Restorative Community Project Session 5:

“I shan't ever write another letter” I declare to an empty audience. No witness to my proclamation of abstinence. This I later learn was ultimately for the better, what with no one to ratify my unkeepable promise, I was to relieve myself of the shame for having broken it over and over again. 

You are the reason why epistolarity is now my least favorite genre. In the purloined bounty of letters addressed to anyone but me, I like to pretend these interlocutors are us. 

James Wright (Jim) was already dead when Leslie Morman Silko (Leslie) sent her final letter. She knew for sometime now that the curtains on their fellowship were quickly closing. Their promises to christen their relationship (till now only brought to bear exclusively through letters and unshared thoughts) would not come to be. For Jim was now dead. Thinking about her last envoi is like what you said about life: “they say you die twice: once when your body goes, and once more when your name is spoken for the last time.” Her letter is both at once. You are neither.

Marking a mortal finality with a closing remark seems like a form of double indemnity. Both should be illegal. But perhaps it is the mark of a good writer who is able to achieve something in spite of the bad prompts to which she must respond. (and all of life is a bad prompt I have found.) Good thing Leslie is indeed a good writer! I won’t to tell you what she wrote because I want you to discover it for yourself. (The Delicacy and Strength of Lace). 

Kafka is a maddening author and an insufferable lover; a redundancy indeed. So its no surprise when his Budapestian royalty and translator lover ceases to send him clippings from her local newspaper and holds the final note to their song. I understand; I too would close my eyes if you sent me something like “All the misfortune of my life -- I don’t wish to complain, but to make a generally instructive remark -- derives, one could say from letters or from the possibility of writing letters.” The resolve to never write to me again however feels like something else altogether. Batteries? 

But enough about how letters end. What of from whence they begin? When you have read enough of these, you began to see patterns in the teleology of discourse and its intensity. Like all rhetorical forms and its discursive technologies, it takes time to get comfortable. Letters begin with caution. They are rank with careful reservation. And its all rather endearing Ive found. Like watching a future olympic sprinter take her first steps; treasure the inelegance for all the glory is yet to come. This I never explained to Brandon. Sahfeeah, and Jazaret, but I dont think I needed to. The letters they sent to the people they will interview are precious enough. 

Hortense spillers once remanded, “we are at the risk of losing this precious insight.” Never explicit about the referent of her “this” is just another show of her unparalleled intellect. But the political imperative of her observation is dire and crystalline nonetheless; we must attend to black social existence and all its emergent forms. I like to believe it is precisely this that we achieve when Basir, Destiny and Micah prepare to address their elders in the project for black liberation. They too sent their letters. 

I was at my most cowardly when I failed to do what Audre Lorde and Pat Parker did for one another countless times. Is the measure of kinship ruled against the transparency of your shared desires? This is what I ask myself when Audre closes her address with the words, “write to me soon.” Has a command ever been so saccharine? Write to me soon. my love