Born into a refugee family of Afghan doctors in Berlin, Aria Aber is the author of the poetry collection Hard Damage, which won the Prairie Schooner Prize in 2019. Since the publication of the book, I’ve read it several times, admiring the courage and candor with which this poet confronts the detritus left behind by Afghanistan’s many wars. As a young girl inhabiting a sequestered space in gentrified Berlin attempts to decode Rilke’s esoteric mysticism, Aber magnifies the excessive, violent memories of the home country, often besieging the lyrical ambience of her poems with a mood that is purposefully dark and disorienting.
Now, in her novel Good Girl, Aber has named and further developed the protagonist of her poems. Nilab is 19 and drawn to partying and photography, substance use, and sex. The novel derives complexity and strength from how the author, beneath the surface of the narration, keeps scissoring Nilab’s indulging in drugs and chasing after sexual desire with what her history entails: a mundane, exilic existence marked by the memory of brazen anti-immigrant violence.
Good Girl is a sense-bending portrait of what it means to be young, to be capable of love. Aber masterfully drifts through techno bars, migrant ghettos, and Nilab’s fond contemplations on Kafka, creating from dark storms of chaos a glimmering arc of girlhood, which despite the neo-Nazi who lives next door, reads like a defiant love letter to Berlin.
Feroz Rather (FR): I want to begin by mentioning your debut, Hard Damage, that came out in 2019. Besides finding Persian-origin words such as jainamaz and sheer chai (which, in a country neighboring the one your parents come from, we also drink in Kashmir), what strikes me about your collection of poems is not only your resolve to collide with the consequences of American intervention in Afghanistan with a formal acumen and lyrical candor that is singularly your own. What I most admire is the breadth of your range: the quickness with which you veer from wasted killing fields to the sequestered existence of a forlorn Afghan family in gentrified Berlin, as a young girl attempts to make sense of Rilke’s mystical heart.
Aria Aber (AA): Thank you so much for your kind words about the poetry collection. I feel very grateful that it resonated with you. Those words, such as jainamaz and sheer chai, speak exactly to people like you: They serve as signifiers that attempt to reach people within my community, which, of course, is vaster than the imperially imposed borders of a single nation-state, especially if we think about the history of Afghanistan as a British protectorate and the many empires that ruled over the region.
I always have lived—and probably will live—in the lacunae between my Afghan family’s history, their disenfranchisement in the early years, their anglophile ambitions, and my own German education (which introduced me to poets such as Rilke). I like the idea of “collision” as a framework to think through craft, lyric leaps, and associative qualities. Poetry feels like a refuge to me, because it eschews linearity and allows for simultaneity of tenses, experiences, and cultures.
FR: In your novel, Good Girl, you continue exploring the theme of dislocation. Here, you embraced the complexity of constructing multiple coordinates of your main character, Nilab, who is 19 and drawn to partying, photography, and sex. And throughout the novel, you also mix Nilab indulging in drugs and chasing sexual desire with sporadic acts of anti-immigrant violence.
Such mixing of Nilab’s disorientation and her awareness of her own real existence helps explain why I find you to be a very disciplined writer. Slowly and deliberately, as you construct the novelistic edifice, you achieve your own version of bildungsroman.
Tell us about how you started writing Good Girl. And how did you go about finishing it?
AA: I knew I wanted to write a bildungsroman for years. I started experimenting with the earliest chapters of Good Girl during my fellowship year in Wisconsin, when Hard Damage was already under contract but not yet published. My poetry collection too borrows from a novelistic structure: Hard Damage begins with a speaker in childhood, moves through various stages of her upbringing, includes archetypal mother and father and sister figures, and then ends with an adult speaker in the US, who has been changed by the arc of the book.
I am very invested in what brings a character to change: what leads to their moment of realization, a confirmation of a knowledge they have always felt or suspected but didn’t want to accept as true. This was the driving force behind the creation of Nilab as a character. However, it took me a long time to find the right voice for the first-person narrator in Good Girl, and I tried out different versions.
It all fell into place once I understood that the uncovering of the neo-Nazi underground organization, the NSU (National Socialist Underground), would frame the narrative. Until the final draft, the novel began with a prelude that meditated on the Pink Panther propaganda video and the narrator’s experience of seeing murder victims who looked like relatives all over the news. Writing that prelude really allowed me to focus on the novel’s central themes and atmosphere, which is steeped in the underlying violence and danger incurred by the fascist ideologies of white supremacy and Nazism, which have never been entirely purged from German society. After all, when I first sat down to write the bulk of the first draft, it was 2020, I was living in Berlin, and experienced political upheaval on all sides, amplified by the pandemic: On the one hand there was the summer of Floyd and on the other, in February of that year, a white supremacist had shot nine people of “Southern look” in the German city of Hanau.
But of course, the surface narrative is about Nilab’s identity crisis, her love for hedonism and partying, and the tension between self-destruction and self-realization. Her artistic evolution synthesizes this dilemma: She carves a way out of her suffocating circumstances by committing herself to the art of photography. I wanted to craft Good Girl as a novel of contradictions—aging and youth, love and hatred, friendship and romance, art and politics, capitalism and Marxism—and also as a novel of parallel societies: the parallel society of immigrants and refugees within a city like Berlin, and the parallel society of ravers within the countercultural spheres of nightclubs and after-hours sessions. Nilab was a perfect character because she is a shape-shifter and code-switcher: She can move seamlessly from one room to the other and diagnose the similarities and tensions between them.
FR: In Good Girl, you capture Nilab’s life with such vulnerability that only a poet is capable of plumbing. I’m reminded of a line from your poem, “Reading Rilke in Berlin”: “Little has been purloined from me … nobody has touched me on my innermost parts.”
