Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit: Essays

by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

An electric essay collection about Blackness, art, and dreaming of new possibilities in a time of constriction

This collection of innovative, penetrating, and lively essays features swimming pools and poets, road trips and museums, family dinners and celebrity sightings. In a voice that is at once piercing, mournful, and slyly comic, Aisha Sabatini Sloan inhabits several she is an art enthusiast in Los Angeles during a city-wide manhunt; a daughter on a road trip with her father; a professor playing with puppets in the wilds of Vermont; an interloper on a police ride-along in Detroit; a collector of the dreams of scientists at a biostation. As she watches cell phone video recordings of murder and is haunted in her sleep by the news, she reflects on her formative experiences with aesthetic and spiritual discovery, troubling those places where Blackness has been conflated with death.

Sabatini Sloan’s lively style is perfectly suited to the way she circles a subject or an idea before cinching it tight. The curiosity that guides each essay, focusing on the period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic, is rooted in the supposition that there is an intrinsic relationship between the way we conceptualize darkness and our collective opportunity for awakening.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir, Race, Queer, African American, Biography Memoir

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Sunny Lu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of art criticism and topic-jumping that was unsatisfying to me… excited to discuss w book club tmrw tho

https://www.instagram.com/p/DQ6-Ip-jv...

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This essay collection alternately made me feel like it was making me smarter while I was reading it and like it was too smart for me and I was being left behind. Sloan is a brilliant writer, whose logical links between seemingly disparate topics within one essay are superbly done. She writes about art, Blackness, family, place, and more. Kiese Laymon puts it better than I ever could: "Innovative, inspiring, sobering, and absolutely terrifying while daring every other essayist in the country to catch up."

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goddammit Aisha Sloan is a genius. Someone once said of Anne Carson, "She wears her erudition so lightly." I feel similarly about Aisha, though I wouldn't quite use the word erudite. But there's something so joyful and playful about the myriad cultural references Aisha makes in these essays, the references to painters, philosophers, classic filmmakers, theorists. These essays are cerebral, deep, daring, and yet spun so lightly and seemingly effortlessly into your hands. It's as if the reader is skimming the surface of a deep lake. Aisha's writing reminds me what the essay can be, and what it can aspire to.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was JUST complaining to a friend (Hi, Jillian! I consider you my friend, FYI!) that there aren't any books I've actually experienced the setting of. While this is nonfiction, I was still ecstatic to see (a day later!) a Detroit-related collection. There's just something about being about to picture the cross streets mentioned, the buildings so unique they serve as landmarks to locals. With the mention of a Tigers baseball or Lions football game, smelling the goods and the bads both - popcorn, spilled beer, cigarette smoke, fireworks (hopefully it was fireworks), those cinnamon sugar candied nuts. Aisha Sabatini Sloan has captured the soul of Detroit so well, though, that even someone who hasn't stepped foot in Michigan will still get a good sense of The Motor City. Beyond The Motor City though, Aisha describes circumstances we can all relate to in some way. Like when she says about a couple who is fishing, "...watching the man, wishing he were as at ease as he meant to be when he woke up and headed to the river." No matter the river, no matter the city, haven't you felt this?

Though I'm pretty familiar with the city, there was still so much I'd yet to learn about it. The unique perspective of a family member is shared, and it hit close to home. She worked (works?) at the precinct a few over from one of my husband's best friends, but hearing this new take on policing Detroit was SO eye opening.

With how beautifully she shares some of Detroit's specificities, how Aisha can describe art so viscerally is stunning. The audiobook format of this collection is read by the author herself, lending to the heart put into these essays. I'd highly recommend the audiobook in addition to the print format if you're hoping to visit any of the places mentioned, as it's sometimes hard to catch their names as you go.

{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, HighBridge Audio and Graywolf Press for the ALC in exchange for my honest review!}

[Kurt Neumaier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Art as metaphor as essay. Some of these are legit incredible, while some of them just didn't connect with me.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 bumped to 4.0. I especially liked the essays about Detroit.

