The next morning, the family — without the father, who has already been arrested — travel to a “civil control station,” where they receive identification numbers they must pin to their clothing. After a few months in fly-infested stables converted to bunkhouses, they are herded onto trains that take them to a remote part of Utah. The America the family sees from the window — their country — is exceedingly beautiful, a counterpoint to their grim situation. These scenes also gesture toward something like hope for life beyond their current circumstance. Natural beauty goes on, despite the evil humans do. On the first night of their train journey, the girl spies a herd of wild mustangs: “The sky was lit up by the moon and the dark bodies of the horses were drifting and turning in the moonlight and wherever they went they left behind great billowing clouds of dust as proof of their passage.”
Present, too, are repeated references to religion. The train passes through idyllic towns where “church bells were ringing, and the streets were filled with people in their Sunday clothes walking home from the morning service.” At the camp in Utah, a fellow interned man recites the Salute to the Imperial Palace, in defiance of the prohibition against Shinto practices. Late at night, the woman in the family recites the Lord’s Prayer.
In her 2009 book “Enfleshing Freedom,” the theologian M. Shawn Copeland traces Western Christianity’s entanglement with colonization, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Native genocide and other societal evils that find justification in “compromised Christian thinking about the meaning of human being.” Distortions of Scripture aid and abet these sins against our fellow human beings. In Genesis, after Ham sees Noah naked, Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan — falsely identified by later interpreters as a progenitor of Egyptians and other dark-skinned people: “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” The curse of Ham was used for centuries in defenses of slavery — enslavement, so the argument went, was the lot and inheritance of Black people.
Devaluation of others’ humanity continues to open the door to every sort of violation — including the ressentiment evident in the internment of the Japanese in Otsuka’s novel. Today, we are once again witness to mothers wailing over their children’s dead bodies, bombed hospitals — violence and suffering so vast it is unfathomable. Copeland suggests a remedy for these transgressions through a theology of solidarity, in which we “apprehend and are moved by the suffering of the other, we confront and address its oppressive cause and shoulder the other’s suffering.” This is not mere feel-good sentiment; Copeland is proposing action and rigor. To bear another’s burden demands vigorous intervention, in whatever mode we can manage. To see another’s life as sacred reminds us that our own is too, and requires that we behave with the dignity of creatures whose lives matter.
There is an echo of this idea in Wes’s quiet attempt to repair the rift with his stepson, and, more poetically, in a moonlit herd of mustangs glimpsed by a child on her way to a concentration camp. These little expansions of psyche and spirit stand against what Copeland calls the “destructive deformation of ourselves.”