Poem Analysis Of The Poem Internment By Juliet S Konio

During world war ||, after the pearl harbor attack, the U.S. took about 120,000 Japanese people into internment camps because they believed that anyone of them could be a spy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which allowed the military to circumvent the constitutional safeguard of American citizens in the name of the national defense. These camps were not a place of leisure, but were a place of imprisonment. After being in the camps for about four years, some families never found eachother again due to death or they didn’t have enough resources to locate them again and some were brought back together many years after being released. In the poem “internment” by Juliet S Kono the author uses diction, irony, and simile to show h that even in the darkest

A simile inputs vividness into what we say. In lines 18-21 it says “on the double row of barbed wire fencing which holds them in like stolid cattle.” The author feels as if they are no longer part of the world or considered human because outside the fence the world continued on without them. She is explaining how they were captured and were moved by force. When some of the internees were released they had no home to go back to. “Corralled, they are herded inland,” this first line of the poem helps support and hint the simile that would be coming up later on in the poem. It shows how they can relate to cows because they are being controlled by people. The presence of armed military police guards presented dangerous situations and confrontations between the internee population and guards. Soldiers had great power over the internees, one wrong movement or phrase could be the end of the internee’s’ life. Some guards would claim that the internee was trying to escape after shooting them, but they were simply most trying to complete a different task that the guards asked