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

katy was so on the nose to generously give me a copy of this book! exciting and alive creative nonfiction that’s not afraid to take a risk and bring the reader along the narrators process of reckoning with the relationship between place, race, and art.

[Oscreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning collection of essays.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit" by Aisha Sabatini Sloan is a poignant and introspective exploration of identity, memory, and the complex interplay between personal and collective histories. Sloan weaves a lyrical tapestry that navigates the intersections of her African-American and Arab heritage, offering readers a unique perspective on the intricate threads that connect us to our past.

The title itself encapsulates the book's central theme — the juxtaposition of a war-torn Middle Eastern city with the urban landscape of Detroit. Sloan skillfully delves into her family's experiences, shedding light on the ways in which war, displacement, and cultural heritage shape individual narratives.

The prose is both evocative and contemplative, inviting readers to reflect on their own connections to place and lineage. Through a series of interconnected essays, Sloan seamlessly combines the personal and the political, creating a work that resonates on multiple levels.

"Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit" is a beautifully crafted collection that invites readers to consider the complexities of identity and the power of storytelling in shaping our understanding of self and community. Sloan's writing is a testament to the richness of diverse voices in contemporary literature.

[Abby]

I fear that in my review of Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s previous book, I may have given the impression that her essays are vague or without a sense of purpose. If so, let me correct the record: Oh, she’s got points.

I read this because I will frankly read anything with Sloan’s name on it, but I am also on an art-and-music reading kick, maybe preparatory for an art-and-music writing kick. Nobody does this better than Sloan. This is a way of experiencing art and music that is so integral, so demonstrative of sensitivity as power, open heart as force.

As opposed to the kind of force that rends people's spines or shoots them in the head, which also comes up.

I was going to point out favorite essays, but there are like five and that's practically half the book. Just go for it.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great collection of essays. I like Sloan’s writing style and how she weaved her essays with personal narrative, research, contemplation, and social critique. There were definitely some subjects that I was unfamiliar with, but I didn’t find myself lost in the writing. Definitely looking forward to reading more of her work.

[k-os]

RAMADI IN DETROIT, much like Maggie Nelson or Claudia Rankine’s writing, bristles with a kind of brilliance you can only shake your head & whistle at. The way Sabatini Sloan moves seamlessly from one topic to the next, from high culture to low, from personal to academic, is endlessly impressive. And she writes one hell of a last sentence!

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

These essays are so smart and sharp. They weave together art, life, and the world as we know it in ways that highlight each element. Reminiscent of Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine.

[Kate Ringer · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the construction of these essays, Sloan draws from a body of writing and art that I have no prior knowledge of. I spent a lot of time googling and putting books on hold while I read, because despite not really understanding what she was talking about, I was moved by the way she wove the different strands of ideas together.

My favorite element was the way she wrote about her father. No, actually, that was just one of my favorite elements. Maybe my true favorite was the absolute rage that comes through the page on multiple occasions. Rage towards her father, toward the realities of Alzheimer's and dementia, toward racism. The way she cries through her rage, teaches through her rage, writes through her rage.

I want Sloan to be my teacher so she can give me homework, tell me what to read, and write comments on my essays.

As a recent patron of many a museum, and for other reasons, this quote in particular resonated with me:

"Upon entering the museum, my father and I got into a minor scuffle with one, then three security guards over whether or not my dad's selfie stick was indeed a selfie stick if he thought it might be used as a 'unipod.' I hissed at him, 'Don't make a scene,' and then I realized from the way they were looking back and forth between me and my dad that the security guards weren't so much comforted by my presence as they were invisibly sucking their teeth at this coddled biracial kid who didn't know how to respect her elders. Somebody looked scared, like she was shielding her son's body from us. Also: there were about five hundred student groups that day. I kept doing that thing that adults do in the face of adolescent swagger, where you act like you're so above it and then you stumble into something" ("One American Goes to See 30 Americans", 115-6).

