Games Without Frontiers: Manzanar Revisited

1.

The full-length, outdoor basketball court at Manzanar, the former concentration camp where thousands of Japanese Americans were imprisoned for much of World War II, is still there. The backboards are painted white wood, and the cloth nets have been well maintained by the employees who oversee its present-day status as a National Historic Site. Well-placed rocks function as the sidelines and baselines, and the surrounding view—the Sierra Nevada Mountains in one direction and the Inyo Mountains in the other—are as breathtaking as one will find anywhere in the United States. On the afternoon when I visit, the handful of clouds in the sky look like the silhouetted dancers in Matisse’s late-period jazz collages, their bodies holding a variety of poses.

I walk the court a few times and take several photographs of it from different angles. It’s a weekday, so there aren’t many other visitors around. I imagine what it must have been like to be a kid playing on this court three quarters of a century ago, the barbed wire fences that stretch in every direction an omnipresent reminder of their indefinite imprisonment. The entire scene is proof of what happens when a country allows its worst impulses—groupthink, paranoia, cruelty—to function as federal policy.

I wonder how often some little boy or girl, seven, eight, maybe nine years old, found themselves dreaming that they were capable of leaping high enough to not only dunk a basketball, but to be able to transcend the fences beyond and not come down until they’d reached a place where their playgrounds didn’t function as outdoor jails. A lot of them, probably.

A happier spin on this might be that people can find ways to experience joy no matter their circumstances, so therefore this basketball court serves as proof that the United States, despite its desires to do just that, was incapable of breaking the spirit of the individuals interned here. But it’s an absurd thing to think, let alone write, because a thought like that lessens the horrors that the very existence of a place like this represents.

Instead I’ll just say that there’s nothing more sacred in this world than children at play, and the fact that the kids who spent a portion of their childhoods here had to do so while surrounded by armed servicemen is the kind of moral disgrace that should make every American pause the next time they’re about to praise the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

2.

In the California State University, Dominguez Hills Special Collections online archive, there is a black-and-white photograph of six women—perhaps as young as their teens or as old as their late twenties—playing a game of three-on-three basketball. They are wearing long pants and blouses, and two of the women are tussling for position under the basket. The barracks are in the background, there is a touch of snow on the highest peaks of the mountains, and in the foreground, we see the back of a woman—perhaps she’s a coach?—watching the game from the sidelines.

All six of the players faces are gazing up at the ball, which—it’s impossible to tell from the image—is either making its way towards the basket or has just caromed off the rim. Either way, every basketball player knows the looks on these players’ faces: that mixture of suspense, wonder, anticipation, and possibility, where no one outside of the gods themselves has any idea what is about to happen.

Every time I see this image I find myself wishing this game had taken place somewhere other than where it does. Given that so many of the individuals sent to Manzanar were from the Bay Area, I often picture these women playing at the courts at Buena Vista Park instead, which is located in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. It’s a silly flight of fancy, I know, but I can’t help it, especially considering the Haight has long represented a set of values entirely in opposition to the ones that led to the construction of the internment camps. And while the view from Buena Vista may not be quite as naturally breathtaking as the one at Manzanar, the Victorian houses are a significant upgrade from those military-issued barracks, and there’s zero barbed wire in sight.

3.

Speaking of which, the entire era was one where the country put barbed wire—sometimes literal, others metaphorical—around its spaces of play. Jackie Robinson wouldn’t break Major League Baseball’s color barrier until 1947, which meant that, while the women in this photograph were playing three-on-three, the big leagues were still being run by Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who fervently upheld segregation in baseball until his death in 1944 with the unanimous support of the league’s owners.

In the National Basketball Association, an equally rigid color line held as well. It also wasn’t until 1947 that the first non-white individual entered the NBA: Japanese-American Walt Misaka, a former star point guard for the University of Utah and a veteran who served two years in the United States Army during World War II, who played three games for the New York Knicks before being waived.

Therefore, the content of this photograph—six Americans absurdly deemed by those in power to not be American enough, and therefore a threat to state stability—is hardly an aberration. The majority of our country’s history has been defined by similar actions going all the way back to the Salem Witch Trials and the slave trade and is thus a reminder of how vast the gulf typically is between our ideals and actions. And while it is true that only a few years after this image courageous individuals like Robinson and Misaka would erase the color line in sports once and for all, it’s equally true that Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee were around the proverbial corner, as was the Hollywood Blacklist, as was President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450—otherwise known as the “Lavender Scare”—where thousands of federal employees were forced to resign because of suspicions surrounding their sexuality.

4.

A few years ago, I had just finished playing beach volleyball with some friends a mile or so south of the Huntington Beach Pier. It was early summer, so although it was nearing 7 p.m. it was plenty light out. Light enough, in this case, for a team of high school girls, along with a trio of coaches standing on the sidelines, to scrimmage at the local half-court.

A handful of us stopped to watch them play for a couple of minutes. The players were good, with two of them in particular with range out to twenty-five feet. Because of the time of year, and because it was the boardwalk, the atmosphere surrounding the game was nearly as entertaining as the game itself: men on beach cruisers rode past, often with their dogs sitting in baskets that had been mounted on the handlebars; women in bikinis glided by on roller-skates; families from out of town, most of them with varying shades of sunburn, walked back to the parking lots; a local Bible-thumper passed out pamphlets that included a detailed map of Heaven’s exact location in the cosmos; several surfers, after hours spent in the water, carried their boards above their heads with an ease I’ve always found remarkable. And beyond all of that, of course, was a view of the ocean itself, whose waves rose and fell beneath a sky that had touches of blue, lavender, gold, and pink.

There was no barbed wire.

            No armed guards.

            No military vehicles, no cops, no posted loyalty oaths.

The perfect environment, in other words, for a group of young women to play the greatest game that the world has ever known.

Kareem Tayyar’s most recent collection, Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2022, and his work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. His poem, “Two Poets,” received the 2022 Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, and his novel The Prince of Orange County received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Prize for Young Adult Fiction.