Lawson Fusao Inada's The Legend Of Groucho

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WWII history classes in the U.S. are driven by a moral narrative that we had to stop the immoral Germans from wiping out a group of people based on their ethnicity. While proclaiming that we were the good guys in WWII, the fact that our president Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the relocation of Japanese Americans to concentration camps is never mentioned. It’s an inconvenient truth that ruins the moral narrative used to teach WWII. Orders were posted in the communities on how to comply with the Executive Order from FDR and hundreds of thousands of businesses,homes, and other property were sold at an outrageously low cost due to the increased supply on market. These American citizens were unjustly imprisoned to prevent possible spying and espionage. And their crime? They were Japanese in the U.S. after Pearl Harbor. The conditions at these camps were never as bad as the Nazi death camps, but it’s still a black eye on our country’s history. Like any prison, the prisoners try to find ways to escape the mundane. They try to grasp something extraordinary: it could be exaggerating everyday details…show more content…
With these attributes, it’s no surprise that he’s a “doggone best natural-born comedian” (Inada 310). With “broken English and the gimpy leg” Groucho is the last person one would expect to bring “joy out in people”,who are in internment camps. The usual interpretations of the poem aside, there’s something special about the story of Groucho. Could it be an exploration of the human condition? The people find joy in making fun of a fellow Japanese prisoner, and their fellow citizens are imprisoning them. Could the narrator be self-aware of the absurdity of the situation so that it fits with the legend theme of the poem? It’s

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