By Mari Matsuda
Address to Na Loio No Na Kanaka Annual Fundraiser
October 2005

We are the children of the migrant workers
We are the offspring of the concentration camp
Sons and daughters of the railroad builder
Who leave their stamp on Amerika

We are the children of the Chinese waiter,
Born and raised in the laundry room
We are the offsping of the Japanese gardener
Who leave their stamp on Amerika

Those lyrics by Chris Iijima and Nobu Miyamoto created a community, by putting down on vinyl what they called “a song of ourselves,” at a time when we were otherwise absent from the space called popular culture. I first heard that song not off the famous Grain of Sand album, but sung at a nuclear free Hawaii fundraiser at Harris Memorial Church, performed by earnest young ethnic studies professors from the University of Hawaii. That song traveled from Harlem to Honolulu, it was part of a huge wave of activism that picked up Asian Americans across the nation and plucked them down in sit-ins and fundraisers and up against police lines where the motto “serve the people,” was not just theory, but also practice. It was life. It was music. It was a way to change the world, and Chris wrote the soundtrack.

The first time I saw Chris, he was speaking at a meeting of the East Coast Asian Student Union, a semi-political but largely social gathering of college kids. I have learned over the years that law schools are adept at finding faculty of color who are smart, and ineffectual. So, frankly, I was not expecting much when this Professor Iijima got up to talk.

I was concentrating on preparing my own remarks, when I was hit by the whirlwind that is the public Chris Iijima. He got up and assumed the posture of pugilistic grizzly bear. He actually held his fist in the air at one point. He leaned into the microphone, then backed up, as if winding up for a punch, then came booming forward again, pacing rapidly to the front of the stage. He exhorted and orated and scolded the roomful of earnest pre-professionals. Get out there and DO something for the people who sacrificed so you could get your precious college education. He talked about power. He talked about oppression. He talked about racism. And when he sat down I looked at him and said, “where did YOU come from?”

“Harlem,” he said.

And then I got it. This was one of those Malcolm Asians. Like Yuri Kochiyama, like the Issei communists who drank whiskey and read Lenin, like the NY artists collective that took the Japanese woodblock style and made prints of workers and demonstrators and evictions.

And Chris said to me “You’re Mari Matsuda? You’re married to Chuck Lawrence, whose sisters are Paula Wehmiller and Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot? Gee, isn’t that kind of intimidating?” Chris knew Paula because they had both taught at the Manhattan Country Day School, a successful experiment in utopian, progressive education – a place where teachers and students are all learners, involved in the joint project of education, where education has as its end justice, peace, and humanity. I put the pieces of the story together. This was the Grain of Sand guy, the one who wrote the song sung by those young ethnic studies professors. He talks like Malcolm and teaches like Paula. In that moment, I was inducted into the Chris Iijima fan club.

Pat asked me to say something tonight honoring Chris as he receives the most prestigious social change award offered in the state of Hawaii. Some of you know him well, many of you have never met him – for all of us, I searched for words that convey the essence of this human being and why we should all be his students and why we honor him tonight.

I decided the way to do this is to sit at his feet as a student and see what there is to learn, gathering the yellow pearls, a random selection of five things Chris would like us to know.

1. Chris would like you to know that there are Hawaiian words for every kind of rain that falls in these islands, and that when the whisper mists of the tuahine rain fall in Manoa, as the late afternoon sun comes in from the west turning everything gold, you must stop, and feel that you are smaller than the rain. Take a deep breath, and notice. Remember that the Hawaiian people are the first people of this place, and their relationship to the rain is the one that recognizes what human beings need to survive and thrive.
   
2. Chris would like you to know that when Asian Americans gathered at Grain of Sand concerts, they heard songs in Spanish as well as English, because the movements for the liberation of Puerto Rico, to organize migrant farmworkers, to claim rights for latino immigrants were integral to the movement for Asian American liberation. And the claim of Puerto Rican sovereignty is a cousin of the claim for Hawaiian sovereignty. Whatever move is made to kill the dream of sovereignty will not succeed. The dream will never go away, because the human will to freedom will never go away, and someday Puerto Riquenos and kanaka maoli will regain control of their homelands.
   
3. Chris would want you to know that there are schools where rich children and poor children, Black, brown, yellow, and white children, are learning side by side with resounding success. Chris knows the teachers who know how to do this. Right in the middle of New York City, where school after school is labeled failing, there is the school where Chris and his wife Jane taught, where children from poor and working class homes are treated as learners, doers, and shapers of their world, with the predictable result that they learn and do and shape.
   
4. Chris would like you to know something about what law and lawyers and law schools can do. It is called justice, and there is no other justification for the existence of law and lawyers and law schools. He wrote this pledge, which all our students take, and which is worth repeating:

In the study of law, I will conscientiously prepare myself; To advance the interests of those I serve before my own, To approach my responsibilities and colleagues with integrity, professionalism and civility, To guard zealously legal, civil and human rights which are the birthright of all people, And, above all, To endeavor always to seek justice. This I do pledge.

