No One Knows My Name: A Letter from Exile
taking my time to write these days
Dear Becoming Ones: I have been at Emory for the week for work and am en route home to the quiet spots of Western New York. I’ve been keeping a rigorous writing schedule, and with the extensive travel I am back to doing, the writing schedule may need to be tweaked.
I still am committed to the work of contemplation and activism / contemplation in activism. I am working out how to have time to write and think and contribute to the growing body of fugitive work that is community supported scholarship.
Today, I have written another epistolary note borrowing from James Baldwin.
It’s almost the three year anniversary of my planting roots in exile, and I thought I’d write about this, since Charlottesville changed my life in such pivotal ways.
I’ll be back, soon, to write more and get back on a writing schedule. Thank you for your patience as I took some time off this summer after my 6 week research trip in Europe. The book is coming together, slowly. I am doing more analog these days, so that my archives have a paper tail of my work and idea formation and process.
My semester at Duke is starting, soon, so I will soon be back in the classroom, and I’ll be back at Emory in due time. I love my frequent trips to the American South, land I DO know; cultures that I DO know! For now, here is my letter from exile as I reflect on the last three years and lean into rhythms of possibility for what is emerging.
They say change is the only constant.
Paz, —RCE+
No One Knows My Name: A Letter from Exile
I fled three years ago and arrived in the hills of Western New York, far from the land that I know. Land and sky are things I pay attention to, and leaving the Texas sky in my mid-20s returned to me once I got to New York. The sky opened up, and the land that I encountered was alive with multiple beings. I later would learn that both the gods of supremacy culture are alive and otherworldly beings co-exist fighting for another possible world.
I fled in the heat of the summer, knowing that I will encounter an otherness in exile. Not knowing exactly what I would encounter, I have learned that I have encountered loss, grief, betrayal, punishment, and violence by the State.
I arrived in the heat of the summer, though not like the American South heat. The sunsets are gorgeous as the sky dances with shades of orange and pink. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done is give up my Texas license. I cried in Chicago when I obtained my new license. Something I will never forget. Did I lose myself that day? When I gave up my Texas identity? A state that tries to harm me and other Trans and queer people on the daily. Why do I lament this loss? Well, it was my first place of belonging and freedom, how ever artificial that was.
I was no longer in the South. No longer in Texas. No longer on land that I knew.
I lived in Chicago for seven years and I worked hard to minimize my Texas accent and I minimized many things: my voice, my agency, and my sense of belonging.
The academy became a refuge for me, even with its systemic violence and the ways that I repeatedly was marginalized for my ideas. So, I learned the dominant voices from the cis white men who were my professors. I studied and I read everything I could. I still have this practice.
When my teacher, Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, suggested a book, I read everything by the author that I could. My teacher has helped me build my extensive library and I am so grateful for the resources I have. I am still reading; still unraveling from being tethered to white supremacist violence that the academy encourages.
I write now, in the vein of Steve Biko—I write what I want.
I have been exiled for three years, learning how to navigate the terrain of the North, as best as I can. No one knows what a public theologian does, and no one can seem to hold the complexities of me holding up a mirror to them. I am exhausted by the white apathy I have encountered over the last three years.
People don’t have a concept of what a politicized theologian is, either! Few people know that I write publicly about everything and they are shocked when they see a familiar story in my essays. Life is a living text for me; how will we repair if we are not honest with the work of reckoning with the powers that be?
I have spent most of my adult life in higher education; a stranger in the village of academia. I stayed long enough to get my papers, and I got out! The invitations continue, and I entertain every invitation into higher education that I receive, and I am slowly unraveling from the tentacles of academia in an effort to become counter institutional with other scholars who are nurturing the undercommons with me.
This fugitive risk I am taking feels like one of the better decisions I’ve made.
My mother has a 6th grade education and urged me to grab onto education as a way out.
I heard her clearly, so I would spend 30 minutes every day reading, like she asked me to. I hated to read as a kid, because I wore glasses and struggle3d to remember the things I read.
I have known struggle my entire life.
We had intermittent electricity; I encountered food scarcity and poverty until I moved to live with my white father.
I lived with a Republican authoritarian father for 4 years, before I left home on my own. I’ve been on my own since I graduated from high school after serving a brain aneurysm and two open craniotomies to correct the vascular problems.
Whiteness has been rescuing me at every turn, and I have been conditioned into the same white apathy that I experience today, and yet my lived experienced—my reality of the world as a witness to the atrocities that have shaped me—tells me that knowing oneself starts with story.
What stories have we inherited?
What stories are we telling?
My story is one of deep and sustained struggle. A struggle to belong and find freedom, which I have come to see as a condition of one’s interior life. A struggle to find my voice in the face of my voice being shaped by white serving institutions. A struggle to love myself when the world hates me and where I am being hunted by unkind strangers who believe in a superiority of white men.
I have been traveling the world and my own country in search of belonging and freedom. I have not found it outside myself. I am grateful for this lesson.
Covid reminded me how much time I need to myself and how rare it is to find a condition of belonging that is external to one’s own lived experience. The silence of solitude; the purr of my apophatic teachers; the smell of my coffee brewing. These are all signs of my effort to belong to myself.
Still, no one knows my name in exile, and I like it that way. I talk with people throughout my days and learn the contours of their own compromised positions as white folks. It’s sad to me that many people don’t see how compromised they are. I find myself spending more time alone and with communities of culture. Being with communities of culture not only feeds my spirit, it encourages my work, because I see others doing similar work as me.
These cultural underpinnings of communities of culture know my name. I am seen and welcomed and I belong. What a gift!
As Baldwin wrote many years ago, ‘nothing that cannot be faced can be changed.’
Leaving Texas meant that I became a witness to the atrocities of the world. In my 20s I faced the bigotry of the Midwest and the overwhelming whiteness of the LGBTQIA movement. I asked about the white dominance; I was met with silence. Why can’t white folks engage in this question of white dominance? I remain unconvinced that they truly want to change. White folks in leadership who maintain the status quo don’t want to divest and want to continue perpetuating harm. They are kind, and they do manifold harm. It’s sad to me, and I am learning who my people are. Hard and important lessons!
My eventual life of exile is me bearing witness in the North. My epistolary engagement is an attempt to not only bear witness and hold up a mirror, but also find a place where I might be able to live out my vocation as a writer and cultural worker. I don’t know how long I will stay in the North, and I don’t know where I would go, because no where is safe for those who fall outside and beyond the cis white heteronormative frameworks of what a body should be.
While I return to being the stranger in the village, I will relish that no one knows my name.
For those who are living in exile, keep dreaming of another possible world. For those who permeate harm, keep unraveling from the tentacle of supremacy culture. I am talking to myself, too! My conditioning made room for me to cause manifold harm in many ways. I’m unraveling from white supremacist violence, too. I’m just as compromised as you are and I am learning to look into the mirror and say: “I love you.”
More soon.
From the tracks heading home.
Paz, —RCE+