Internment

“I pretend the world beyond the curtains doesn’t exist. Being in his arms is the only thing that feels real right now.”

Layla is more than a freedom fighter. The novel carefully tracks how Layla, with her courage, her determination, and her faith in the power of activism, is still a teenager and very much in love. Here, she and David enjoy a quiet moment even as the government’s armed security officers are gathering to begin the relocation of Muslim Americans.

“But the lies, the rhetoric, calling refugees rapists and criminals, the fake news, the false statistics, all gave those well-meaning people who say they’re not bigots cover to vote for a man who openly tweeted his hatred of us on nearly a daily basis.”

Internment is a novel of the Trump era that never actually mentions Trump by name. Layla, in criticizing her parents for their lack of outrage over the direction the country is moving, reviews the volatile and dangerous conditions in America, each a familiar talking point from Trump’s campaign and time in office.

“I look at my parents: they’re ghosts, too. The world has shattered, and all that’s left is this alternate universe full of broken people with nothing to hold on to.”

The Amin family, taken at night with ten minutes’ warning and now on their way to what is euphemistically called a relocation camp, reflects on the impact of the treatment, degradation, embarrassment, and anxiety. It is as if they have stepped into an alternate universe. In one night, the Amin family has gone from respected and productive Americans to outcasts guilty only of being Muslim. 

“What’s that thing people always say about history? Unless we know our history, we’re doomed to repeat it? Never forget? Isn’t that the lesson? But we always forget. Forgetting is in the American grain.”

Layla is an astute student of history. She knows the history of the Manzanar camp where Japanese Americans were incarcerated because of their ethnicity, and she knows the story of the college students who led the White Rose movement during Nazi Germany. She will never forget that America imprisoned innocent Japanese Americans, and she will never forget the slaughter of millions of Jews and other scapegoated individuals in Nazi Germany. With these historical observations in mind, Layla is astounded that nevertheless America is poised to make the same mistake.

“It’s something my dad told me once, when I was a district spelling bee. He said that my fear made me more alert. That I could channel my fear into focus.”

Layla, in remembering a spelling bee in which she competed, reveals how her life of normalcy is entirely lost. She applies her father’s coaching advice going into the spelling bee to the reality of how to handle life in the internment camp. She is terrified and unable to sleep the first several nights, but she hopes her fear with give her focus.

“Unity. Security, Prosperity.”

The banner that spans the auditorium where camp orientation takes place recalls the infamous slogan over the gates of the extermination camp at Auschwitz: “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “Work Will Make You Free.” The Camp Mobius slogan is intended to deflect the reality that the Muslims have been interred in a prison camp. The chirpy slogan only exacerbates Layla’s anger and frustration.

“I’m planning on getting out alive. Think about it. There’s never been a wall that people haven’t been able to get by.”

Layla’s brave early assertion defines her resilience and her refusal to surrender hope. While touring the camp grounds and walking the parameter with the electrified fence, hope seems a fantasy. But Layla is already thinking in terms of survival and escape. The fact of the wall, she reasons, only makes her plan, whatever it will be, inevitable and doable.

“You and everyone in here, every guard, every politician, every neighbor who watched us get taken away and said nothing—this nightmare is on you…And I hate you. I hate you so much right now because you can shoot me for no reason at all and no one will a word.”

Layla’s anger directed at Jake Reynolds, who ultimately will prove a critical asset in Layla’s resistance, reveals her frustration. She is not sure to whom she should direct her emotions. Candidates include the neighbors who said nothing, the Muslim guards who are helping the camp administration, and the politicians whose rhetoric gave a false logic to the relocation of Muslims.

“I can hear my father’s voice now, and I repeat the words that come to mind, ‘In the quiet of the night, the heart knows the lies you told to survive.”

Layla’s camp experience hinges on three dramatic moments. In each of these, she is offered a chance to cooperate with the Director in return for better treatment. It reflects on her character that her response each time is no. Her conscience could never view cooperating with the Director as anything but collaborating with evil.

“My God, they were so brave. My heart is in my throat. This is what the Director wants. He wants us to hear the screams. He wants us to know that it could be us screaming.”

For Layla, the pockets of resistance among the camp detainees reflect both nobility and futility. When each of the protesters are dealt with by the camp guards, Layla knows the Director wants the other internees to hear the screams that come from the interrogation rooms to squelch any further resistance. Layla understands, however, that these acts of resistance are futile only when done by isolated individuals; instead, she begins to plan the first mass demonstration of the internees’ solidarity.

“Someone has to make a start, right? I’m scared as anyone else. I’m not a brave person. But I know we need to act before things get worse. This fast—maybe it’s small, but it’s how we start.”

Layla and her co-conspirators are all assigned work in the camp’s sprawling vegetable garden. Using the metaphor of planting seeds one at a time, Layla’s response to Ayesha’s hesitation reveals Layla’s faith in how resistance starts with a single voice willing to stand against tyranny. The logic is simple: resistance cannot commerce until someone is the first to stand up to oppression.

“I want it all to be like it was. I am desperate for a brief moment of Before with David. The minty smell of his soap, the warmth of his arms, how when our fingers intertwine, the brown of my skin and the brown of his are nearly a perfect match.”

