Poured Over: Aria Aber on Good Girl
Good Girl by Aria Aber is a coming-of-age novel featuring the daughter of Afghan immigrants set against the backdrop of Berlin’s creative scene. Aber joins us to talk about themes of identity and exile, speaking and reading in multiple languages, her literary influences in prose and poetry and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.
This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.
New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app
Featured Books (Episode):
Good Girl by Aria Aber
Hard Damage by Aria Aber
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Luster by Raven Leilani
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
The Girls by Emma Cline
Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer:
I’m Miwa Messer. I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Aria Aber. Okay. Show I’m late to the poems. I’ve said this before on the show, Hard Damage, which came out in I think 2019, University of Nebraska Press, won the Prairie Schooner Prize, which does include publication. So University of Nebraska Press, I’m pretty sure also did Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal, which is a collection I love as well. But Aria is here because she has a novel that is so mindblowingly good. And if Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is on your radar, if Raven Leilani’s Luster was a book you loved, you need Good Girl. And I’m personally really excited just to talk to her. We’re going to talk language, we’re going to talk exile, belonging, all sorts of stuff, but I’m just so excited to meet you because your work is really extraordinary. So thank you for joining us.
Aria Aber:
Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here.
Miwa Messer:
So I was doing a little homework and I heard that you had thought about becoming a lawyer, and I’m really glad you didn’t do that. I’m so glad you didn’t do that, but all right. Let me understand this. Your parents were refugees from Afghanistan. You grew up in Germany. You speak Farsi and German, but you write in English.
Aria Aber:
Yes.
Miwa Messer:
Obviously did not decide to become a lawyer. You started with poetry though, and I’m just, can we talk about this before we come to the novel? Because I need people to know you a little more before we start.
Aria Aber:
Yeah. I was born in Germany. My parents fled Afghanistan a year before I was born, and I was raised there with those two languages, but I was sent to a bilingual school from the age of 10 where I stayed for nine years. So English was pretty present as a language in my life too. But I didn’t really start writing in English until I went to college in London at Goldsmiths where I studied English literature, and I didn’t know that poets were alive. I kind of always was obsessed with language. And the first thing I ever wrote was a screenplay. I think I was 16, and for some reason it was already set in America, I guess American culture just has a hegemonic power over all kinds of Western societies. So, my imagination was inundated with American high schools, and I really wanted to set something there.
But in Germany, growing up there, I just was not exposed to any living poets, and I didn’t learn much about them until I moved to England and realized, oh, you can write poetry and get published, and there are people my age or older than me who are alive and are doing this, which was so exciting. And so, yeah, I kind of stumbled into poetry, maybe out of laziness, but also because it was easier to write for me, and I was really interested in it and ended up coming to New York to do an MFA at NYU in poetry as well, and kind of just stayed here since then. But yeah, the novel was something that I wanted to write for a long time too. So, I don’t think I ever thought of myself as pigeonholed or constrained to just one genre.
Miwa Messer:
It was funny, I was going through an interview you did with Meghan O’Rourke for the Yale Review. You sort of hinted at the fact that there would be something coming. This was right around the time when Hard Damage came out and you were like, well, there’s some stuff I don’t write about in poetry because honestly, I’m saving it for something else. And again, as I said at the top of the show, I’m late coming to Hard Damage, so I didn’t know. But now having read Good Girl, which is a coming of age set against a very clubbing kind of, it’s exactly what I wanted it to be. It’s exactly glad’s exactly what I needed it to be. I mean, it’s rough, it’s edgy, it’s messy. It’s the kind of coming of age where you have a protagonist who’s slightly unreliable. Yet you’re rooting for her because you’re like, oh, come on, kid. Figure it out. Figure it out. Figure it out. She’s got terrible taste in men.
Aria Aber:
Absolutely, yes.
Miwa Messer:
But that’s kind of the fun of the whole thing. So can we talk about Nila for a second and how she came to be? Because she’s got a great voice and she’s really genuine, and there are times when folks, she’s 19, she never sounds like a 40-year-old. She never sounds like she’s suddenly divorced and has nine kids. And I think that’s harder to do than some people might imagine.
