Borealis

Aisha Sabatini Sloan

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781566896283
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Teoria e critica dell'arte

Art about glaciers, queer relationships, political anxiety, and the meaning of Blackness in open space— Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Aisha Sabatini Sloan's experiences moving through the Alaskan outdoors.

In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan observes shorelines, mountains, bald eagles, and Black fellow travelers while feeling menaced by the specter of nature writing. She considers the meaning of open spaces versus enclosed ones and maps out the web of queer relationships that connect her to this quaint Alaskan town. Triangulating the landscapes she moves through with glacial backdrops in the work of Black conceptual artists and writers, Sabatini Sloan complicates tropes of Alaska to suggest that the excitement, exploration, and possibility of myth-making can also be twinned by isolation, anxiety, and boredom.

Borealis is the first book commissioned for the Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen. The series investigates the ways we activate space through language. In the tradition of Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Spatial Species titles are pocket-sized editions, each keenly focused on place. Instead of tourist spots and public squares, we encounter unmarked, noncanonical spaces: edges, alleyways, diasporic traces. Such intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre, moving travelogue, fiction, or memoir into something closer to eating, drinking, and dreaming.

Driving from Anchorage to Homer takes just over four hours. As I arrive, I am listening to an episode of This American Life in which Jelani Cobb talks about the activists from Ferguson who have died mysterious, violent deaths. This listening overlays the coastline—and the ice-covered mountains now visible across the pristine bay—with burning cars. A woman speaks of death threats while I drive past a sign that says “Welcome to Homer.” Shaggy, off the side of the road, that’s a moose. Where exactly have I driven myself?

In a gray journal I’ve jotted down, “Go back / re-create a space you can’t return to.”

On the plane ride over, two White men discussed the Illuminati loudly, a conspiracy about the left that the president has been retweeting. I was sitting across from them in the last row in front of the bathroom, and people pushed their bodies into my face while moving by with such pillowlike ferocity, such sparse apology, it was best to pretend it wasn’t happening. It was like something Marina Abramović might ask people to do to her.

My first night in Homer, I dream there are flashlights beaming into the windows of the tiny house. My dream self tries to call my Airbnb hosts, then slinks down from the loft to see out the window that there are small monkeys, who are also the cast of a show I can’t quite recall—I take pictures of them. A student recently explained that you are only allowed to write about dreams once in your writing life. I blurted back, “That’s for fiction.”

This manuscript has become a grid of small, white rectangles on my kitchen table. I’ve left space between some of the rectangles, and now I’m making collages to better visualize what those spaces might be for. Some might call this procrastination. I’ve cut around the billow of a pink explosion and layered it on top of a gray square. There is a jolt of blue alongside an oval made of cotton candy–hued beach sand.

In Homer, I drive down the spit, a stretch of land that curves like a sloppy spiral jetty into the bay, covered in bald eagles. I drive slowly, remembering the play I once saw in a red playhouse called The Electric Kool-Aid Antacid Test. It was like watching Christopher Guest: LIVE. There is an almost carnivalesque area with a disintegrating ship and piles of colorful ship stuff. Docks reach out into the bay. Long stretches of rocky beach, then sandy beach. Then, two rows of shops facing each other. A ferry terminal. A huge Chinese restaurant. You can buy art and candy and indigenous halibut hooks.

I have spent three summers here with women I’ve dated, without access, or much access, to a car. I marvel at how many miles we walked or biked to get to a tent or a cabin with no running water. Now, I drive a compact rental car and stay in a tiny house that has been decorated with, I imagine, the guidance of Chip and Joanna Gaines. The floors are that gray-brown wood popularized by HGTV. There is a sconce with fake flowers. There is a small loft up a set of steep stairs. There is just enough room for a couch along the windows, punctuated by a small table. A heater that is meant to look old-timey lurks underneath the stairs. A bathroom beyond the kitchen with a bounty of clean, white towels. I lay copies of Lorna Simpson paintings on the couch like an altar.

All along the spit, Sinatra sings “When I Was Seventeen” on the car radio. It is a very slow song. Like an empty dance floor. It is lonely, and it supposes that thirty-five is the last point in this man’s life he will ever feel young. I feel all of my ages now, imagining those selves walking or biking along the water’s edge.

If I were going to choose a quotation to describe my relationship to this place, it would be this from Renee Gladman:

I began the day asking the individuals of this group of my ex-lovers to map a problem of space, but not the problem that involved the anxiety of whether they could or could not draw, nor the one that asked how it was even possible to translate “problems” into lines, rather, I meant real problems, where you had to think about where you were in a defined space and what your purpose was for being there.

I asked out K, my college girlfriend, with a quote from the film Crossing Delancey. I crafted courtly emails in a rush of adrenaline to entertain my friends. On our first date we drank sweet, hot beverages at a quiet bar in our small midwestern town. Someone was wearing cowboy boots. It was me. After the first night at her co-op, I woke to go to the printmaking studio, high off of her, living out a scene from the movie I had and had not imagined for my life: rumpled sheets. Morning light in an empty art space.

After we graduated, she moved to Alaska. Lived through a rose- and slate-skied winter with her best friend in a cabin with no running water. She had a day job assisting a dog musher. We were on again, off again when she got a dog and named him after a tropical bird.