[T Brown]

Accessible prose treading Black art, lifetime and white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy in the Midwest. Readers are exposed to juxtaposing perspectives on humanistic potentiality with respect to power, race, gender, class and information/indoctrination. A few of the essays are arguably found to be imbued with less of a radical instigation urging a sociopolitical revolution. I think there is value and merit in writers identifying and prioritizing their personal stakes in their work which Sabatini Sloan does via curation. "Dreaming" conjures an transnational voice piecemeal: incorporating fine and folk art collected across the African Diaspora to write about Detroit. It parallels diasporic movement in its narrative structure: lacking a defined genre wholesale, intriguing me as a contemporary reader but often falling short in originality resisting white supremacist structure. Why did she spend so much time talking about her white cop cousin?

[Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

YESSSSSSS.

[Frank Jude · Rating 5 out of 5]

First things first: I know Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Not only that, I love her.

I had the honor for a time to be her teacher (of Buddhism and mindfulness meditation) and as her teacher I have learned so very much from her. I also have the honor of being her preceptor, and though I've not seen her in way too long a time, I hold her in my heartmind - as I do many of those students who have touched me in ways they do not know.

SO, you may think I'm biased and that this review couldn't possibly be "impartial." But as someone who used to write music reviews, if I really didn't like this book; if I weren't stirred, moved, sometimes overwhelmed by the strength and beauty in this book, I'd just not write anything. I only wrote about music I loved. I tossed the albums of mediocrity and focused on what had impacted me. Except once, but that's another story…. So, I will admit to being partial to great art that moves me, and this book most certainly does.

Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit is Aisha's second collection of essays. The Fluency of Light, published by the University of Iowa Press in 2013 is as brilliant and splendid and full of light as well. There she focused on interpenetrating essays on art, music, and identity as a mixed-race daughter. Here too, a confession. I've had the pleasure to meet her mom and dad and I got to see where she comes from and it is truly from love and devotion; creativity and intelligence and kindness. I have such a deep respect for both of them and wish we lived near each other so we could meet for coffee and conversation.

In Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, Aisha's dad plays a recurring role and as a father myself of two daughters, I found it comforting to see how the love shines through even the most tense moments between them. At times even humor breaks through at the most tense moments like the time, in the title essay, when as father and daughter are driving through the streets of Detroit and gunshots are heard. Aisha shouts out to her father who is driving, "DAD, GO. THERE WERE GUNSHOTS. KEEP DRIVING. DRIVE FASTER." But her dad stops the car instead! As they drive away from the scene, the vivid aliveness of them "reenacting the conversation and laughing harder each time" feels like a memory rather than someone else's story. "I was like, 'GO FASTER,'" "And I was all, 'You want me to stop?'"

And speaking of stopping. Great art - like serious meditation practice - makes the mind stop. It has to if we're ever going to be able to think differently; to feel differently. I am not exaggerating to say that on every page - sometimes more than once - Aisha writes something that just makes my mind stop. I have to breathe and completely re-form an image in a different way; a different light. Re-read and then re-read again the sentence or paragraph. Like in meditation, this stopping of the mind is not a dullness but a breaking in of light. The train of thoughts gets derailed and in that liminal mind space, a new vision; a new way of thinking and the possibility of a new way of loving, living, relating opens up.

Finally, as I know her, I keep hearing her voice in my mind as I read her words on the page, and it strikes me that some of these essays, like the title essay, "'D' Is For the Dance of Hours," and the gripping closing essay, "Caldera," would make wonderful monologues. Her essays often start off with a concrete image, then seem to spin out in myriad directions and you wonder what is the connection; what's the point? Then seemingly effortlessly, everything comes to a focused pin-point in the final sentence that - stops the mind and takes the breath away. I remember having such experiences back in the late 70s and early 80s when I'd attend performances by monologists like Spalding Gray or Laurie Anderson.