Aria Aber:
I mean, I was kind of rushing to finish the novel because I felt as though I was growing older and more distanced from that very youthful kind of consciousness that I wanted to inhabit. In this book, I’m really drawn to first person protagonists or narrators in fiction. I find that such a seductive quality in fiction. Of course, a good third person narrator is just amazing and a classic when someone can pull it off. But there is also a beauty to inhabiting someone else’s consciousness and someone that is maybe making bad decisions, but that you can understand even though you are wanting them to do something else at all times during the reading experience. And when I set out to write Good Girl, I knew that I wanted it to be set in Berlin and to explore two different types of parallel societies that I was familiar with growing up myself. So on the one hand in Berlin, you have the immigrants and the refugees, which make up such a big part of the city’s makeup. And then you have the club culture that’s very thriving and famous too. And both of those kind of exist adjacent to the majority of the society in Germany. And both of them don’t necessarily revolve their lifestyles around the production of capital, which was really fascinating to me. And I wanted a narrator who can shapeshift and code switch and navigate both of those milieus without necessarily being super judgmental or cynical about them, but still curious and hungry and bristling against the expectations in both of those worlds. It was important to have a young person in order to bring in that kind of refreshing energy to it. I am just really interested in the bildungsroman as a genre, because you can explore a person’s development at this precipice between childhood and adulthood, which is such an intense moment of change, and that’s so universal. So I’m just really obsessed with that.
Miwa Messer:
Those late teens are so messy.
Aria Aber:
Yes, so intense. And everything feels like you think you’re the only person in the world who experiences these things.
Miwa Messer:
There’s a universality to Nila that I really appreciate. I think she wants to be numb. She doesn’t know where she wants to go to school. She really likes doing drugs. I mean, straight up. She really likes it, and she’s who she is. And I mean, she kept surprising. There were a couple of moments, and obviously we’re staying spoiler friends in this conversation. There were a couple of moments where I was like, Hmm, let’s see where this goes. One involves a castle and tripping.
Aria Aber:
That was a very fun scene to write, even though I don’t think it’s fun for the characters, but as an author, I enjoyed it.
Miwa Messer:
And as a reader it was fun too, but it didn’t quite go where you might’ve thought, which I thought once I finished.
Aria Aber:
Oh, I’m so curious where you think it was going.
Miwa Messer:
I thought there was going to be a little bit more of a moment there, and you held it off. You know what I mean? You put a little distance between I thought the whole thing was going to happen in that moment, and I was like, oh, this is good. The pacing of everything was really great and it didn’t feel like it was. There are times where you read a coming of age and the pacing can get either really manic or too elastic, where it’s like suddenly it races, races and then it slows down. It stops completely. And it’s, I’m wondering if that comes from writing poetry though, where you have to have a really innate sense of rhythm and language and tempo in a poem in a way that not necessarily every long form writer thinks about.
Aria Aber:
Oh, I love that question and that analysis. I think it might come from poetry. One thing that I was very conscious of while writing was more the music on a sentence level, on a very granular level, that’s something that I was studying and revising over and over again while I was writing it. And in terms of the pace of the story and how that evolves, it’s interesting because in poetry, I’m often suspicious of this epiphany moment that often occurs at the very end of a poem. And I like poems that play with the expectation of the epiphany occurring at the end but coming at a slightly jagged or familiarizing moment. So it might be that, but it’s also, I think, related to my relationship to exile and how I wanted to portray exile in the mind of this narrator, which is kind of playing tricks on your sense of linearity and past and present and how the future is experienced or what is expected of it.
Miwa Messer:
Can we stay with exile for a second? Because it’s something that, well, I mean, it’s always something that I want to read about And it’s funny, I was talking to a friend the other day and I was like, well, yeah, you feel like an outsider when you’re a teenager, but if I look back on my adolescence in high school years, I’m like, yeah, not an outsider. Nope, nope. Between the sports and the grades and the friends. Nope, just, nope. But I love sitting with characters who are trying to figure out where, what home is, what it means to belong. I mean, she’s so messy, but I really love this kid. I really, she’s so great. But when you’re sitting down and you’re playing with time and you’re playing with linearity and you’re playing with belonging and exile and all of these things, are you though writing sort of set pieces and then going back and putting in the connective tissue, or do you know where this arc is going?
