Hughes’s ingenious use of the time-travel device allows her to include several plot twists which refreshes the camp narrative for those who know it well. (Readers of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred will recognize this form of time travel, rooted in traumatic history, and Hughes pays tribute to Butler in her notes at the end of the book.) Some of the physical and psychological scars from camp have an impact on the main character, and it’s not until she tells her mother about her travels that the reason for these temporal displacements becomes clear. After returning to Seattle, she experiences several such “displacements” until she’s trapped in the past for almost a year.
The next day, she experiences another temporal displacement and goes through eviction with other Japanese Americans before coming back to the present. Displacement brings together several current conversations in camp history: intergenerational trauma, the relevance of camp history for present-day history, tracing genealogy, the tradition of resistance to incarceration, and Japanese American queer history.Īs a loosely autobiographical book, the main character “Kiku” is visiting San Francisco’s Japantown on a trip from Seattle when she’s pulled back into a scene from her grandmother’s past. But even for readers versed in this history, Kiku Hughes’s Displacement is a powerful innovation in camp literature and Japanese American literature overall. A time-travel graphic novel about intergenerational Japanese American camp history is a surprise.
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