THE POVERTY OF OUR ACTUAL CONDITION: NOGUCHI AND POSTON by Matthew Shen Goodman

THE POVERTY OF OUR ACTUAL CONDITION: NOGUCHI AND POSTON

MATTHEW SHEN GOODMAN

December 7, 1941 — Listening to NBC News on the car radio while driving south from Los Angeles to San Diego in search of onyx for a sculpture, Isamu Noguchi heard Upton Close announce that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Born to a white American mother and a Japanese father who returned to Japan when Noguchi was a toddler, Noguchi was, by his own account, abruptly racialized at age 37. “With a flash I realized I was no longer the sculptor alone,” Noguchi writes in his autobiography. “I was not just American but Nisei. A Japanese-American.”

The shocked sculptor, who had earlier worked with Brâncuși in Paris and was experiencing some success (most notably with the previous year’s News, Noguchi’s Rockefeller Center bas-relief of various heroically posed newsmen), joined the Japanese American Citizens League after the hearing the announcement, in hopes of convincing the country that Japanese Americans were loyal citizens. Finding the JACL too timid, he organized his own group, the Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy. (He later held that organization to also be of little worth: “The Nisei don’t want to have anything to do with liberals. They say, ‘Keep away! Leave us alone!’”) The NWAMD drafted a “Plan for Government Sponsored Farm and Craft Settlement for People of Japanese Parentage.” The group proposed voluntary evacuation for Japanese immigrants and citizens (Issei and Nisei) to small settlements where evacuees would participate in New Deal–style industrial and agricultural work. While the plan did not circulate widely in Washington until March, it preceded in its conception the February 19 Executive Order 9066, which allowed the Secretary of War to create military zones from which any person could be “excluded.” The NWAMD framed the evacuation as fostering “good will” via the production of goods as one’s “patriotic duty”: “as a citizen, it becomes incumbent on the Nisei to consent to evacuation as a measure of his patriotism.” (The plan reads strangely to current sensibilities; it is hard to imagine a contemporary group of ostensibly left-leaning people of color proposing “voluntary evacuation” in order to convince white America of their commitment to democracy.)

On March 18, Roosevelt signed the War Relocation Authority into existence with Executive Order 9102. The WRA immediately began to issue civilian exclusion orders. In the coming months some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, including those with as little as 1/16th Japanese heritage, were made to leave their homes and report to assembly centers, to be processed and relocated in what the WRA itself framed as “pioneer” communities. “Within these areas,” a WRA-produced circular stated, “you will have an opportunity to build new communities where you may live, work, worship, and educate your children.”

Worried about being interned, Noguchi flew back to the East Coast that March. He then seemed to change his mind, deciding to go west to join the internees, enlisting John Collier, head of the Office of Indian Affairs, in his efforts. With the help of Collier, Noguchi obtained a letter from the WRA office in Washington, DC, stating that the sculptor was traveling “to aid in the development of a handicraft project among Japanese evacuees.” The letter identified Noguchi as not an evacuee from a military area and therefore not needing any special permit. Noguchi arrived at the Poston War Relocation Center in southwestern Arizona on May 8, shortly before evacuees were relocated. Getting there early allowed Noguchi to make somewhat short-lived friendships with the administrators. These alliances didn’t survive, dissipating with the arrival of the rest of the internees and the start of camp life in Poston.

Life in the camp was not as Noguchi hoped. Lacking both equipment and skilled personnel, his plan to begin a handicraft program failed, leaving the sculptor feeling superfluous. He gave the WRA office an ultimatum: if they didn’t help him with his projects, he’d ask for his release. In the meantime, Noguchi was prevented from seeing a show of his own work at the San Francisco Museum of Art, which was put together by the museum’s director Grace Morley in part to counter the demonization of Japanese Americans. Reviewing the exhibition in the Pacific Citizen, Larry Tajiri wrote of Noguchi’s embodiment of the ideals of true democracy, “the mixing of cultures and races that was anathema to the Axis powers.” Both Noguchi himself and his art were that “synthesis of culture and race that he believes must eventually come to America.”

In spite of the idealism Tajiri saw, Noguchi was attempting to get out of Poston, applying for leave in August under a new “mixed blood” clause allowing for those in racially mixed marriages and children thereof to ask for release. He remained trapped in Poston until mid-November, needing the intervention of the internment camp’s director Wade Head. “I have every expectation of coming back here in a month,” Noguchi told the camp’s newspaper, “unless some unforeseen development keeps me out.” Though the camps remained open another three years, he never returned.