Aria Aber:
That’s also an amazing question. I mean, I think it depends. Interestingly, I wrote the ending of Good Girl first, which is not something that happens in poetry. When I write a poem, I never start with the ending. I always start in the beginning and have idea where it leads me. But it just so happened that when I was in Berlin in 2020 and I started writing the first draft, what emerged was then the ending, and I had to figure out how to get this protagonist that just subconsciously evolved to the point where she was at the end, because it suddenly clicked for me. But it was quite difficult to figure out an arc. And then some of the childhood chapters that interrupt the linearity in the beginning, especially I included later on. So those were post hoc decisions. But I was very much aware of how manic or frantic pacing is in the present-day narrative in the novel, which is 2010, 2011, around that time. And I was also aware of these two opposite driving forces that my protagonist experiences. One of them is voracious desire for the world and all kinds of experiences, drugs, hedonism, filth. And on the other hand, she has shame, which is a moral and social feeling of inadequacy and having made a mistake, which leads to withdrawal and isolation. And that’s a much slower feeling. So every time there was a moment of conflict or an encounter where she might feel shame or that might end up in a shameful feeling, I could go back and slow down and include a childhood chapter that’s a little more reflective, even though the language there is more poetic than in the linear, than in the linear narrative. So that was fun to play around with.
Miwa Messer:
And shame is such a universal, it messes with a lot of people regardless of what the culture is. Right, absolutely. It is just one of those things where it’s like…
Aria Aber:
Nah, everyone has the capacity to feel shame if they have consciousness. As soon as we’re aware of having a self, shame is just a given.
Miwa Messer:
It’s interesting to me though, who feels shame and who doesn’t? I mean, if you put Nila up against this guy she’s dating, which is sort of the polite way to put Marlowe. I mean, we meet Marlowe. He’s messy. He’s an American expat, and if expats by nature kind of make me laugh because they tend to be who they are. But again, Marlowe, it makes perfect sense that this ends up being the terrible choice. And I’m not giving anything away by saying he’s a terrible choice. I mean, you meet this guy page one.
Aria Aber:
Yeah. It’s pretty obvious from their first encounter that this is not going to end well for her and that the relationship is kind of a toxic one. But yeah, he is kind of the opposite of her on the spectrum of immigrants, where she is the child of refugees who had no choice and had to just live in asylum for a while, whereas he is a voluntary artist, expat, he’s a white man who can blend in easier. He also embodies this artistic hedonistic lifestyle that she aspires to and freedom, most of all what she yearns for. And at the same time, it’s quite interesting that I think what she’s most obsessed with is his image.
I don’t know if I’m giving away too much by saying that she encounters him the first time in a magazine, seeing his photograph before she sees him in real life. So there is this play with surface and depth and what lurks underneath even with him and not just with her.
Miwa Messer:
Well, and he really is, I mean, he’s shameless to begin with, but he’s also very sort of shallow. And he himself is all about images and what he can do. I mean, the book that he sort of makes his reputation with his debut as it were, it’s basically him telling his parents stories and auto fiction is auto fiction, and obviously people pull from their own experience and everything, but the way it’s set up and the way that we as readers encounter his book within a book, it gave me a very good idea of where I was going with this guy. And I was like, okay… Let’s see what’s going to happen. And watching Nila though figure out who he is and what he represents, not just to her, but what he represents in a larger world, there were a couple of moments where I was like, oh, don’t open the door. Please don’t open the door. She has to open the door. It’s fine. But the cast, you have a very tight cast. You have a couple of people from her past and obviously her present. But I’m wondering if you would talk a little bit about how you sort of figured out who was going to stay. I sort of feel like you probably had a bigger cast at some point and then pared out some people, and I don’t mean that in something felt like it was missing, but more like there’s something deliberate happening here. And just knowing how some debut novels get sort of created, how people start and where you end up. I’m like, something happened in between. So what was that process like?
Aria Aber:
So in some ways, I feel like so much of writing is subconscious and the world reveals itself to you as you sit down to write, and you just deal with these characters that pop up. And a lot of them are probably background characters and don’t matter that much to the narrative or don’t propel it forward and might be confusing to the reader. So there were definitely some characters in the present day narrative, especially in that circle of Nila and Marlowe. Some friends that got cut out or some of them became one person, three people became one character in the end because they didn’t have a proper development. They were more or less flat characters. Even though to me as an author, they felt real. I understood that they didn’t propel the reading experience and didn’t add anything meaningful. And maybe if this were a 19th century Russian novel, I could have given them a separate chapter and written about their backgrounds, but I had to take that out in order to trim it.
