 2024 18:42:32 GMT
I do get that sense of homelessness from Okuboi as well as that sense of helplessness that comes from the Age of Anxiety. I feel as if Okubo shows that she was mostly helpless in the face of a world war and this shows another side to the problems people faced during this time. Narrowly escaping France only to come back to the United Sates to then be taken from her home, to me, shows that there truly was not anywhere to be safe from the world’s conflicts.
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Post by gnicholson3 on Jul 31, 2024 20:42:21 GMT
The "homelessness" that appears in existential novel feels like a bigger picture kind of metaphor. I can't remember in which article I read it, but I remember reading about the temporary elements of our existence. We're visitors and even when we belong in a place, the world doesn't necessarily belong to us. It something we're here to see and experience in, more often than not, less than a century. Less than a century is quite nearly irrelevant to the overall understanding of time. In fact, we attribute our own meaning to our temporal existence as a society which is the cause of existentialism. It makes us ask, "Why are we here?"
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Post by Dr. Nemmers on Aug 1, 2024 3:09:00 GMT
Agreed, Grace--- there's an element of "homelessness" that springs from people being alienated, disconnected, and overall distant from the world. We have no true home, according to much of existentialist thought... The other thing I wanted to add on here is that it's been a very long time since we've had large-scale camps of this sort in the United States... but that may change as soon as next year. www.scientificamerican.com/article/trumps-massive-deportation-plan-echoes-concentration-camp-history/Just goes to show that this sort of thing never really goes away, and that if we don't learn history, we're doomed to repeated it (or whatever) |
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