Self-Interned, 1942: Noguchi in Poston War Relocation Center opened last January at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City in New York. Open until January 2018, the show displays some two dozen works from Noguchi’s time before, during, and after Poston — though all marked in some way by Noguchi’s time in the camp. The Poston-antecedent works include a bust of theater actress Lily Zeitz (actually finished by Noguchi in the camp, the piece was one of numerous such busts of celebrities Noguchi had undertaken to make money in the decades prior the war), and a 1937 frieze maquette that had been detained in transit from Hawaii to San Francisco, where it was to be shown at the 1942 exhibition. (“Writing to the shipping agent and the War Relocation Authority’s Division of Evacuee Property while interned at Poston, Noguchi learned firsthand about the loss of internees’ rights as citizens,” Self-Interned states. It pales in comparison, of course, the wholesale loss of property by his fellow internees, who, as Hayden Herrera writes in the Noguchi biography Listening to Stone, saw the sculptor “as a famous artist from Manhattan and did not feel at ease with him.”) Absent from the show is any evidence of Noguchi’s socially minded projects from the ’30s that might contextualize his work with the NWAMD and his choice to go to Poston. Much of the work from those years exhibits a combination of New Deal liberalism and Deweyian philosophy; this is especially evident in the 1933 Monument to the Plow, a Jeffersonian proto-earthwork consisting of a pyramidal mound of dirt — one side fallow, another plowed, the third planted — proposed to the Public Works of Art Project. We also don’t see evidence of Noguchi’s labor affiliations, whether with the Artists’ Union or, in another proposed monument, a memorial for hosiery workers to be built in front of Philadelphia’s Carl Mackley Houses, the first federally funded housing project in the United States.

The objects produced during the sculptor’s time in Poston testify to the hampered quality of Noguchi’s time there. With little by way of sculptural materials, Noguchi was forced to work primarily with wood. His curved carvings are on view in the exhibition, less works in themselves than precursory elements to the multifaceted, mobile-like pieces he would make later on. In addition, the exhibition presents plans for a recreational park and a cemetery for Poston, both unbuilt during his time in the camp.

The works made upon Noguchi’s return to New York bear the marks of his internment. Reminiscent of topographical models, wall-hanging squares bear titles like My Arizona and This Tortured Earth, the latter featuring tears and rips in its undulating surface. Categorized as either “Gateways” or “Deserts,” the rest of the exhibition attempts to find Poston’s traces in Noguchi’s later career. Rough-hewn slabs of rocks evoke the colors of Arizona’s wilds, while portal-like objects are meant, according to Self-Interned, to represent a bridge between an alien landscape and something more closely approximating home. “That was how he turned the potential liability of his bi-culturalism and innately peripatetic existence into an asset: by fashioning himself as a citizen of the world,” the wall text reads, echoing Tajiri’s words some decades later.

Yellowing, type-written documents from the museum’s archives related to Noguchi’s internment are on view: the back and forth over the seized maquette; a memorandum from the San Francisco Museum of Art on the occasion of Noguchi’s exhibition; a letter from Shoji Fujii, editor and publisher of the progressive Japanese American weekly Doho (“some predicaments you face with no doubt, but whataheckthematter, isamu ol’ boy? Now that you are in, I guess we’d better

ISAMU NOGUCHI, UNTITLED, 1943, WOOD, STRING. 23 1/4 X 5 3/8 X 3 1/2 INCHES ©THE ISAMU NOGUCHI FOUNDATION AND GARDEN MUSEUM, NEW YORK / ARS. PHOTO BY KEVIN NOBLE.

plan accordingly”); and letters from Noguchi himself, including one to Man Ray sent only a few weeks after his arrival. “I’m all right,” Noguchi writes. “Tis is the wierdest [sic], most unreal situation — like in a dream — I wish I were out. Outside, it seems from the inside, history is taking fight and passes forever. Here time has stopped and nothing is of any consequence, nothing of any value, neither our time or our skill.”

A corner of Self-Interned has been set up as a reading room, with a number of history books on the internment camps available for perusing. Visitors can take pamphlets of “I Become a Nisei,” Noguchi’s unpublished May 1942 essay. Solicited by DeWitt Wallace for Reader’s Digest, the article was perhaps an attempted atonement for “Japanese Saboteurs in Our Midst,” a fear-mongering screed published a month after the Pearl Harbor bombings (that article remains unpublished in any of the subsequent printings of the January 1942 issue). Noguchi knew that the Reader’s Digest audience expected something patriotic and inspirational, and was probably wondering why Noguchi, “a Eurasian sculptor from New York,” would go to Arizona to join the evacuated Japanese. “I reply that because of my peculiar background I felt this war very keenly and wished to serve the cause of democracy in the best way that seemed open to me,” he writes. “Relocation ofered a presage of inevitable social change in which I wished to take part.” He makes clear the misery of Poston, the 120 degree afternoons, and the winds of burning dust; the 37-cents-a-day rations, prepared by inexperienced cooks. “We have moments of elation only to be defeated by the poverty of our actual condition; the lack of water and equipment for farming, of tools and materials, our barrack surroundings. Sixteen dollars a month seems hardly an incentive to some.”

