Home of the Brave Reviews
Breaking from such previous works as Tea with Milk and Grandfather's Journey, which featured a realistic sequence of events, Caldecott Medalist Say here enters the realm of dreamor, rather, nightmare. The opening image shows a man dwarfed by an ominous, craggy stone edifice at the edge of a shore, as he prepares to step into his kayak. In the next spread, the man, wearing a red helmet and vest that match his vessel, hurls over a waterfall; the sky resembles billowing black smoke that blends with the rocky cliffs ("The man closed his eyes and held his breath"). Say's use of light and dark has a haunting effect, as the man first surfaces in an underground tunnel with a faint glimmer of sunlight; the light then shifts from horizontal to vertical as it illuminates a ladder. Barren land awaits above, with a single structure: "Must be an Indian reservation, he thought." Two children sit against an adobe ruin with nametags around their necks, explaining they are "from the camp." Details in the meticulously rendered watercolors reveal that the children are referring to an internment camp: a row of abandoned identical wooden houses sit on the desert floor of a valley (and hark back to the deserted Indian reservation); thousands of children with identical tags chant "Take us home!"; searchlights from high watchtowers follow them as they flee. Other details link the hero's fate with theirs, but the final image is uplifting. Much remains enigmatic: most children will require the aid of an older reader to make sense of the historical context, and may be put off by the dark and lonely vistas. However, the images create an internal logic of their own, as emotionally convincing as any waking experience. All ages.
Los Angeles Times
By Duane Noriyuki
I was 36 years old when I learned that my mother played the violin. It surprised me at first, as I had never considered her particularly musical. But now that I look back, I recall watching her dance at ritual of obon in kimono and obi, moving in concise, repetitive steps around and around to the music, tilting her head as her eyes followed the graceful movements of her hands against the nighttime sky.
She mentioned the violin in a discussion of war. I had asked what the most difficult thing was to leave behind when she and her family were forced out of their Yuba City home and imprisoned during World War II. She said it was her violin, and then described how her parents, farm laborers, had paid for it in monthly installments and sold it for almost nothing before stepping onto a bus, then a train and, eventually, the unfamiliar, barren terrain of Camp Amache in southern Colorado.
Even now, whenever I envision her as a young girl, I see her with the violin, and in my mind, I hear a mournful song. I heard it again as I read Allen Say's Home of the Brave.
It wasn't so bad, my mother said of internment, except for the wind and cold, the lingering taste of dust. They lived in a built shack, but the truth was that the house they lived in before the war was not much better. I never understood how such an experience could be not so bad. Perhaps it has to do with my mother's Buddhist faith, which defines the world as a place of suffering.
Shikata ga nai (it cannot be helped). These are my mother's words. It is a familiar phrase to the 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were imprisoned in ten camps built in remote areas of the nation's interior. It is what they said to one another behind barbed wire in harsh winter and ruthless summer, the slow passage of seasons of war.
Shikata ga nai. How could they not say more?
I would not have expected that a book for children would provide a truer meaning of the phrase. Say, the son of a Korean father and Japanese American mother, wrote Home of the Brave after attending a retrospective of his work two years ago at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.
While at the museum, Say, winner of the 1994 Caldecott Medal for Grandfather's Journey, was also entranced by "Common Ground: The Heart of Community," an ongoing exhibition about the history of Japanese Americans, including photos and artifacts from internment camps. "I stared and listened," he writes in the epilogue. "And what I saw and heard turned into yet another personal journey. This is that story."
It begins on the bank of a river. The central character, a man of Japanese ancestry, first listens to the river, then enters it in his kayak, whereupon he is thrust into rapids, then down a waterfall into darkness, stripped of vessel, helmet, paddle, life jacket, all means of controlling destiny.
It is an unlikely beginning to a provocative, dreamlike tale, but Say's storytelling, when at its best, tends to be wonderfully unpredictable, well beyond the narrow realm of adults. In A River Dream (1988), he wrote of a street turning into a river. In The Sign Painter (2000), an amusement park with a towering roller coaster appears like a mirage on an isolated desert butte.