And then the ones that stayed were important. There are two friends that she has from her school time whom I wanted to include so that she has kind of a network that is not just related to the club and that drug culture, but who are more well-adjusted and can save her to put it in quotation marks at the end, but that also offer her a kind of perspective on a life outside of this very claustrophobic club scene. And then I wanted Doreen and Eli, however you want to pronounce him, to be there as an alternative to Marlowe and to show a type of activism that is not cynical and also does not necessarily only revolve around this countercultural drug induced scene, but that is concerned with real political and theoretical values because Doreen has this funny moment where she introduces herself as a Marxist Leninist and is insistent on being precise about that.
But she also goes to all kinds of protests and sends petitions to all the friends around her. And Nila at the beginning of the novel is a little apolitical. She doesn’t really care. She is, as you said, messy. And she’s not ambitious, even though her ambition mainly is to get out of Berlin, but she’s not super studious or anything unlike these other people around her. So I needed other characters to instill some of my own ideas into also, so that not everything is on the burden of this one protagonist. And I also wanted to create a whole world, like a community, even though it’s limited in some sense. But I’m interested in power dynamics with characters rather than just one single consciousness stumbling through the world.
Miwa Messer:
Now, I liked the cacophony of it, and I liked watching Nila sort of bumble her way through. She thinks she knows so much more than I mean any 19-year-old. Right.
Aria Aber:
Yes.
Miwa Messer:
I’m sure. I thought I understood the world in all of its wonder when I was 19, and I’m sure I absolutely knew nothing looking back on it. But do you think you could have written this novel in German? I mean, it is your first language in a way.
Aria Aber:
Yeah, it is my default language. Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing is that I did my own translation. I translated into German, and then recently I did, which was a great and extremely intense experience that I hope to never repeat again. And I wrote two chapters in German first, very interestingly, even though I had not written anything in German in years, I would write emails maybe or text messages to my family and my friends. But I hadn’t ever written anything creative in five or six or seven years at that point. And then two chapters that occur late in the novel there at a festival happened in German because I did a bunch of research, and I was watching videos and listening to a bunch of music. And somehow, I think my consciousness just retrieved the remnants of the German language somehow. And it was easier to compose the draft in German. But no, I don’t think I could have written the whole thing in German. It would’ve been entirely different. So much of what I love about writing in English is dependent on the sounds of this language and the play and the fact that English is both Germanic and Latinate, right? You can use a lot of foreign words without sounding extremely pretentious, maybe a little but not extremely. And I like that you can defamiliarize English and elasticize it in these many ways that you can’t really, with German, it’s more rigid.
Miwa Messer:
Yeah, elasticize is actually a really good word to describe it. I mean, I think there’s so much more swing to English. And of course, I do not read German. I just have the experience of German that I have. But at the same time, if you look at bad example, but the example I’m going to use anyway is Conrad, right? Joseph Conrad, trilingual Polish, English and French I think, or German, I’m missing one of his languages, but he wrote all of his novels in English. And regardless of how I feel about Conrad, that’s not nothing. And so the idea that you find the language that you want to work in, or I’m pretty sure Sasha Hemon writes in English rather than Bosnian and all of these things where you’re just like, because the language can do things and it swings a little harder. And yet it’s also a language of colonialism.
Aria Aber:
It is the lingua franca, and that is kind of a fraught relationship or awareness to have while you use it. But at the same time, I do believe that it also creates a sense of democracy because English has also been inflicted by all of these other dialects and indigenous language that it has eradicated. If you think of pigeon English or South Asian dialects of English or whatever, English is not immune to the influence of the outside world either. And because it is so colonial and international, it can also, it’s just more malleable a little bit, which makes it fascinating. And for me, as a person who grew up in Germany with kind of a fraught relationship with German, even though I love that language, it also provided a sense of freedom. I could reinvent myself and it felt like an empty canvas. I didn’t feel the burden of bureaucracy and pain and foreignness, I think within it.
Miwa Messer:
And also, I mean, if you look at the history of Afghanistan too, the Brits getting there, and then obviously the Americans, I mean, there is very, the fact that the British Empire used to refer to Central Asia as the great game.
