This course is for those who know exile not just as displacement from a land, but from a self, a people, a sense of home that never quite held. It’s for anyone who’s been told they belonged while secretly knowing they didn’t. And for those who’ve had to betray a community, a lineage, or a version of themselves just to survive. Drawing on the layered texture of our own stories – from childhood separation to racial ambiguity to religious rupture.
We begin by naming the many kinds of exile: from land, from family, from identity. We use your concept of “dislocation beneath the surface” to ask: What have we had to leave behind? What stories have been denied?
This session explores betrayal not only as something done to us – but something we must sometimes commit to survive. Drawing from Cixous, Zornberg, and our own writing on spiritual rupture, we consider the price of freedom and the ethics of departure.
Here we turn to the aftermath. How do we piece together a self after fracture? We explore the idea of “refuge in becoming” and building identities that aren’t tethered to false loyalty. We invite participants to reframe loss as generative.
Finally, we wrestle with the impossibility of full return. Using our lens on narrative reparation, we hold the tension between yearning and reality. What does it mean to come home to yourself, even when no place welcomes you back?
We live in a time of mass fragmentation – political, spiritual, familial. But for some, that fracture is not new. It’s generational and cellular. This course refuses to tidy exile into metaphor. Instead, we take it seriously as a condition of becoming – a place from which radical insight, redefinition, and resistance can emerge. Our own term “existential exile” helps hold this space, naming the betrayal of a self disallowed by dominant scripts.
This 4-week online course offers a soft but rigorous container. We meet weekly for 90 minutes with guided reflection, dialogue, and collective meaning-making. Participants also receive access to an online space with optional journalling prompts and key texts. The space is trauma-aware, non-performative, and built for those who carry hidden exiles within them.
Tone: philosophical, political, tender, and real.