Like those ordered into the camps, the man suddenly has no control over his journey, and Say takes giant leaps from one page to the next. From darkness the man discovers a ladder leading to light and, as he climbs, he reaches a moon-like desert, where he sees two children alone in the distance.
They are two young girls with nametags hanging from the collars of their coats. Say's illustration of the girls is based on a 1942 Dorothea Lange photograph of a Hayward-area family. The black-and-white photograph, capturing lives in turmoil, became one of the defining images of the internment process.
The man leads the girls through a dust storm to the camp, where he discovers traces of his ancestors and more children seeking to return home. The man also encounters Native American children similarly displaced and living on a reservation.
Say's use of darkness in the portrayal of childhood innocence is a poignant interpretation of what children, whatever their culture, must feel when so tiny and scared and far from where they long to be.
Perhaps the most haunting illustration in the book is of a group of interned children, "one large body with many eyes." Each wears a nametag as they stand in front of cold, bare mountains and darkening sky.
The children scatter as watchtower guards order them to disperse and chase them into the darkness with beams of light. The man loses sight of them and returns to the river, where he falls asleep. When he awakens he sees Native American children who have found his kayak. He may leave, but they cannot.
The journey ends prodigiously and poetically as he and the children watch a cloud of internee nametags magically whisk and swirl into the sky like paper birds.
Young readers or listeners will have questions, foremost among them: "Why were the camps created?" "Why were reservations created?" For some, the story may serve as an introduction to social injustice. I have read the book as both father and son. When I read it to my four-year-old daughter, who is named after my mother, she commented on the children.
"They look like me," she said.
I did not address issues of race, the fact that her grandmother was imprisoned in such a camp. We will reach that point later, perhaps when she is old enough to read the letter of apology my mother received from then-President George H. W. Bush in 1990. It was included with a check for $20,000 in restitution.
"We can never fully right the wrongs of the past," Bush wrote. "But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II."
Say delivers the same message, using different words. My mother, too, uses different words.
Shikata ga nai. I have a better understanding now. I hear strength and courage and darkness, a sense of quiet desperation I didn't hear before. The phrase is written in the confused, fearful eyes of lost children, regardless of their culture, in the power of an angry river and the mournful song of a violin. It is written in tears my daughter has not yet cried.
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Duane Noriyuki is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times.
New York Times Book Review
By Jose Padua
Anyone approaching Allen Say's HOME OF THE BRAVE (Walter Lorraine/Houghton Mifflin, all ages) expecting something along the lines of his 1994 Caldecott Medal-winning I will be disappointed. Furthermore, anyone approaching this book knowing that it deals with the subject of internment camps for the Japanese-Americans during World War II may be disappointed to find that it neither explains nor gives any kind of background regarding this dark part of American history.
Beginning with a man kayaking on a river, the story quickly shifts like a dream from this watery landscape to an internment camp, where the man meets imprisoned children who all wear nametags. No explanation is given as to how the children got there. Of course, this lack of context is more likely to disappoint adults than children. And after getting over how different this is from Say's previous work, adults may be reminded somewhat of the films of David Lynch. With its mysterious and rather disjointed story line, Home of the Brave could be the sort of script Lynch would write if he were making a movie for kids.
So while the landscapes may appear somewhat ominous and the story of the interned children wanting to go home may seem a bit frightening, Say's gently evocative paintings and his plain but lyrical writing prevent this work from being too disturbing for school-age readers.
What Say does so successfully here is to show how displaced children feel; how, through some unnamed strength, they manage to survive and find their way home. Although it may be clear to adults that what we're seeing here refers to a historical moment, this book isn't meant to be a history lesson. It's more like a preparation for the history lesson. Not until the end, in the afterword, does Say specifically mention the internment camps. The story's real focus is not so much the re-examination of America's historical past a past we become a part of through Allen Say's intense dreamscape.