Welcome to the first Weekend Picks for February!
 Roy Jackson | This month, we welcome back contributor Roy Jackson from Goshen College. He once again provides wonderful, timely YA recommendations to keep our TBR lists filled during these winter months. Our many thanks to professor Jackson for his commitment to our YA community! Roy Jackson is a writer and educator whose scholarship and prose have appeared in various outlets. He holds degrees in English and Education, including an MFA from Youngstown State University. He is currently an assistant professor of education at Goshen College. |
Internment by Samira Ahmed
I often use Rudine Sims Bishop’s theory of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors in my teaching and writing about literature for adolescents, young and new adults. Bishop proposed the idea that literature offers readers tools for interpreting experience, recognizing patterns in human behavior, and imagining alternatives to the world as it is (Bishop, 1990). I almost always pivot myself to the imagining of a better world, a better way of living, a peaceful existence. In uncertain times, I crave comfort and resolution. I now realize this is often a naïve thought and one our students may not need. While I can hope for positive outcomes after living through uncertain times, I know all too well, as a queer American, that this is not always the case. No law is ever settled, no progress follows a steady or inevitable upward trajectory, and progress itself is messy and unstable, often marked by backward steps.
 Samira Ahmed | As I searched for books this month, I thought it wise to seek out literature to help our young readers make sense of our current time, particularly a month when we often highlight civil disobedience and the power of protest. I found a powerful novel that profoundly impacted me. Samira Ahmed’s (2019) Internment is exactly what Sims Bishop was referring to when offering the thought that literature can offer alternatives to the world as it is. However, Internment’s power comes from not imagining an America where the uncertainty we live in resolves and makes the country a better place. Instead, the novel not only allows students a window and sliding door into the aspects of marginalization based on race and religion in an ever-changing country, but it also presents a cautionary tale of just how much worse it can get when each week seems worse than the one before. Books like Internment complicates the theory of mirrors, windows, and sliding doors by asking what happens when texts function as warnings rather than an aspirational alternative, when literature acts as alarm, not refuge. |
Internment is a young adult dystopian novel by Samira Ahmed set in a near future United States where Islamophobia and authoritarian politics have led to the forced internment of Muslim Americans in detention camps. The story follows seventeen-year-old Layla Amin, who is imprisoned with her parents and must navigate a world defined by surveillance, armed guards, and the systematic erosion of civil rights and selected, forced media. While her parents focus on survival through compliance, Layla becomes increasingly aware of the moral and political implications of silence as she witnesses abuse, medical neglect, and collective punishment inside the camp. Through relationships with other detainees, including the outspoken activist Ayesha, and with David, the son of a camp guard who begins to question the system he serves, Layla develops a deeper understanding of power, complicity, and resistance. As conditions worsen, she helps organize acts of protest that grow from symbolic gestures into collective action, drawing public attention to the camps and exposing the fragility of democratic ideals. The novel examines how young people make sense of the world around them under conditions of state-sanctioned injustice and how solidarity and courage can challenge systems built on fear. Most students have multiple experiences with dystopian YA. What is so powerful about this genre is that it resists the myth of democratic inevitability, instead helps us see the civic fragility, rather than hope-driven futurism. Our students understand that the world is not universally democratic and to imagine a US where it is lost brings power to the classroom conversation.
| As young readers seek understanding of the uncertain times we live in, literature can offer educators a mode of discussion and exploration. Internment’s initial power lies in the connections to WWII both abroad and domestically. Classroom discussions and studies could easily veer to WWII. Not just on the Holocaust, but also the US Japanese internment camps are clear connections that come to light. But the list of US internment does not begin and end with the Japanese internment camps. Parallels to the mass confinement of Indigenous peoples of this land, the enslavement of Africans as slaves, mass detention of Chinese immigrants at the turn of the 20thcentury, the so-called war on drugs that targeted and led to the mass incarceration of people of color, and the current rise in ICE detainments illustrate that internment and systemic oppression exist in our past and present. |  |
Internment doesn’t seek to offer a nice solution tied in a bow; instead, Ahmed offers students a cautionary tale that must be addressed in our current times. The students are already thinking about it, fearing it, and wondering about it. Others may be misled into thinking the oppressing forces are right in what they are doing, and Internment gives a window into the world we cannot see in detention facilities. We witness the rounding up of our neighbors, yet we do not see what happens after they are taken, what the loss of freedom and due process does to those who are mass-incarcerated. The book challenges those of us privileged enough not to fear internment to consider how we will respond: will we witness and challenge this injustice, or sit idly on the sidelines? I wonder what this looks like in the classroom. As the educator, the responsibility here may be the facilitator of discomfort, historical connector, or the ethical guide. In the end, most likely all three.
I couldn’t put this book down. It is a page turner for a variety of reasons. The pacing of the writing is exciting, the characters are relatable, and the visceral reaction is gut punching. But more than that, it is the perfect time to read in our current national circumstances. For those living in fear, it offers a mirror of representation; for those seeking a deeper understanding of their own fears and how to act as allies, it provides a window; and for those unfamiliar with the experiences of the marginalized, the sliding door is wide open.
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