Some encounters stay with you.
We had the pleasure of meeting Suzanne Hartmann at Columbus Center, standing before The Dance—an exhibition by our friend and artist Vince Mancuso that opened in October 2025 and runs through March 15, 2026. The exhibition reclaims joy as a radical, unguarded act. It holds to a quiet truth: that memory, like movement, does not always announce itself — but it persists.
Meeting Hartmann in that space made that truth feel alive. History, we were reminded, is not distant. It lives in the rooms where art, memory, and migration find each other.
It was a fitting encounter for March—a month that asks us to honour two things at once: the women who have long been the quiet stewards of cultural survival, and the enduring, unfinished struggle for human rights.
Hartmann’s book, The Nail That Sticks Out, holds both.
The story begins in April 1942. Hartmann’s mother — just eight months old — was among the Japanese Canadians forcibly removed from their homes on British Columbia’s West Coast. Families were first held at Hastings Park, sleeping in what had been horse stalls. They were then sent to incarceration camps in the Slocan Valley. Property was seized. Communities were dismantled. Futures were rewritten by the state.
But The Nail That Sticks Out does not stay inside that single act of violence. It follows what comes after — the long, quieter consequences that forced migration leaves behind. The scattering of families across Canada once the war ended. The gradual erosion of the Japanese language within households. The rise of intermarriage, and the intricate negotiations of identity that followed. What Hartmann gives us is a fourth-generation story that understands migration not as a single event, but as an ongoing condition — one that keeps reshaping the relationships between generations, cultures, and the self.
Hartmann writes from the in-between. Between Eastern and Western worldviews, between silence and speech, between inherited memory and lived experience. Growing up mixed-race, she has spoken of feeling racially ambiguous — never fully legible in any one space. Rather than resolve that ambiguity, her book makes it the ethical centre of the work. Identity, she suggests, is not a destination. It is a process of becoming — continually shaped by history, movement, and choice.
This is also a book about women.
Not women as symbols, but as historical actors. The mothers and grandmothers who raised children inside incarceration camps. The daughters who rebuilt community life in unfamiliar cities. The women who carried values of endurance, care, and responsibility through conditions of profound injustice—whose labour was rarely called political, but was foundational to survival.
In Hartmann’s telling, the loss of Japanese language within families is not merely a linguistic fact. It is a relational one. Stories become harder to pass on. Emotional distances widen between generations. And yet, against that fragmentation, women held memory together—through gesture, through ritual, through food, through art, through sheer persistence.
This is the living thread between March 8 and March 21.
The incarceration of Japanese Canadians was made possible by fear, racism, and the suspension of rights in the name of security — mechanisms that have not disappeared. They continue to endanger marginalized communities today. Hartmann’s work reminds us that discrimination does not end when camps close. It reverberates through generations, quietly reshaping who feels entitled to belong — and who is asked to stay silent, stay grateful, or stay invisible.
The title itself reclaims that silence. The Nail That Sticks Out invokes the familiar proverb that warns against visibility. Hartmann turns it into a question: what happens when those who were once forced into silence choose to be seen? What responsibilities come with that choice? Her answer is not to elevate herself above the collective. She expands the frame—weaving in portraits of family and community members whose quiet contributions shaped the cultural and social fabric of postwar Toronto.
Published by Dundurn Press, the book is both personal testimony and communal archive. It refuses historical amnesia by insisting that migration histories are not peripheral to national identity. They are at the centre of it.
At the Gallery of Human Migration, we believe that migration is not only a right—it is a vital force of human connection and creativity. The Nail That Sticks Out is that belief made visible. It shows us that becoming is rarely comfortable, never linear, and always relational. It asks us to listen more carefully—to women, to elders, to stories carried across borders and down through generations.
In honouring Suzanne Hartmann this March, we honour all those whose lives were uprooted and re-rooted—by war, by policy, by the political failures whose costs are never paid by nations, but by families. By individuals. By memories that quietly insist on surviving. Their persistence is not passive. It is, as Hartmann shows us, the deepest form of courage. And it is a story that belongs to more of us than we know. You can read more about Suzanne Hartmann here.
Do you carry a migration story—one passed down, one lived, or one still unfolding? We’d love to hear it.