Tuesday Telegram: Exile, Belonging & the Caste of Violence
Tuesday Telegram: Exile, Belonging & the Caste of Violence
“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”
— James Baldwin
“I am a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds.”
— Gloria Anzaldúa
“We are guided by a feeling of our own unfitness to the world as it is.”
— Fred Moten
Dear Becoming Ones:
Today’s telegram may raise eyebrows with my agent and publicist — two courageous women I trust with my whole being — but in this world of technofeudal empires and algorithmic illusions, what is love without risk? What is truth without eros?
I am summoning the bold self-portraiture of Frida Kahlo, the moral clarity of James Baldwin, and the radical honestyof Ta-Nehisi Coates. These are the guides who remind me:
Be impeccable with your words —
because words can liberate
or they can annihilate.
For too long, I learned language as a weapon — sharpened through elite institutions like Harvard and Princeton. Precision became a knife I didn’t always know how to put down. After watching Origin — the film inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste — I see more clearly:
violence has been the scaffolding of this country
and
its scaffolding has shaped us too.
This is a telegram about my next project — one rooted in exile, rurality, belonging, and the slow labor of repair. 🌱
BLOODY CORNERS
A local reader told me that Friendship, NY was once called The Bloody Corners — where settler colonial violence spilled onto this land. Today, the diner is closed on Saturdays and the sidewalks go quite early. To live here is to live inside a silence that holds history.
Thanks, Lee, for this tip! It’s brilliant!
I write from exile — having fled the American South after years of targeted harassment that fractured my nervous system. Catastrophic anxiety shaped my days. Agoraphobia kept me inside. Trust became a casualty of surveillance.
To land in Friendship is to land in a place that resists forgetting — a place that insists on reckoning.
I am learning its names.
I am learning its wounds.
LEAVING / ARRIVING
Exile is not romantic.
It is disorienting, terrifying, clarifying.
I return again and again to Baldwin — writing from France not to escape America, but to see America more clearly.
Belonging and freedom aren’t abstractions.
They are conditions we create in the absence of violence.
So on Tuesdays — even in winter’s grip — I go to the public library as an act of healing. A discipline of leaving the house. A small resurrection of trust.
My friend, Sarah the librarian, handed me Baldwin today. What a holy gift — literature as kinship.
KINSHIP AS INFRASTRUCTURE
The Divine Lure is alive here:
• My best friend opened a shop in town
• Someone I love dearly sells art there
• Brian and I go to Alex’s — our whiskey pilgrimage halfway complete
• The land calls me back to my body
These slow patterns of gathering — year after year — are the architecture of nonviolence. They build, unhurried, what empire cannot: trust.
The rural landscape is teaching me resilience:
that beauty takes its time,
that home is a gradual becoming,
that frost is not the end of growth —
only its hiding place.
THE NEXT PROJECT
Here is the heart of it:
My next book takes shape around
belonging and freedom.
Not sentimental versions —
but the kind built through:
🌾 reckoning with caste and colonial violence
🌾 unmasking unbelonging and unfreedom
🌾 returning dignity to one another
🌾 resurrecting our humanity
🌾 duende — the fierce flame of existence
I’ve been working with a set of core value words — the conditions for belonging and freedom — and each Tuesday I will write one into the world, right here.
A slow construction.
A communal imagination.
WHY NOW
Because:
We are not safe in this political climate.
Technofeudalism is the latest colonial fold.
We are being trained to forget one another.
But we can refuse.
We can choose the erotic aliveness of being human together — like Flamenco in Barcelona, like Frida’s brush on her own skin, like Baldwin’s relentless longing for kinship, like Coates’ unwavering testimony of the body’s truth.
We must find shelter in one another.
Right now.
The times are urgent.
TOWARD A FERVENT TUESDAY
Each week, I will venture out.
Each week, I will write.
Each week, healing will meet me in the open.
Thank you for being here with me.
Thank you for believing I can belong again.
In exile, becoming,
RCE+