Aria Aber:
Oh, yeah.
Miwa Messer:
And I’m just like, oh, wait, sorry. What the great game is how you’re talking about Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iran and Iraq in the Middle East, all of this stuff where I’m like, that just seems ill considered.
Aria Aber:
But it’s also playing with open cards because that is how colonialism works and empires think about the rest of the world. It’s a chess board
Miwa Messer:
And borders that get drawn, and you’re like, I’m sorry — that, what are you doing? But you went to Afghanistan for the first time in 2019?
Aria Aber:
Yes. I was there when Hard Damage got published. Actually, interestingly, it wasn’t planned that way. It just happened.
Miwa Messer:
Okay. How long were you there for? Because that’s sort of a pivot moment for the country.
Aria Aber:
Yes. I was there for two weeks, and I was there only in Kabul. We wanted to explore more, but we couldn’t because there were some Taliban checkpoints that you couldn’t get through. And one of the airports was, yeah, I don’t know. It was a terrorist attack plant. That didn’t happen. But it was kind of a fraught time. And I mean, I knew that I would be in a country at war, but there were moments, and that was the most fascinating part about my experience there, where I could forget that I was at war. You would go into a museum or into a garden that was walled, and suddenly you didn’t hear any of the chaos from the city anymore. But then again, you’d walk outside and you’d see men with rifles everywhere. But it was very, very destabilizing and intense and beautiful experience. It changed my relationship to writing for a while. I felt a kind of writer’s block or silence descend upon me, at least when it came to poetry. And I didn’t write a poem for a long time. It was easier to write prose when I came back, which is, I think also now looking back how Good Girl probably started rolling.
Miwa Messer:
Oh, that’s really interesting. I mean, you did an interview with the poets, Dennis Smith and Franny Choi that, I love — that is such a fun show. So I’m going to go suggest to people too that they go listen to it because you guys are clearly having a ball, but listening to you tell that story makes me think about something you’d said to them where you were just like, listen, we are, as a society, taught to look away from pain and violence. And so looking itself is sort of, it’s very deliberate, and it can be a radical act because you choose to look at the thing. And it was partially in relation to something too that you were saying where you were talking about your own anger not really being yours.
And the poetry, I can feel when I read your poems that there is definitely sort of this th of rage underneath it all, and you’re trying to figure out what your relationship is to lots of different places and your parents’ relationships to these places as well. And then I get this novel where I’m just like, oh, I see how we get from the intellectual exercise of understanding a place that isn’t necessarily yours, but isn’t not yours. And I say, this is someone who has family in Asia too. So I have family in Japan and Taiwan, and you go, and obviously it’s a very different experience from Kabul, but it’s not like I’m in Chicago,
Aria Aber:
Right?
Miwa Messer:
And you’re figuring out what all of that means. And then I get Nila and Marlowe and their gang and good girl, and I’m like, oh, so Germany, Germany’s home, right?
Aria Aber:
Germany is home. Yeah. I mean, it is. It’s hard to admit that, but it is where I grew up. It is where I’m from, and it is the language that I’m most comfortable with. The only language that I don’t have an accent in, even though Farsi is technically my first language, my cousin, say my Canadian cousin say, I sound like I have a New Jersey accent when I don’t know where that comes from. Must be the German, probably have a German accent. It sounds like New Jersey to them, which is hilarious. But it is home, and I wanted to, I mean, actually did not grow up in Berlin, but Berlin is one of my favorite cities, and I was in Berlin when I started writing this book, and I really wanted to write a character who was grappling with a German city and her relationship to Germany and what it means to belong in Germany and not be seen as belonging there constantly having to prove yourself as being from there.
Miwa Messer:
Have your parents read either book?
Aria Aber:
My parents have read Hard Damage. They haven’t yet read Good Girl. I just sent them the finished copy last week. Yeah, I mean, my sister has read it. Yeah.
Miwa Messer:
Okay. Can I ask what she thought?
Aria Aber:
She loved it.
Miwa Messer:
Wait, is she older or younger?
Aria Aber:
She’s younger than me.
Miwa Messer:
She’s younger. Okay.
Aria Aber:
She’s younger. Yeah.
