Story and photos by Judas Ātman

I signed up for ieiMedia’s journalism and photography program in Arles knowing I’d be less than three hours away by car from James Baldwin’s house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Overseas, I carried with me a question that had burrowed itself in my mind: Why did he exile himself to France?

What was happening in the psyche of this sharp witness to history that made him leave the United States for Paris on November 11, 1948? 

Baldwin’s decision to leave our country bothered me because, frankly, I judged him. Throughout my entire love affair with his work I have been frustrated by this feeling that were I to do the same, I would be “abandoning” our people, which is to say those of us who possess the same frustrations with our country and the fervent desire to see it transformed.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I speak about Baldwin and his work obsessively, as if when I read his words, I am engaging with a close friend over dinner and reporting out what he has told me. Even through this intimate love with his words, I have found myself angrily wanting to demand, “How could he leave?” How could he abandon our country that so desperately needed his sharp ability to bear witness?

But in my first two weeks here in Arles, I get it now. I’ve been shocked, honestly, to find myself so in love with this town I never even knew existed outside a tiny, digital photo on a random website of a random media company. It is here, self-exiled, whisked by the wind to this tiny town, a leftist eye in the swirling storm of the far-right area that surrounds it, that I am able to feel the extent of my grief when I think of my country.

I expressed a portion of this grief to Ania, the colleague and friend I met here in our program the first day as we walked together and had lunch. I told her I feel as someone who becomes increasingly more deviant and pushed to the social margins of American society, there are few options left for me but imprisonment, exile and or death. I said I’m not afraid to die.

Ania said I was martyring myself. And she was right. Why martyr yourself for a country that doesn’t care about whether you live or die? 

Like a morning bell, the truth of this grief tolls in my mind, echoing with an almost feverish level of vision, as if I could see the world between the 1’s and 0’s of the Matrix. In a notes app on my hike around the outskirts of the city, following the dirt paths along the Canal, I wrote the following:

homeland is not a place, a person, a people, when you’ve lost your home

america is an abusive narcissistic parent. i have stockholm syndrome. i’m not american. i never was. it’s not a part of my ontology. it’s not the core essence of who i am. i am an exile. i belong to no one. i belong nowhere. my home is in the liminal margins, between worlds, between countries. i am opening portals in my mind and hoping to manifest the same boundlessness in a western world obsessed with the borders of nationalism.

Despite this moment of separation from one country, I see a new self sprouting in the fields of another one – each seed a shard of Self that blooms through stickers, graffiti, and wheat pasting I find as I walk through the winding walls of La Roquette,  my integrity reflected in the architecture of this city. 

I didn’t know who these people were who posted them but I follow the trail — like Alice trailing the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, like Neo following Trinity’s instructions to trail after the white rabbit to find Morpheus in The Matrix — I leave my American self to find this Arlesian persona. And that persona is an evolving self, a truer self that enters me like a song humming a deeper resonance than I knew my own voice to be capable of.

Once I leave Arles, I have no idea how to make sense of where I’m going, because this place has struck me like a bolt of lightning, causing so many structures within myself to tumble and fall.

When home, I won’t be the same person I was before my time here. This new person I am becoming, I can’t yet say who they are, but I was told by a sommelier in Plan de Campagne, a region just outside Marseille where Ania, my colleague, and I stayed this past weekend, that I’m not meant to know how to make sense of all this right now.

The only moment that exists, he implied, is this present one: me, writing this “postcard” while sitting in the dining room of my host family’s home, my mind scrambling to understand the impact my time in this city is having on me.