![]() ![]() Introspective, Zebra was raised with books - literally. As she travels, she studies the living, growing “matrix of literature” that connects her to her ancestors. ![]() She hopes to honor their story by revisiting both the spaces her family once occupied and the books they devoured and cherished. Zebra’s meditative walking is a means for her to grapple with her tumultuous past, which started when the family fled from their home during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. This “grand tour of exile” leads her from New York through the Mediterranean and toward the country of her birth. Her obsessive and eccentric narrator, Zebra - a name she gives herself - sets out to retrace the path of her family’s exile from Iran in reverse, writing her own manifesto as she travels. In Call Me Zebra, her much-anticipated second novel, Van der Vliet Oloomi expands on these ideas. We contemplated how walking deliberately might inform our thinking and our writing. We pondered the capacity of spaces to store memory. We considered the rhythm of our movement. In pairs, we slipped out of DeBartolo and onto the quad. ![]() On the first day of her class my sophomore year, creative writing professor Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi asked us to take a walk. ![]()
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