This paper addresses physiological responses to psychological trauma. It argues that the narratorâs experience in a World War II internment camp disrupts not only her mental processes and her ability to narrate traumatic events but that it interrupts her physical aging process (the body's narrative) as well. Sakamoto's novel demonstrates that internalized racism can reveal itself externally on the body. Traumatized individuals in the novel come to understand themselves as figures of abjection at community and national levels as the polity attempts to expel those whom it sees as harmful to the social body.
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