In directing the pre-admissions program, Chris has produced an army of students who not only took that pledge, but who live it. He pushed, pulled, and shoved them through law school and into a profession that was not made for brown-skinned justice seekers from rural Oahu. They are re-making that profession, with Chris’s voice in their heads as they go.

5. And in the end, Chris would like you to know something about meaning. A few years back, before we knew that Chris would hit the wall of illness, he began prodding friends about the Big Questions. He observed with interest that progressive Asian American feminists of a certain age were going to the dojo and turning to Bhuddha. Chris and I were both raised by Nisei progressives who inculcated a healthy skepticism of religion. If religion is the opiate of the people, why was spirituality suddenly so intriguing to Chris?

Chris Iijima is a humanist and he takes human beings seriously, just as Marx did. A coal miner/organizer/communist named George Meyer changed the way I see Marx’s famous quote on religion. He described his father leaving for the coal mines every morning. His mother would say goodbye with a look of terror on her face, because nearly every family they knew had lost someone in the mines. Every mornings’ good bye was quite possibly the last good bye. George’s father would say gently to his wife, “don’t worry, the good lord will bring me home to you.” That, George Meyer explained, is what Marx meant by the opiate of the people. You don’t reach for the drug because you are a stupid dupe to capitalism, but because you are in pain.

Well, aren’t we all. Many of us who do social change work throw ourselves into it with life-eclipsing zeal. As a young lawyer I was pulled into doing pro bono work for Na Loio, and stayed up all night at the Xerox machine, borrowed from the ILWU across the street, making copies of briefs. The quick dinner grabbed from the food court, the stapling assembly line, the agonizing over strategy, the big emergency – no time to sleep or to stop and think about your messed up personal life or the fact of your mortality, or to confront whatever demon it is that breathes down your neck. The People! The Struggle! The Cause!

Chris the activist might have lived that way at times, but Chris the artist never has. The guitar won’t resonate for fingers that are denying the existence of the soul. When I picture Chris the musician, I see the eyes close, the brow crease, the head tilt forward in the posture of the seeker. In theoretical terms we might call it thesis/antithesis, or simply contradiction: that a guitar playing atheist brings forth the voice of God.

So what does it mean that in his most recent publications Chris used words like “love?” He wrote: “as I mature as a law teacher, engaged in my own existential, personal and professional searches for who I am, part of that journey has also become a search in the pedagogy of my profession for some indication that we collectively are concerned about where each of our student’s “who” is.” He challenges all teachers to take each student’s search for self and meaning seriously.

Some of my students went to visit Chris recently, and from his hospital bed he handed out organizing lessons. You can organize a campaign, he said, where you are in and out – work on one issue, hit it and leave. Or you can organize a community: think about building it and nurturing it as a place of strength from which structural change is possible.

Chris is the community builder: through his music, his writing, his teaching, through the many struggles for peace and human dignity that he has signed on to in his long life as an activist he has made those around him feel like they belong to something deep and precious.

Che said all revolutionaries are motivated by love. Chris is a lover: of the Tuahine rain, of the dream of sovereignty, of the struggle for justice, of the search for meaning.

To the Iijima family, greetings of aloha and solidarity from everyone in this room. I know in your enryo style, you would turn from expressions of sympathy for the hard road you have faced, remembering that there is a world of suffering out there. Right now, as we sit in this banquet hall, in the park across the street there are those who are unhoused, hungry, ill with no doctor to care for them. There are brothers and sisters of ours in prison, some shipped off like cast-off junk to profit-making prisons five thousand miles away from their island home. There is violence defacing our beautiful land, the raging violence of the fist lashing out in anger, and the quiet violence of schools that can’t teach children, the relentless violence of lives worn bare by hard work for lousy pay. You would want us to remember all of this and to respond not with a liberal’s guilt but with the revolutionary’s love. Love people enough to go out and work for justice. And then when life knocks you down and you land in that hospital bed, at least you will know that you are part of the struggle, part of something bigger than yourself, that will last longer than any of us, and somehow that will have to make it all make sense.

Chris, we are learning from watching you. You said to me yesterday, get some joy! So I end with that. “The Struggle” should not be like dragging around a bag of rocks. It should be like standing in the middle of the curl of a giant blue wave, carried by inexorable forces of nature, exhilarating, exquisite. Chris, you told me you are looking for serenity. I don’t know a damn thing about serenity, but I do know about love. I love you, Chris.

I close with your words, from a song about the Tuahine rain:  

“Peace will find the valley, when justice is reclaimed.”

We’ll see you there, Chris Iijima, meke aloha pumehana, a hui hou.