On Wednesday, Oberlin College hosted American author and professor Aisha Sabatini Sloan for a nonfiction reading followed by a Q&A. Sloan read lengthy excerpts from two books she had written; first, a comedic yet somber excerpt from Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, then a meditative musing on Homer, Alaska in “Borealis.” The event took place in Dye Lecture Hall.
Sloan began with asking the audience: “Funny or sad?” At the request for something more lighthearted on a Thursday afternoon, she chuckled as she flipped through the pages of Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, her essay collection of her various intersecting identities. Structured as a playlist, the chosen excerpts were broken into distinct sections under song titles. Many of those were labeled under Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” which became increasingly humorous with each repetition but also perfectly set the tone and environment for the story to unfold. Listening to the radio soon after Prince’s death, a young Sloan drives with her father as they muse on race, gender, and how they fit into and fight against the American cultural narrative.
Sloan perfectly captured the strange yet beautiful harmony between comedy and heavier topics throughout the reading, her ever-changing tone and strategic pauses orchestrating the audience through emotional highs and lows.
“I really appreciate how she uses comedy to speak to important matters related to race and ethnicity,” Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine, assistant professor of Creative Writing, wrote in an email to the Review. “Comedy can be a powerful narrative tool to dramatize the human condition, and Sloan’s writing and communication with the audience demonstrates this.”
College second-year Iris Sanborn was also struck by the tasteful balancing act of comedy, tragedy, and heartfelt moments.
“I felt that humor and emotion mixed so well together, such as moments of connection between her and her father being immediately followed by the Prince song for the fifth time,” Sanborn said.
Sloan then read excerpts from her newest essay, “Borealis.” As part of the Spatial Species Series edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, “Borealis” was an essay Sloan wrote under spatial constraints. Describing her work as “opposite of a travel narrative,” Sloan likened it to Georges Perec’s famous book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. In the book, Perec forces the reader to sit with him in Saint-Sulpice Square in a slow and an often melancholic rhythm. Sloan wanted to capture the small details of Homer, Alaska in a similar vein to Perec’s work in Paris.
Although she has never lived in Homer, Sloan shared that many of her personal and profound memories were created during her numerous travels with friends and past lovers. Throughout the essay, she plays with the idea of stillness and time in relation to the absence of people. She explained how writing about people with no personal relation felt akin to eavesdropping, and that covering the space between isolated individuals — separated by gender, race, and physical space — was one of the struggles in composing “Borealis.”
Visiting Assistant Professor of English Sarah Jane Kerwin, OC ’15, was in attendance, as she had been planning to add “Borealis” to her syllabus for her fall course, ENGL 105: Literature and Environmentalism. Kerwin asked Sloan about the role of the environment in relation to “the relationship between queer theory and ecocritical theory” during the Q&A.
“Sloan said, and I paraphrase, she doesn’t feel qualified to write about nature, but that it’s hard to ignore the environment when looking at melting glaciers,” Kerwin wrote in an email to the Review. “I believe that a work like ‘Borealis’ challenges our understanding of what it means to write about nature.”
Aisha Sabatini Sloan is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan.