Miwa Messer:
There’s always this kind of assumption, especially with a debut novel, that there might be more of you in the book than possibly intended. And we should talk about the fact too, that Nila’s story includes her wanting to be a photographer and what it means to lead a creative life and what it means to figure out where you are in the context of your art, and watching her sort of go through that as well as kind of delightful. It seems though that there are some parallels to living a creative life when you’re also a poet and now a novelist.
Aria Aber:
Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, that was the impetus behind writing, kind of like an artist’s bildungsroman or whatever you want to call it, because that is very much embedded in the narrative of her coming of age. And I chose photography because I found it challenging, but also extremely riveting to write about visual art, especially this type of visual art that is ubiquitous where, I mean, photography is everywhere. It’s on Instagram, it’s an advertisement. We are so used to it but then taking it back a notch and thinking about analog photography when it’s still material and physical was quite fascinating to me. And because my sister’s a photographer and primarily works with analog photos, so it wasn’t my life, and I was always intrigued by it. Then there’s also the aspect of Nila being an unreliable narrator, and this is also, I don’t think a spoiler, but she lies about where she’s from because she’s grappling with the expectations of her family, but then also with the expectations of the society around her, that she’s always aware of other people’s gazes.
And when she takes self-portraits and stents in front of the camera, she has no one else’s gaze to respond to and can stage herself the way she wants to be seen in front of this device and more or less immortalize it. And then of course, there’s also the fact that she is an exile and doesn’t have access to family albums and things that other people take for granted and doesn’t so much of her past or her family’s past is in the shadows, is in the ruins that she wants to create a record of her life in the present and say, here I was. I existed. I have been on Earth. And in some ways, we do that with all kinds of art, but I was interested in photographs as this literal thing that could be a family album or an archive that she didn’t have.
Miwa Messer:
Well, it’s proof, right? Yes, exactly. It’s proof. And she doesn’t necessarily have that. I mean, there are a couple of different moments with different characters where they’re like, could you just tell the truth for five minutes? And she’s like, well, but that’s boring. Why would I do that? I’m paraphrasing her, obviously, to stay away reveal. But watching her again, figure out what she values, that’s a big piece of it. She doesn’t know what’s important to her. She just knows who’s, her dad has expectations for her. Her other friends have expectations for her. Marlowe has expectations, but he’s Marlowe. And so watching Nila piece together, what matters to her is actually where the sort of real kinetic energy of the story comes from. And it’s really kind of exciting to see her figure out what’s next. There were a couple of moments where I was like, oh, okay, okay, girly.
Aria Aber:
Yeah. She keeps on making bad decisions and going back, repetition, compulsion. She keeps thinking it might change this time. It will not.
Miwa Messer:
Can we talk about literary influences? I know you have an MFA, and I know you did the Stegner program at Stanford, so obviously you have been around lots of different kinds of influences. But I sort of want to play here for a second because it seems to me that it’s not just the visual art. I mean, certainly, and it’s not just poetry, and it’s not just prose, but all of the sort of, yeah. Can we talk about that?
Aria Aber:
Yeah, of course. I mean, I guess my main literary influences during my training or education as a poet were other poets. I love the work of Louise Glück. I love Sharon Olds. I love Yusuf and Anne Carson. Those are all kind of amazing people that I look to. Linda Greg, also an amazing poet, Sandra Lim. I love her work. She’s younger, but she has written three incredible poetry collections. And then when it came to prose, I was mostly interested in mid-century authors, Jean Rhys, James Baldwin, Marguerite Duras. I looked to those three primarily while drafting Good Girl, even though there are also a lot of contemporary writers, I love, I mean, I like Sally Rooney, as everyone does. I love Raven Leilani’s work. I love Kaveh Akbar’s work, Leslie Jamison, Isabella Hamad and a writer, really, really inspired by her work. And then I read this incredible novel last year that I can stop talking about, and I wrote a review about on it that will appear shortly, Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin.
Miwa Messer:
Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. I read that.
Aria Aber:
Yeah. I’m obsessed with that book. I guess I also, interestingly, especially early on while I was writing Good Girl, I look to Emma Cline The Girls, because she’s also dealing with a historical act of violence that she’s fictionalizing in the book, and girlhood is so important and that narrative and making bad decisions. So yeah, that’s another I was looking to.