Internment is a teenage love story. David, for all his rhetoric and his brave decision to leave his family and put his life on hold to help Layla, is more than a revolutionary. Layla, caught up in planning the camp insurrection, relishes a moment when she remembers in a very human way what loving David means to her.

“It is beautiful here. But that’s on the other side of the fence, unreachable—like our freedom. So close. So far. I wonder if I’ll ever look at mountains or starry night sky the same way once we get out of here.”

Although the heat is unbearable and the desert dust settles into everything, the camp is located in a beautiful stretch of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Layla appreciates the landscape but wonders how much emotional and psychological damage her incarceration will cause. She questions whether the prettiest elements of nature will be lost to her, once she is released?

“Human beings are capable of so many wondrous things, but there’s no limit to the horrible things we do to one another. I shudder.”

For all her education and familiarity with literature and history, Layla is still a youth. Her observation reflects the difficult transition she is making from childhood to adulthood, as she realizes the brutality that people are capable of perpetrating. That involuntary shudder marks Layla’s step into maturity and reflects what the camp has taught her.

“I wish I could make my parents understand, persuade them to speak up, act out…They want to bide their time until one day we are magically released, and the president isn’t some raging fascist. That will be never.”

Layla’s parents test her patience—and her love for them. They appear unwilling to fight the camp administration. Although her mother finds solace in her religion and her father writes about revolution in his poetry, Layla believes their passivity will never close the camp. Layla has left behind her childhood. She does not believe in magic anymore—only resistance. 

“They can kill us while we sit quietly and do nothing as well.”

The most difficult lesson Layla learns is that in the camp there are no laws, no due process, and no fair trials. There is only brute force. The guards can kill without consequences. Within this difficult logic, Layla realizes she might be killed during the demonstration at the main gate, but she could also be killed sitting in the Mess by a guard who would face no consequences. It is better, she decides, to go down fighting.

“A compass doesn’t tell you where you are, and it doesn’t tell you where you have to go. I can only point you in a direction. It’s up to you always find your true north.”

Jake’s explanation of his compass tattoo comes to shape Layla’s emerging resistance to the camp, even as that resistance puts her life more and more at risk. She understands she needs a true north that will direct her. Her goal—to close the camp—determines her every move and decision from this point.

“I’m outside my body, watching the chaos unfold as if I’m not in the middle of it. I fall to my knees, crying. Huge, heaving sobs. I can’t catch my breath. What have I done?”

In leading the protest at the camp’s main gate that turns into a riot, Layla realizes, as every leader of every resistance in history has learned, that those who follow their lead often suffer consequences. Here, as shots ring out and the camp descends into chaos, Layla realizes the impact of resistance. It is more than a slogan or a line from a poem. Resistance has consequences. 

“I dig my heels into the floor and wrap my hands around the Director’s forearms. I feel like he could tear my skin from my skull. He begins wrenching my face, like he’s trying to pull it off my neck.”

The novel does not flinch away from recounting Layla’s brutal interrogation at the hands of an increasingly diabolical Director. The pain and helplessness are real. The panic over what is coming is real. Despite that she is a legal minor and thus protected by the Geneva Convention from such interrogation tactics, Layla feels the pain of the Director’s treatment.

“You know, America is a melting pot. America is a mixed salad. America is a shining city of a hill…But America doesn’t seem like any of those things anymore. Maybe it never was.”

All the cliches Layla has dutifully learned about America and its rich history of diversity now seem like cruel irony. This moment, in which Layla is being led handcuffed and blindfolded to another round of interrogation, reflects her bitterness and represents the low point of her incarceration. She has begun to abandon hope in the fundamental promise of America.

“Give them an Other to hate, and they will do what they are told. And that’s what keeps our nation safe.”

The Director’s snarling speech that he delivers in Layla’s interrogation is a way to break her spirit and show her the futility of resistance. This hate-filled speech—the Director spits as his voice descends into a growl—reveals the false logic of xenophobia. As a commentary on some of America’s ugliest tendencies, which many view as resurgent in the late 2010s and early 2020s, the Director’s diatribe rationalizes hate by arguing that Americans prefer to blame some minority within its diverse population rather than actually address problems.

“I want the whole world to hear us coming. Everyone, go back to your trailers and grab anything you can to make noise. Pots, pans, spoons, whatever. We might not have weapons, but we have our voices. Let’s get loud.”

It is time, Layla decides, to make their voices heard. After surviving interrogation and with her parents now missing, Layla sees the time has come to stand up together against the camp. In a novel that values the individual voice as a powerful weapon in the fight for rights, here the collective voice, amplified by all those spoons pounding on all those pots, creates a powerful metaphor for solidarity. 

“I think of all the people throughout history who found themselves in a place like this, stepping from the shadows, raising their voices. Finding their courage, facing their fears so that they could be free.”

Layla always pursues what is right within a context of humanity’s long history of rebellions against tyranny. Here, she voices the power and the courage of the individual willing to stand up against oppression, whatever the cost. If facing her fears once meant gearing up to compete in a spelling bee, now that courage comes from a far more terrifying fear.