Satsuki Ina Presents Her Memoir: The Poet and The Silk Girl

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Author Reading with Satsuki Ina

In 1941 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 and invoked the 1798 Enemy Aliens Act, and 125,000 people of Japanese descent, including newlyweds and American citizens Itaru and Shizuko Ina, were forcibly removed and incarcerated in remote concentration camps for years, without charges, trial or due process.

Many of their homes, property and businesses were stolen by their white neighbors, and never returned. These fundamental violations of basic rights and US constitutional rights were a consequence of war time patriotism and racism and intended by the government to intensify that hysteria – to unite the country behind racism and patriotism against “the enemy”.

Satsuki Ina was born to Itaru and Shizuko during their imprisonment. She is a psychotherapist and an activist and weaves their story together in this moving mosaic through diary entries, photographs, clandestine letters, and heart-wrenching haiku. She reveals how this intrepid young couple navigated life,love, loss, and loyalty tests in the welter of World War II-era hysteria.

From Heyday, the publisher:

“The Poet and the Silk Girl illustrates through one family’s saga the generational struggle of Japanese Americans who resisted racist oppression, fought for the restoration of their rights, and clung to their full humanity in the face of adversity.

“With psychological insight, Ina excavates the unmentionable, recovering a chronicle of resilience amid some of the severest blows to American civil liberties. As she traces the legacies of trauma, she connects her family’s ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Lyrical and gripping, this cautionary tale implores us to prevent the repetition of atrocity, pairing healing and protest with galvanizing power.”

In this time when Trump MAGA fascism is incarcerating and deporting immigrants to hell hole prisons without due process, along with a furious onslaught of other fascist measures, when the government is declaring it is acting under the authority of very same Enemy Aliens Act which was used against the Japanese in World War II and has not been used since,

Revolution Books is proud to host Satsuki Ina and we invite everyone to come, listen and engage on these crucial questions.

NEVER AGAIN IS NOW!
Order the book at https://revolutionbooks.org/book/9781597146265

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