I moved home to California and had panic attacks looping the golf course where, sometimes, I might jog past Dustin Hoffman. I looked at the ocean a lot and worked at a bookstore in a mall and cried constantly in the self-help section. I had boarded a flight from Montana to Los Angeles when suddenly I got the idea to get off the plane and buy a ticket to Alaska.

I kept unbuckling my seat belt, thinking I would march down the gangplank, go up to the counter, and fly to Fairbanks. It was the middle of winter. I had no coat. The thin White man next to me turned, slowly, and asked if I was O.K. I kept rising to disembark. For some reason, I told him everything. He listened calmly and suggested my relationship with K was not contingent on me flying to Alaska on a whim.

I flew back to my parents’ apartment. I thought I might be a nanny in France and was saving money without making any plans. One day, after hearing a friend’s roommate had moved out, I asked my manager if I could transfer to another bookstore and moved, on a whim, to Boston. When K invited me to spend the summer with her in Homer, we had been on a long pause. It was a gorgeous depression of a winter. I walked to the bookstore. Modeled with my clothes on for a drawing class near the Alewife stop at the end of the Red Line. Saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the theater. I was sleeping with a coworker who had freckles and the most delicious gap in her teeth.

In Anne Carson’s “Kinds of Water,” the speaker describes a pilgrimage along the road to Compostela. She writes about a river underneath her hotel window with a big waterfall. “There is a dark shape at the edge of the falls, as I look down, knocking this way and that in the force of the current. It would seem to be a drowned dog. It is a drowned dog.” She goes back and forth about it. “Could there be a sculpture of a drowned dog on the ledge of an ancient waterfall?”

The first time I read this passage, I felt quite positive it was about the time when I sat with K at a restaurant alongside a river in Fairbanks. There was no dead dog. The memory has a pleasant feeling—the gray sluice of water below, a strange trip so far into nowhere. It must be the sensation of coming to an edge and looking over.

A fragment of an afternoon from that time: We took a walk from a friend’s cabin toward an intersection. I remember feeling the degree to which we were inland like barometric pressure, a sensation at my sides. We were surrounded by a nostalgic version of the colors pink and green and yellow and light brown. Like experiencing summer for the first time. A character in a TV show is named Prairie, and I keep imagining something about her is relevant here.

We crossed a bridge between Homer and Fairbanks where, my girlfriend told me, trucks had been knocked over by the wind. There was a moment, in what I recall as silver light, when I seemed to say to myself, Alaska! Alaska! There must have been moon then. We stood next to a car on the edge of a road between cities. Like eclipse, it would have been an off glow. The dog named after a tropical bird would one day die on the night of a total eclipse. A short-legged, black baby with ears like an art teacher’s haircut, who scream-sang at squirrels.

Carson writes, “The moon makes a traveler hunger for something bitter in the world, what is it? I will vanish; others will come here, what is that? An old question.”

Lorna Simpson has been painting glaciers. Human-sized, cataclysmic. Eviscerated ice overlaid by a deep blue wash. Tumbling ash, full spectrum of gray. Volcanic clouds. Nothing whatsoever warm. I have long loved her photography, which is often paired with text and has an archival feel—bodies of evidence laid out with numerical precision, like slides on a light box, clinical amid a world of white space. Whereas these paintings gut. They are unfurling and torn open. A wound before the blood comes. A Vogue article explains: “Nature hasn’t looked this turbulent in a painting since J.M.W. Turner.”

According to my father, the ghost of J. M. W. Turner used to visit Gordon Parks. The dead painter sat on the edge of the dying photographer’s bed and told him stories. Parks was writing a novel about Turner at the time called The Sun Stalker.

Robin Coste Lewis uses the titles of paintings to create poems refracting the meaning of Black womanhood in her book Voyage of the Sable Venus.

In class I assign students to mimic her approach, harvesting language from the titles of art. In my notebook I reassemble words from paintings by J. M. W. Turner and call it an explanation for his appeal among Black artists:

The Battle of Light and Color.

The Decline of the Burning of the Modern.

The Shipwreck of Moses Rising through Vapour.

The Fighting Peace.

The Burial of Becalmed Heaving.

His Mouth, the Fighting.

Porch of the Deluge.

Crossing the Alps of Empire.

Rain, Slave, and Speed.

I first heard about Matthew Henson when an art professor showed us a sneak peek of the video project “True North,” created by the conceptual artist Isaac Julien. Inspired by Julien’s stark photographs of Black skin against blue-white snow, I wrote about Matthew Henson’s journey to Antarctica in a letter to my nephew, who had recently been put into solitary confinement.

Something in me positioned the prison cell against the glacier, an immediate and insistent binary. I was newly discovering meditation and interwove the letter with stories from the Anapanasati Sutta about the Buddha’s awakening. I wanted to give my nephew [proselytize] the sensation of space. The glacier made me feel as if I were on the very edge of the planet. One time, I called it “a jewel that adorned my quiet life.” As if freedom of movement could be crystallized, cut, and set into a ring. But ice is a lock. A container of suspended time.

During a conversation with Fred Moten about “the Black outdoors,” Saidiya Hartman talks about the effort to “produce a thought of the outside while in the inside.” She speaks of “trying to produce an outside, trying to create an opening.”

After watching the movie Hancock, in which Will Smith sketches his life as a Greek god into the walls of his jail cell, I write in the letter to my nephew, “I picture you on the floor of such a place, le...