Miwa Messer:
I totally get that. Did you read The Guest?
Aria Aber:
I did, yeah. That incredible.
Miwa Messer:
Oh, love that book. But I see the Jean Rhys and I see the Marguerite Duras and certainly the James Baldwin. And I love the idea that you’re pulling from that period as well as the current sort of present day. I mean, there’s a timeliness to Good Girl. It feels present day, but it also feels like it’s kind of a classic story, and it’s like, oh, yeah, we’ve sort of been here before the coming of age of an artist. Sure. But this girl is, I have not met this girl before. And that for me was the fun. But I love knowing that Rhys and Duras are, I go back and forth on Duras. There are times where I’m like, oh, she writes a pretty sentence, but…
Aria Aber:
She writes it 7,000 times in a row. She’s very repetitive.
Miwa Messer:
Well, she’s very repetitive, but also I feel like she is a product of colonialism in a way where I’m like, I get it. I understand where you grew up, how you grew up when you grew up. I also feel like the books themselves are repetitive, not just within the book, but also like, oh, here we go. Yeah,
Aria Aber:
Again. I think it’s so fascinating that she ended up going into film because she’s such a visual writer and to speak of photographs and visual art. She is so obsessed with a still image and how can change depending on when you look at it. So I think in her dialogue is quite mesmerizing. So I think it makes sense that she went into film and she probably excels in that medium more than a literature, but The Lover is very formative to me.
Miwa Messer:
Oh, completely. No, I think you are not alone in that at all. But if I think about too, when you say dialogue in Duras. What? I know. I know. I just remember having my head explode, and I was a teenager.
Aria Aber:
Me too. When I saw that, it’s such a good thing.
Miwa Messer:
And then you read it later as an adult, and you’re like,
Aria Aber:
Yeah.
Miwa Messer:
It really does work better as a film than it does this screen. It’s true. So did you surprise yourself at all as you were writing Good Girl?
Aria Aber:
Yes, absolutely. I mean, there were so many moments where I didn’t know what the characters were going to do. And generally, I had a broad idea of the storyline, but within the parameters of the world that I had determined for them, there were still a lot of scenes where they ended up doing things that I didn’t expect them to do, or some images would emerge, or observations that Nila made or turns they would take, and suddenly they would see something that were not planned. And that felt like creative accidents, which felt similar to writing a poem and not knowing where the next line leads you right after the line break. So in that sense, it was extremely surprising. And I also, I think surprised myself by sticking with a, I guess, loose plot. There is, I would say it’s not just commentary, because I think when I first started writing the novel and I told all my friends about it, most of whom are also poets, I think we also, it would be a very fragmentary poets’ novel without any storyline. And somehow, I was drawn to narrative, which I think is also visible in my poetry, actually. So it’s not that farfetched.
Miwa Messer:
I definitely feel a narrative in your poems. I also felt like there was a narrative running through hard damage as a collection.
Aria Aber:
I absolutely thought of a bildungsroman while putting that together.
Miwa Messer:
Yeah, no, no, no. I absolutely get that. And there are times too where you’ll sit down with a collection and you’re like, oh, I get how you organize this. But I would’ve done it slightly differently.
And I do. I am not trained in poetry in any way, shape, or form. Have I read a ton of Larkin? Yes, I’ve read a ton of Larkin. I’ve read a ton of Gwendoline Brooks and all of the people that you should read kind of thing. I love Claudia Rankine. There’s work out there where I don’t know how I would do if I formally studied poetry, but Joy Harjo, they’re just fun people to sort of groove on the page with. But it’s also nice to have a break from prose sometimes and just be able to sit with a thing where maybe it’s three lines and your eyes get really big. I was telling you, and I were talking about this before we started taping, but asylum, which is an early poem in hard damage, my jaw dropped, and I’ve read it now.
Aria Aber:
Thank you
Miwa Messer:
More than once prepping for this interview, but also because it’s really extraordinary. It’s longer than I might’ve expected. And you were talking about how you don’t like to have the sort of finale as it were at the end of the poem necessarily. And there are a couple of different places in asylum where, and it was partially because I was reading it electronically for various ands reasons. And sometimes it’s distracting to read poetry with improper line breaks, but if you focus on the language and you focus on your structure, I still had multiple points where I thought, oh, that’s…
Aria Aber:
It’s going to be at the end.
