Can you tell us about a teacher who shaped your undergraduate or graduate education?
I suppose Leonard Thompson, the eminent historian of southern Africa, was the most impressive. Thompson taught at UCLA when I was a graduate student in African history, and moved to Yale to finish his distinguished career. Thompson’s lectures were a model of clarity, although delivered in a dry, monotone. I still have my notes from that class, Southern African History, and they guide me to this day. More influential, however, were Yaeko Shimada, my fifth-grade teacher, and Reva Palmer, my English literature high school teacher. Miss Shimada, as we called her, believed in my potential (she told my mother, decades later, she always knew I would amount to something!), and Miss Palmer shocked me into the power of words and poetry when she wept shamelessly as she read to us Lord Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon (1816).
What book or article has recently been on your mind?
Pele’s land. Pele is the volcano that created the islands of Hawai`i causing it to rise from the ocean’s depths, displacing sea life but also providing safe havens for seaweeds, shellfishes, and fishes. On Pele’s land grows magnificent o`hia groves, revelations of her sister, Hi`iaka, and countless other plants and animals—life abundant. Her deeds are continuous (lava still flows across the land and erupts beneath the sea), and her generosity is unbounded. Reading her, her relations, and her ever changing formations requires of me a lifetime and more of learning.
What are you working on now?
I am currently at work tending my gardens. On our vegetable patch grows Chinese mustard, Japanese daikon, Hawaiian kalo, Mexican peppers, Thai basil, and Salvadoran loroco (edible flower). Fruit trees abound – mango, avocado, lychee, cashew, coffee, jabon (Japanese grapefruit), banana, papaya, carambola. We cultivate the world on our tiny plot. While serving as earth’s custodian, I tend to my subject self.
Can you tell us about one of your best teaching experiences?
Yale. I’ve taught amazing first-generation working class students as well as equally awesome bourgeois students at Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton. But my Yale students have and continue to gift me with endowments I never dreamed possible. I don’t know why that is so—brilliance, sincerity, fearlessness, honesty. My Yale students have those qualities in abundance. To be so rewarded at the end of my fifty-year career is more than I deserve. Thank you my dearest students, my best teachers. I will carry you with me through the void that is myself when at last we become all matter.