Kiese Laymon's back cover blurb puts it way more succinctly than I have: "Aisha Sabatini Sloan manages to produce a collection of essays that are at once innovative, inspiring, sobering, and absolutely terrifying while daring every other essayist in the country to catch up."

[Jerrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a balm for short-circuited imagination - personal and collective.

These days it feels like we are all subjects to a conspiracy against hope. Given a bad name, hope now feels not only elusive but alienating. But this malaise must be resisted. Real hope is never easy; nonetheless, it is worth our fight.

In these essays, Aisha Sabatini Sloan ably navigates a blasted sociocultural landscape, excavating moments of beauty and terror from art and life. She enacts an aesthetic and ethics of reaching. For more possibility, for more care, for more dreaming, for more vision. The book plays with form and quietly teases out echoes over its length that bring insight to questions of race, violence, power, and legacy. A collection not to be missed.

[Seiler Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great Braiding essays in this piece. A lot about race and philosophy that will make you think. So happy to have read this book for class

[Katy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this! Great weaving together of personal essay/art criticism/reflection. This felt like a very polished writing-as-thinking which I really like.

[Josh]

At the risk of sounding overly trite: Aisha Sabatini Sloan is a masterful poet, managing to weave insights and beauty into the most natural of paragraphs. More than a collection of essays, this is a collection of paragraphs, each its own thought with a unique identity, and each interwoven into the seams of each essay and the whole. This is a book that need not speak for anyone except for the author's, and what a voice it is!

“There is a poet at the conference who was born in Somalia and grew up in Ohio and who looks like THE SUN EXPLODED AND A WOMAN WALKED OUT. She spent the evening before Prince died whispering some kind of Lorraine-Hansberry-meets-Nina-Simone, pure-gold-wisdom art-love into your ear and your heart was healed and your dad was there and it was his birthday and everybody sang even though they’d just met him. All of this to say that the poet sings ‘When Doves Cry’ at the beginning of her reading. All of Ithaca falls silent.”

“There is a bookstore with such a good display of African American contemporary poetry that you don’t feel self-conscious that the shopkeeper is watching to see if you are stealing. This means a lot, you realize, about poetry.”

“In the car that day, we are quiet as Leela sings in the back seat. Kara writes in her journal, ‘her hair heavy with lake water and strung out over glistening shoulders. Like heartstrings or gold. Singing so under her breath (like borrowed breath), big lily pad eyes and we are lost but the trees burst. To constellations as the tires turn, bent by the crowbar of her song.”

“’Now,’ Kinnell says, ‘does anyone want to read a poem?’ It doesn’t matter that we are already reading one. It doesn’t matter that he is already reading his own. ‘That’s nice,’ he’ll say, pronouncing his poetry as if for the first time. Kate notices that when he reads, it gets silent, and his voice changes—‘deeper, raspier, and round.’ His approximations of language cast the afternoon into something dreamlike. Fergus points to a tree: ‘That’s where I fell when I was a boy.’ Because this refers to one of his father’s poems, we titter, starstruck.”

Music mentioned that I should listen to:
- The Flower Duet (Lakmé)
- Ladysmith Black Mambazo
- Aretha Franklin’s performance of Nessun Dorma

[chantel nouseforaname · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books of essays that I've ever read. Definitely the best I've read so far this year. A new favourite.

I found this book in another city on a random walk through a book store. Reading about intersections of history, art, personal suffering, education, empathy, sympathy and confusion in this book made me have numerous long chat sessions with my journal and many a conversation with ChatGPT.

All the essays go hard, however some stand out essays that hit me really hard were:

A Clear Presence, putting Rodney king, Christopher Dorner and artist David Hockney in conversation with each other and using each individual to explain the layers of each other was brilliant, it was a heavy opener, being the first essay, and was incredibly well executed. That first one set the stage of a level of intent and intensity in the writer's work that I'm overjoyed that I got to experience.

