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Tribute to Chris Iijima (5 of 5)
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.
