Desert Exile

Uchida deploys various landscape descriptions that characterize and enrich the world presented in Desert Exile. As Uchida traces her life from Berkeley to Tanforan to Topaz, the landscape shifts from lush, beautiful, and filled with flowers and gardens to a cracked and barren desert caked in dust.

The Uchidas pass “Nevada sage brush country” (105), and “small farms, cultivated fields, and clusters of trees” (107), until the bus turns “into the heart of the sun-drenched desert and there in the midst of nowhere were rows and rows of squat, tar-papered barracks sitting sullenly in white, chalky, sand. This was Topaz” (107). There are no trees, only “skeletal greasewood” (107).

This shift in setting can be seen as symbolic of the emotional state of the Uchidas and other interned Japanese Americans. Uchida’s life was very much bustling before Pearl Harbor but becomes more barren while interned. 

Flowers appear as a classic motif of hope and regrowth throughout Desert Exile. Uchida also relies on language, using the word “uprooted,” which a reader connects with the motif of flowers torn from the earth. In spring 1942, when the government announces Japanese Americans must report to relocation centers, Mrs. Uchida’s home garden is ripped to pieces.