Frozen in Time: On Aisha Sabatini Sloan's "Borealis"

Aisha Sabatini Sloan | Borealis | Coffee House Press | 2021 | 144 Pages

For climate archaeologists, collecting core samples from arctic ice offers a look back in time and a glimpse into an uncertain future. The layers of ice record forest fires, industrial revolutions, and the migratory paths of plastic refuse. They are also silently melting away.

For Aisha Sabatini Sloan, ice is a memory and glaciers a reification of time and space: “As if freedom of movement could be crystallized, cut, and set into a ring… ice is a lock. A container of suspended time.” In her book-length essay, Borealis, the reader joins Sabatini Sloan on a journey through Alaska, Arizona, and Iceland in an extended meditation on what it means to preserve and revisit memories, and to experience life as Black, as queer, and as an artist in the great outdoors. 

A tiny house in Homer, Alaska, popularly known as “the end of the road” and a “Cosmic Hamlet by the Sea,” is the foundation from which Sabatini Sloan’s thoughts extend. Throughout the book, she excavates memories of finding herself as a creative, falling in and out of love, and reckoning with freedom and enclosure between the endless expanse of the Alaskan wilderness and the containment of the desert prison where her nephew is concurrently incarcerated. 

She draws inspiration from the freedom nature offers alongside the sense of precarity involved in being “the other mixed girl” in a town that is over 90% white. She juxtaposes her own sense of loneliness with that of her nephew, with whom she exchanges letters during his solitary confinement. Beyond the obvious contrast between her freedom and his incarceration, Sabatini Sloan’s relationship to ice as bearing layers of memory throws the aridity of an Arizona prison, and the broader carceral system itself, into sharp relief, where its inhabitants exist in a nature without such a preservative capacity. 

Upon arriving in Homer where she spent extended periods of time living with an ex-girlfriend, she notes, “In a gray journal I’ve jotted down, ‘Go back / re-create a space you can’t return to.’” Though married at this point, Sabatini Sloan has made the trip alone in an attempt to reimmerse herself and imbue new meaning into a place redolent with memories, where “queerness has a kind of architecture.” This architecture is present but hidden in the cafes, bookstores, and firehouses in the town where Sabatini Sloan has met a semi-underground network of lesbians in Homer. These places structure her flashbacks to her previous relationship and house awkward interactions with her ex’s friends in the present, where Sabatini Sloan is constantly reminded that despite being alone she remains highly visible.

The author wrote the majority of the book between 2019 and early 2020, when the racial tensions of the Trump administration were fresh and before the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt. As a result, the queer space Sabatini Sloan returns to in Homer is disrupted almost immediately. When a walk on the beach reveals a swastika spray-painted on the side of a nearby RV, the reality of her decision starts to surface. Recognizing her position as a Black woman and a stranger in a white town, she writes, “I am alone in Alaska, I keep telling myself… for the first time, nobody but my Airbnb host has a claim on me here. I am a loose body with no clear purpose.”

Sabatini Sloan’s structural approach to Borealis embraces this sense of unmooring, perhaps in reference to the intangibility of the northern lights themselves. The floor of her rented tiny house becomes a canvas and she converses with the reader as she re-arranges the pages that ultimately comprise this book, unsettling the chronology and demonstrating the ephemerality of not only her body, but her narrative. 

The result is a pocket-sized volume whose brevity belies its seductive, deeply lyrical, and thoughtful prose. The reader is gently drawn forward and backward in time through the author’s memory spaces, allowed to resonate with and freshly imagine the experience of otherness in nature. Sabatini Sloan’s meditations on feeling out of place outdoors, tinged with anxiety about the wandering eyes of neo-Nazis and low-flying eagles, make frequent metaphorical comparisons to the withholding nature of icebergs, the sensuality of a sherbert-colored sunset, and the utilitarian satisfaction of a camp shower. These images of nature support her poetic self-analysis. “This has never been a book about glaciers so much as it is about landscape,” she writes, “which can be an internal experience Black women who have been called ‘strange’ by their sisters have had collectively, and alone.”

Sabatini Sloan engages with the theme of landscape through the “Black outdoors”—an academic-theoretical framework that attempts to reconcile “the possibilities of being outdoors together when the fraudulence of racial-sexual-ecological enclosures are laid bare.” In a recent interview with Smithsonian Magazine about the connection between wetlands in the American South and slavery, historian and environmental lawyer Victoria Gee Richards put it perhaps more succinctly: “The land remembers, but cannot speak.” Likewise, in Borealis, Sabatini Sloan’s evocation of the “Black outdoors” is a way of being in nature that seeks to resurrect and reclaim her unspoken memories and those of the spaces she inhabits.

In addition to theory, Sabatini Sloan frequently draws on the African American artist Lorna Simpson’s Ice series as a means of sorting out her own thoughts on race, temporality, and space. When looking at Simpson’s pieces, Sloan immerses herself in the architecture of the glaciers: the contrast between crisp, fractured islands of white submerged and steadily disappearing into a deep blue. In doing so, she connects ice to memory and the practice of collage to discovery and preservation. Back in the tiny house, the collages Sabatini Sloan creates in dialogue with Simpson become coping mechanisms, architectures, “a system outside of myself to keep me contained,” she writes. “Otherwise there would be nothing but freefall.”

Sabatini Sloan’s deeply personal meditations on using art to reconnect and rearrange oneself is a powerful one at a time when most people have become all too familiar with the disorientation that isolation can bring, even in spaces that were once so natural to us. As we embark on “being outside” again—a meaning that the pandemic has changed—we may also find that the more some things change, the more others stay the same. As Sabatini Sloan notes with a darkly prescient sense of humor, “Russia is so close to here… I dare you to go to Alaska and look at a map without saying something equally inane. In our minds, which are collapsing, Russia can’t possibly be this close. And by Russia, I mean a lot of things.”