The essay, Ocean Park was next level. Sloan interrogates Joan Didion's externalizations of losing a child discussed in her books against massive losses like losing everything in a bombing, re: Hiroshima. It was intense. It brought up so many thoughts.

D is for the Dance of the Hours is awe-inspiring writing. It demonstrates talent and a thought process that is unmatched. It was perfectly engaging, insightful and piercing.

In That Black Abundance - the author's reverence for Kiese Laymon is highly relatable. Her contiguity of Kiese with her dad and then placed in discussion with Will Smith's character in Six Degrees of Separation is unique and eye-opening as it relates to talent, the talented-tenth ideology, Black fathers, etc. I loved reading it. Check out more on her dad here.

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is a new favourite writer of mine, this was #1 on best books I've read in 2024. You heard it here first.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a way Sloan can make thinking an occupation in some of these essays. Like when you're thinking about something, and then the full weight of whatever you've thought about in your life raises up to help you think about something further. I mean, yes, I know I'm just saying these essays reveal Sloan as a cultured person in the best light possible. But just saying she has a full scope of culture doesn't do justice to what happens. The opening essay where Rodney King's death in a swimming pool is juxtaposed to David Hockney's paintings of swimming pool, and using that to think about the limits of writing about King. How could she possibly express the complexity of his life after his experience, both what was seen on television and the consequences when everyone in the world has seen that happen to you on television.

Another juxtaposition between opera and riding along with her cousin who works on the Detroit police. And then add in layers of family, biracial identity, and the events from the ride along. Sloan shows such dexterity maneuvering through all of it, sowing a pathos that feels without end.

For my reading, these are the memorable pieces. I'm unsure why there is a handful of not-so-memorable essays interspersed through the book. I'm not sure how to relate them to these impactful pieces.

[Jola · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really good read. I am always picky when it comes to creative non-fiction so when this was selected as required reading for a class I was taking, I was not sure what to expect. Ms. Sabatini has a really versatile writing style especially the uncanny way she spins rather macabre details in a whimsical light. As a reader, it had an unusual way of letting gruesome details land delicately to the point where by the time you come to the realization of the seriousness of what you have just read, you are still basking in the joy of the writers glorious prose.

[Kellylynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure why I do this to myself, I really am not the target audience for a book of essays. This was just not my cup of tea. I wish they had all tied together a bit more smoothly. I loved the interactions with her father and wish she had delved into those a bit deeper. It seems like she has something to say but for me it just felt like a spewing of thoughts that have some small thread connecting it all.

Yes, they are well written. I just did not feel fully engaged.

I won this in one of the giveaways.

[Nathan Halstead · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really appreciate a lot of what Sloan brings to the table here, but the references were incessant and every single time one didn’t land it thrust me out of the rhythm of the essay trying to place where I might or might not have heard of xyz thing. The perspective that Sloan provides on the topics here are profound, grounded, and interesting, but in execution I found the collection as a whole a bit lacking. Three stars. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

[Madeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is a master of the braided essay and this is apparent throughout every page of Dreaming of Ramadi. For all of my fellow graduate students out there who are also studying writing, you'll close this book with a whole new set of tools added to your writer's belt. Plus it's a great read. The best of both worlds perhaps? I think so.

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic book. Aisha Sloan has a way of weaving together art history and personal narrative to create something sublime. Her writing is impossible not to fall in love with, and through her writing and the stories of the people in her life, the artists and writers she features come into focus in new ways. I'm absolutely smitten.

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

I left this and came back to it, but some of these essays are just so good. Grays Anatomy gets me every time. Layered and associative and digressive essays, circling blackness, art, our era, Detroit, teaching and writing. Smart and strange and fearless and weird.

[Shruthika · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a book i probably should not have read while on the stairmaster because i was not able to savor it nearly as much as i wish i did but very very cool essay collection! she connects art and pop culture and family and community so well