Noguchi hardly shakes his unsettlement throughout the essay. Aware of the legal and material stakes of being Japanese (it is difcult to believe he felt Japanese at all for the frst time on that car ride — one wagers he felt threatened in a diferent, near ontological manner), Noguchi describes his arrival as being in part to commune with those he now felt close to, and in part to help the Japanese interned live a sort of model minority life of democratic citizenship. “A haunting sense of unreality, of not quite belonging, which has always bothered me made me seek for an answer among the Nisei.” Tey did not respond in kind, Noguchi feeling alienated as he had two years before, when he claims he frst heard the word Nisei in Hawaii. “I met many of them on the Islands, young architects’ assistants who feted and dined me. Tey looked upon me as one from the outside who had surmounted barriers which they felt closed advancement against them.” It didn’t help that the white faces of the camp also abandoned him, those administrators he’d befriended upon arrival abruptly having become “our keepers whose word was our law […] Along with my freedom I seemed to have lost any possibility of equal friendship. I became embarrassed in their presence.” A state of transitory alienation was pervasive in Poston, Noguchi ascribing a similar ailment to his own to the Nisei at large. “I begin to see the peculiar tragedy of the Nisei as that of a generation of transition accepted neither by the Japanese nor by America.”

Conceivably conceding to the audience of Reader’s Digest, the sculptor remains conficted yet upbeat about the internment camps themselves. He describes “a duality of purpose in the relocation program,” seen either as “a land and community development which may lay the basis for social engineering in the handling of oriental peoples for reconstruction and education to a more democratic way of life,” or “a travesty of democracy which at best leads to paternalism.” Te essay is bookended by two interwoven assertions: that the reintegration of the Nisei, “a middle people with no middle ground,” should come from their acquisition of handicraft skills, which will provide them with the employable traits necessary for their return into public life; and that their hybridity — but maybe more so Noguchi’s — is the teleology of the United States. “To be hybrid anticipates the future. Tis is America, the nation of all nationalities. Te racial and cultural intermixture is the antithesis of all the tenet[s] of the Axis Powers. For us to fall into the Fascist line of race bigotry is to defeat our unique personality and strength.”

Donald Trump was inaugurated a day after Self-Interned opened. He had said two years prior that he didn’t know whether he would have supported or opposed the internment camps, playing up the contingency of history — “I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer” — and quickly veering into abstracted talk of the difculty of winning. A week after the election the spokesman for a pro-Trump super PAC cited the internment camps as legal precedent for an immigrant registry many obviously feared would target Muslims. A week into his presidency, Trump signed Executive Order 13769, which restricted travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries. (Defending the widely protested ban in the Ninth Circuit Court in this past May, Acting Solicitor General Jefrey

ISAMU NOGUCHI, POSTON PARK AND RECREATION AREAS AT POSTON, AZ, 1942, BLUEPRINT, 42 3/8 X 88 INCHES

Wall declared the case “is not Korematsu,” referring to the Supreme Court decision upholding Executive Order 9066, which, despite being almost universally reviled, has yet to be officially overturned.)

Given the circumstances, the exhibition has been understandably lauded. For those perturbed by the country’s state of affairs, it felt timely, prescient, Noguchi’s declaration of a hybrid America described as a sort of rallying cry by the Times. On February 19, the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, I attended Bend, a performance by Kimi Maeda about her art professor father who had been interned in Poston with Noguchi. I found myself crying, sitting cross-legged on the floor for lack of room, before the lights had begun to dim.

That manner of solace seemed and still seems useful. Certainly harmless: Liberal viewers did not suddenly begin suggesting that Muslim Americans register themselves in order to demonstrate their patriotism. But what a moment might harbor does not necessarily last. In rereading “I Become a Nisei,” some months after the initial shock of the election has dissipated, I find that a sort of wavering disgust hovers over everything. There is something embarrassing about it, to me, as a mixed-race individual. The specifics-bereft nature of the language we used and still use to praise multiraciality rings hollow, from those vague pronouncements of bland anti-racist goodwill (as if the commonwealth of democratic humanism was foretold in your discernibly hybrid phenotype), to those self-affirming bills of rights for multiracial people that provide celebratory choices — you can determine your identity! — but no demands. I wonder what it means to claim hybridity as the future in a nation culturally and legally structured by hypodescent, and whose anti-miscegenation laws provided the legal model for German fascists. I imagine “hybridity” as an empty category, often meant to imply something very specific and still very white, often vaguely east Asian — Keanus and Isamus abounding. It certainly feels strange to consider a return to the peak Obama-era headrush into a post-racial utopia — venerating “The New Face of America,” Time magazine–style, with appropriated terms like “hapa” — when the political mood of a sizable part of this country now seems to align more closely with that of Santa Barbara mass shooter Elliot Rodger, who was half white, half Malaysian Chinese. Roger’s murderous misogyny seemed inseparable from his unending white supremacist calculus. (Bemoaning his lack of a sex life, Rodger fumed impotently in his manifesto: “I am beautiful, and I am half white myself.”) Noguchi’s message here might fall short because of its resonance with the glistening corporate image of multiracial bliss preferred by the centrists who lost to the man so feted by the white supremacists in Charlottesville. Certainly, Americans could procreate among themselves until their descendants become some universal beige. We could put a person of each and every color at the head of Berkshire Hathaway and Exxon, the NYPD and ICE, and each of the armed services. That could, despite Trump, yet be the American telos, our hybrid future — while still being, as Noguchi described the camps, a travesty of democracy, at best a paternalism, at worst something differently hellish.

HILMA AF KLINT, BUDDHA’S STANDPOINT IN THE EARTHLY LIFE, NO. 3A, 1920, COURTESY HAMBURGER BAHNHOF.