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How did we save ourselves

How did we save ourselves, they will ask, and we will tell of a great awakening. The water was rising, and we saw that it was our last chance to save our island home, and our planet, from the greed machine.  It was hard, we had to form coalitions with people who did not always see it the way we did. We had to organize, house by house, demonstration by demonstration, to fight back. We raised our voices in song, as Liko Martin wrote, “to save our land.” We got arrested. We were not alone.

In movement building, we knock on doors and organize.  In theory building, we argue and write. In radical imagining toward our fullest possibilities, we make art.  The Peace Orchestra, and its connected artistic, intellectual, and movement practices, is about the beauty and joy we all deserve in our lives.  We can leave behind, now, the world made by markets, violence, greed, and status defined as having more than others.  We will make, now, the world of mutual celebration, creative practice, and status defined as giving more to others.  Feel free to laugh at this orchestra, it does not take itself seriously, it only wants to play Bach, however poorly, and to show that not everyone is joining the authoritarian’s march toward human self-destruction.

Mari Matsuda is a law professor emiritus, artist, organic gardener, and critical race theorist who grew up in Los Angeles and Honolulu. Her work is in the collections of the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, and has appeared in Artists of Hawai’i 2023 and 2024. The Peace Orchestra comprises collaborative performances organized by Matsuda over time in conjunction with her artmaking. She built the instruments of this orchestra, but she makes no original claim to its concept, an idea that is as old as art: we need beauty, joy, and surprise in our lives, and we are at our best when we work together for those things.

THE PEACE ORCHESTRA HAS AN INTELLECTUAL NEIGHBOR.

In the early 1980’s there were almost no law professors of color. A few of us began meeting and theorizing about the dialectical relationship between white supremacy and the US legal system.  We came out of freedom struggles, and we defined freedom broadly to include the end of all forms of subordination. We imagined a world in which all human beings are valued and upheld.  Our teachers were generations of freedom fighters before us and we took our genealogy seriously as we pushed, argued, cooked our way into a new mode of analysis called critical race theory.  We were and are feminists, and when feminism met critical race theory, it expanded into intersectionality.  

With Kimberle’ Crenshaw slinging pots and pans in her kitchen I watched a new idea emerge: The systemic devaluation of our sister who is poor, Black, female, queer is not just a matter of one oppression piling on another.  The entire structure of colonization finds its perpetual motion miracle by deploying interlocking subordination. Multiple oppressions supercharge the colonizer’s system, allowing it to morph and disrupt resistance at every turn, breaking our coalitions and occluding our thoughts.  Freedom is not coming unless we take on the entire beast. 

It’s an ugly thing, the beast we saw when we called out its name, but seeing it was the first step in seeing its vulnerability.  There are more of us, always have been, and we have power.  Critical race theory is what happens when you take your hands off your eyes in the scary movie, and start laughing at the absurdity of the premise. We are laughing, and fighting, and writing, and marching, now four decades into this project.