Aisha Sabatini Sloan Asks 'Who Are We Writing For?' at Literary Hub

Literary Hub posts Aisha Sabatini Sloan's essay, "The Dangerous Lure of Writing for White Readers in an MFA," adapted from her June 2017 keynote at the NonfictioNOW conference in Reykjavik, Iceland. Sloan's meditation on writing and for whom centers around her experience as a person of color in MFA workshops and expands to include her position within academia. Sloan finds solace in the writings of Samiya Bashir, Tisa Bryant, Renee Gladman, and Kevin Young—a relief after (and this sounds unbearable) a graduate writing workshop in which many of the participants didn't know who Jean-Michel Basquiat was. "I was the person who cry-shouted, midway through a conversation about professional basketball and slavery, 'It’s hard to be the only black or gay person in the room.' The advice that steered me toward the process of revision was coming from life experiences that were not familiar with the thoughts and ideas that arise when you are moving through the world with brown or black skin," Sloan writes. From there: 

This is not to say I’m somehow upset with my writing. I think I did a pretty good job under the circumstances. I am writing for white people on my own terms. But my workshop was composed of people who, and I don’t mean to be offensive here, but: my workshop was composed of people who, the majority of them did not know who Jean-Michel Basquiat was. This hurt my feelings. I remember that day so clearly. It was the thing that should have sent me into therapy. But I was in Arizona, and I wasn’t confident that I could find a queer-friendly therapist who knew who Jean-Michel Basquiat was.

Years later, I have had the pleasure of delving into the writing of Tisa Bryant, Gabrielle Civil, Samiya Bashir, Wendy S. Walters, Renee Gladman, Alea Adigweme… please see the participants on the “Ekphrasis and the Black Female Gaze” panel. And I can’t tell you how much of a relief that has been. I can’t tell you how much of a relief it is to come to this conference and sit on a panel with other black women who love museums. But this year in particular is a year that, for me, has involved a lot of feeling distraught that my MFA cohort couldn’t have resembled this panel a little bit more. I feel very heavy with this feeling. In The Grey Album, Kevin Young calls the books that black authors might have written but didn’t, “shadow books.”

So lately I am carrying around a real sense of shame. Of almost humiliation. And I’m not just saying that because Wayne Koestenbaum is here. I am humiliated that I was never really writing with a black reader in mind. All of the overtures that are made to “explain” the experience of being a minority are tiny coded signals that the reader is presumably unfamiliar with this experience. And the reader who doesn’t have to guess at that reality can feel those signals as a distancing. In some cases, these are teeny, tiny gestures. But the reality is, even the smallest of those gestures can feel huge. And it seeps into the level of bigger formal decisions: ok, I guess I’ll engage in conversation with the narrative risks taken by Zoe Wicomb and Michelle Cliff later. I’ll break form in a way that nods in the direction of Jean Toomer’s Cane some other time. I’ll just put that shit away for the foreseeable future.

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