Being Ruth Asawa
by
Anne Whitehouse
Anne Whitehouse’s poetry collections include Steady, Outside from the Inside, Meteor Shower, The Refrain, Blessings and Curses and The Surveyor’s Hand. She is the author of a novel, Fall Love. Being Ruth Asawa is Anne’s fourth chapbook published by Ethel Zine & Micro Press, following Surrealist Muse, about Leonora Carrington; Escaping Lee Miller; and Frida.
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from Being Ruth Asawa
Soon, with thousands of others,
we were assigned to a detention camp
in Santa Anita. We lost almost everything
we owned. We lived in the stables
of a converted racetrack
surrounded by barbed wire.
Hair from the horses’ manes and tails
stuck between cracks in the walls.
In the summer heat, the smell
of horses was overpowering.
The excuse for separating us
from our homes and livelihoods
was that the U.S. was at war with Japan
where our parents were from.
Yet there was no similar removal
of Italian or German Americans.
In the camp, I noticed three men
who liked to sit together high
in the grandstand of the racetrack,
balancing sketchpads on their knees,
drawing pictures with pieces of charcoal.
They didn’t seem to mind the dust
that blew up from the track, or the sun,
or if I sat with them. They encouraged me.
That was how I learned I was an artist, too.
They were my teachers—
Tom Okamoto, Chris Ishii, James Tanaka—
Disney artists who’d drawn Pinocchio,
Fantasia, Dumbo, Donald Duck,
and Mickey Mouse—now suspected
of being “enemies of the people.”
Yet I saw how when they worked,
worry fled. In the midst of hardship,
their concentration made a peaceful space
where something unexpected
and beautiful might happen.
Wire selected me,
not the other way around.
We had it on the farm,
and even as a child
I noticed how useful it is
and how transparent a barrier.
Wire starts out as a line,
a boundary between two places,
inside and outside, left and right,
But wire can also be transformed
into a three-dimensional object.
