On Decentering and Unlearning in Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit

“I WAS IN A BAD MOOD…” Aisha Sabatini Sloan writes in her innovative, thrilling essay collection, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, originally published by 1913 Press in 2017 and reissued in revised form by Graywolf Press in 2024. Rather than positioning herself as objective critic, Sloan describes her emotional state while she surveys Thirty Americans, an exhibition of contemporary Black art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. “Maybe I was looking for a fight,” she adds.

What follows this admission is a piercing dissection not of the art itself, but of frameworks of looking at Black art and life that go beyond racist tropes disguised as appeals to the primitive, the spontaneous, the corporeal. This approach is characteristic of the collection even as it consistently finds ways to resist easy pattern recognition, whether through an essay that includes contributions from students at a camp in which the author taught, or through frequent asides from Sloan’s life that only have a tangential relationship with the subject at hand, except that seems to be the point.

As a result, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit leaves me unable to write without questioning what I’ve learned about writing. I am writing a review of a book that contains explicit and implicit critiques of how criticism is written, ones I find myself agreeing with yet imply that the way I’ve been writing since I was taught to write essays—by white people in rich white institutions—is misguided at best and destructive at worst. The book challenges us to undo as much as to do, both as writers and as readers.

The collection begins with two essays that collide ideas about art and society through seemingly random associations that end up making sense like a set of scattered dots that suddenly resolve into an image. The first, “A Clear Presence,” sets the beating of Rodney King alongside David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings, woven with other subjects such as Sloan’s childhood in LA’s Brentwood area and the Olympic diver Sammy Lee’s experiences of segregation. Drawing from King’s autobiography, she writes: “Rodney King was swimming on the first day he ever heard the word nigger,” and later describes how he died in a swimming pool.

One consistent quality of Sloan’s writing is her attention to elements that don’t make sense at first glance but do upon closer inspection.

The second essay, “Ocean Park #6” uses Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings to ponder mothers coping with the loss of their children, with references to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories of color and a Joan Didion interview on writing about the loss of her daughter Quintana. Both essays make stark and rapid turns that defy traditional essay structure, moves that are destabilizing at the moment yet leave this reader exhilarated in the way Sloan circles back to her central concerns without ever settling for simple resolution. I do find “A Clear Presence” particularly compelling, but maybe that’s just because I’ve been a longtime fan of Hockney’s, was living in LA during the beating and riots, and am an avid swimmer. This acknowledgment of reader subjectivity is in the spirit of Sloan’s work, in contrast to the traditional critic’s standpoint of an objectivity that has never really existed, that often only serves to obscure whiteness, masculinity, and wealth.

Two consistent subjects in the collection are art and Blackness, which may be unfamiliar to readers in different ways depending on their demographic. Unlike, say, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which features images of artwork the book describes as text, Dreaming of Ramadi takes a you-can-Google-it approach, dispensing even with establishing descriptions of artwork, preferring to engage in description as it relates to Sloan’s specific argument at the time. This feels frustrating in moments even for an art nerd like me, but there’s also something pleasurable in being set afloat in a sea of vague memories and associations, with a side of flinch and guilt when she uses the same strategy to describe violence against Black people at the hands of police. Right, Rodney King was batons, Eric Garner with a chokehold.

There are essays in the collection that are more narratively linear, such as “Playlist for a Road Trip with Your Father” where Sloan describes a day with her father at a literary festival, or “D is for the Dance of the Hours” where she shadows her police officer cousin. But even those essays are full of interruptions from uncontrollable external forces, which to me implies that her aesthetic comes from the lived experience of not having the same agency as people who can protect themselves with social and economic privilege. And when she takes critics to task for emphasizing Basquiat’s intuition and drug use over his clear intentions in her essay “Gray’s Anatomy,” perhaps Sloan too argues for the deliberateness of her own style, which might also be dismissed through tired tropes of Black achievement as a product of instinct rather than purpose.

But see here I am, constructing a linear argument that tries to force integration and cohesion out of what amounts to a series of striking essays that can be approached in myriad ways, that feel meant to be reread more than read. One consistent quality of Sloan’s writing is her attention to elements that don’t make sense at first glance but do upon closer inspection, not just with King and Hockney but also opera and daily life in Detroit; Wings of Desire, Werner Herzog, and climate change; and, indeed, Detroit and Ramadi through the humanization of Osama bin Laden in the collection’s title essay.

I’m sure I can think up ways to frame the summation of these essays so that they can all make sense together, but doing so doesn’t feel like the point. The point seems to be that the critic’s desire for attention and juxtaposition needs to be tempered with the reality that shit just doesn’t make sense a lot of the time, and we just have to do the best we can.

More than anything, I see Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit as a challenge to decenter and unlearn. It teaches a certain kind of critical modesty that asks the critic not to master their subject, but grapple with its inherent contradictions, while also finding striking connections that others may not have noticed. Sloan’s essays teach as much as they argue, not just about their subject matter but what it is the essay can do and what it’s good for. Sloan is certainly teaching me. This is the best I can do so far.