If Only
(This is a poem I wrote when I went for the Manzanar Pilgrimage as part of my class in Theology of Asian American Churches. Manzanar, California is one of the 11 Japanese Incarceration/Concentration camps in the US during WW II. More than 120,000 Japanese Americans and persons of Japanese ancestry were sent to these camps as a result of race prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership and not because of military necessity as claimed by the Roosevelt Government that time.
Knowing this part of Japanese American History gave me a new lens of looking at things, especially on how we, Filipinos perceived the Japanese as a result of the Japanese conquest and oppression of our countrymen during the war.)
If Only
If only I could have a good paying job back home.
I never had to leave my beloved country.
If only I had found a buried treasure.
A better life I would have lived.
Or what if I became WHITE?
Would it make any difference?
Would I have the better life I longed for?
And not to be oppressed anymore?
If only racism and oppression be set aside.
Would my ancestors, native, or indigenous people,
Ever been called uncivilized, savage,
And Barbarian?
If people learns to acknowledge their guilt, their fault.
Would dialogue be possible?
If people learns to forgive and relinquish.
Would the process of reconciliation start?
If God made us equal.
Why do people suffer because of their color?
Does color ever matters?
Do people ever learn?
If only Manzanar’s story and other silent stories will be known everywhere.
Would it change history?
Does it make any significant difference?
Would there be change?
Manzanar…………Acknowledge……..
Relinquish…………Forgive………….
Learn………………Never Again!
If only these words were imprinted in our hearts
IF ONLY………….