Miwa Messer:
Okay. And then you go a little further, and then you go back.
Aria Aber:
I actually typed it out so I could read it as intended.
Miwa Messer:
And it’s spectacular.
Aria Aber:
Thank you.
Miwa Messer:
It is really, really great. But can we use that as a jumping off point for a second? Because it’s the narrator is talking directly to her mother. Her mother clearly has had experience, and they’re clearly a refugee family. And I’m just wondering how much of it is sort of in conversation with your own relationship with your mother and your parents’ status as refugees? Because I mean, you’re an immigrant kid, but you are not technically a refugee, even though your parents are. And I think that I’m not parsing semantics there. That is a distinction.
Aria Aber:
It is a distinction, but I mean, we didn’t have papers until I was 11, so I was also under asylum status with my parents. Even though I was born in Germany, I was kind of what they call an anchor baby. My parents were in asylum and didn’t know where they would end up. Germany took them in, and I remember that time very vividly that we were not allowed to leave the country and that it was kind of very precarious and unstable. We might’ve ended up in America or in Denmark or in another country. My dad’s family is in Germany, so that’s why they went there. But obviously my mom’s side ended up in Canada, and people were scattered all across the globe depending on what country would take them in. So even though I was born in Germany, which I understand is an immense privilege because I don’t share the same kind of traumatic childhood memories that some of my cousins were in refugee camps in Pakistan and elsewhere before they immigrated to the West have, I think I grew up with an awareness that the country that I was living in was not my country.
I also didn’t learn German until I went into kindergarten. I picked it up very fast as it’s the case for so many immigrant children. And this my default language now, I was kind of the translator for a lot of my extended family at a young age. So I was aware of a sense of unbe belonging and also a sense of maybe not having arrived yet, because a lot of the people on my dad’s side of the family were trying to get out of Germany. Even though they had been granted asylum, they were trying to immigrate to the United States or to Australia or to Canada, where the majority of the rest of the Afghan community was of our extended relatives. So it seemed like a stopping point and not really like a home. And I think part of it had to do with how I perceived the elders in my community talk about Germany.
Then also the other part is that I did experience the material reality of not having a passport. I mean, I could have probably gotten one, right, because I was born there. So I have a birthright technically, which I also speak about in that home in asylum, but it wasn’t something that was present at first. So that was the way I grew up. And then my mom’s, one thing that I should preface before I start talking about my parents more is the reason why I think I have a novelistic disposition or novels come easily to me is also that I lie in my poems. So not everything is a factual, I think the mother and the daughter or the mother and the child in that poem in a refugee camp, which is not something that I experienced. It’s more or less a persona or an imagined poem.
But my mom’s side of the family were all activists. All of them went to political prison. My mom was in political prison for two years during the Soviet occupation. My grandfather on my father’s side was in prison for eight years. There was a lot of activism in my family, and everyone was kind of aware of the fact that you can’t rely on nation states or on housing or on anything really. That war can strike any minute, and that life is not particularly stable. So I think that understanding of exile or that exilic condition is foundational to my understanding of language, but also of home and family.
Miwa Messer:
Now that I’ve read both books, now that I’ve read Hard Damage and Good Girl, I’m kind of bummed that they’re both over. When you get to a story for the first time and you’re like, oh, yeah, this is great. I have a new book. I’m so excited. I kind of need to know if you’re working on anything new.
Aria Aber:
Yes, I am working on poetry collection, which I don’t know when it will be finished, but it’s a lot of poems that are centered around grief and in a more personal way than heart damage. There is a longer meditation on a piece of art that again, is related to the German canon, which I think haunts all of my writing, Rilke and Hard Damage and Kafka and Good Girl. And this time it’s a piece by copper etching, melancholia one. And then I’m also working or just started working on something else in prose, which will be set in the eighties in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. But it’s, yeah, just basically one page long, so I can’t talk more about it.
Miwa Messer:
Okay. I’ll be patient because I really, really want to read both of those. But Aria, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. Hard Damage is out, so if poetry maybe is not your thing, try start with Hard Damage and see where that gets you. And then Good Girl. The novel is out now, and oh man, it is such a treat. It is a really fun read.
Aria Aber:
Thank you, Miwa. Thank you so much for having me.