AA: I love that you refer to that opening poem in Hard Damage, because it definitely encapsulates my whole ars poetica. Interestingly, I initially hadn’t included much about Nilab’s early family life. But through the help of my agent, Bill Clegg, I understood that her past is as important as the present-day narrative, and that the reader must learn about her formative childhood experiences to contextualize her current behavior. This led to the inclusion of the more associative and lyrically charged chapters that puncture the present-day narrative in the first half of the book. Those were some of the most fun to write; liberated from the constraints of novelistic linearity, I could really play with the language as a poet and follow the music of each sentence.
While writing the book, I was actually thinking of a specific Rilke poem—the ending of his famous sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “For here / there is no place that does not see you. / You must change your life.” Rilke arrives at that volta after meditating on a broken, time-withered sculpture of the god of truth and poetry, and suddenly the act of looking is inverted: The speaker is being looked at by the sculpture, naked and vulnerable in front of this piece of classic art. What does it mean to be seen? What does it mean to feel compelled to change your life? Those last lines have always mystified me, and yet they are some of the most moving lines of poetry I have ever read.
Nilab comes from a political family, and fleeing them, she ends up in a political group of friends. Still, she herself is quite apolitical until the very end; she doesn’t want to accept herself as affected by those circumstances, she doesn’t want to look at the wound, because doing so would necessitate her changing her life.
I was drawn to lushness and excess—not just because it comes to me naturally, but because I was interested in how lushness can enact an embodied experience of a splintered life on earth.
FR: As much as Nilab immerses herself in certain Western traditions—literature, photography, dance, music, even the decadent practice of taking drugs—individuals of the society she so badly wants to be a part of seldom forget that she does not belong. My sense—and perhaps my favorite thing about the novel—is that as a consequence of this dissonance, your narrative becomes relentless and morbid, attaining the shape of an obsession.
AA: The obsessive quality of the narrative owes to the fact that Nilab is on amphetamines for a big chunk of the book, which leads to a psychological tunnel vision. I tried to re-create that in the prose style, focusing on her hyperfixation on Marlowe and by proxy, the lifestyle he represents.
Before we learn who he really is, he epitomizes, at least for the first part of the book, the pinnacle of success and self-fulfillment and freedom. She is quite addicted to him. This obsession is complicated and amplified by the paranoia she experiences about her identity. As long as he loves her, she believes she can be someone she’s not. But there’s an irony to her condition: As with all liars, she probably wants to be found out, so she can be liberated from the shackles she’s created for herself. Of course, her paranoia is exaggerated. Her pain about being Afghan is singular to her and not necessarily as heavily experienced by the people around her.
Nilab is an unreliable narrator, and the way she relates the world is colored by her low self-esteem. While it’s true that some people would never accept her, this doesn’t apply to everyone. Her friends, including Eli and Doreen and Romy and Anna, accept her all the same, even after they find out that she’s Afghan and not Greek. It’s her own self-hatred that imposes limits on her ability to let go and be comfortable in her environment: She will never feel as though she belongs in those rooms, because she doesn’t see herself as belonging within them.
FR: Drifting through techno clubs, migrant ghettos, and Nilab’s fond contemplations on Kafka (despite the neo-Nazi who lives next door), Good Girl reads like a defiant love letter to Berlin. At the same time—even while capturing your narrator’s movement through these disparate realms—you also register multiple moments in her journey to self-discovery that are so strange that they move into a sort of extrahistorical realm. At one point, Nilab says: “Sometimes even this was not enough, and I yearned for more—spit and welts, for the glitter of skin and bites to accumulate in violent domination, to achieve total obliteration of consciousness. The goal of sex was not just to lose all sense of self but to forget death. Push and pull of desire, the blood and awkwardness, the strange odors and liquids, the power, which was both mine and his, regardless of submission—all these mechanisms produced the illusion of having stopped time.” These moments are existential and truly unique to Nilab, making her a being of own: Her body is riddled with yearning, across and beyond the fault lines of religion, culture, and nation.
AA: Good Girl is a bildungsroman, for sure, but I also think of it as a künstlerroman. The experiences of coming of age and coming into art—of finding your own voice and a vision for your craft—are spiritual and psychological journeys, and, for lack of a better word, universal.
I don’t even know what I mean when I say “universal.” That word is so frequently used in writing workshops to denigrate the work of marginalized authors, who allegedly belong to a pigeonhole of alien particularity that fails to speak to the “real” and “universal” aspects of the lives of the cultural majority. I am trying to say that I hope that Nilab’s experiences will resonate with readers from all walks of life, not just young Afghan women who love to party and lie about where they’re from.
Ultimately, this story is about many things: toxic relationships, substance abuse, confusing friendships, grief over a parent, political awakenings, and so on. These are experiences that are shared across the human spectrum. And yes, the novel is a love letter to Berlin; after all, the story couldn’t have taken place anywhere else.
Berlin was the home of Walter Benjamin, it housed the Führerbunker, it was cut in two by the German Democratic Republic, and now it is home to some of the largest Turkish and Arab immigrant communities in Europe. I love that city, with its unruly and melancholy history, with its diversity and defiance, with its rebellious nature. Berlin is one of the few places in the world where I feel at home. It was important to me to write about its beauty, and not just about its violence.
FR: Do you think of Good Girl as a poet’s novel? If yes, how is a poet’s novel different from a novelist’s novel? What does that mean in terms of character construction and the size and scope of character?
AA: I hesitate to characterize my book within that framework, as I don’t know how I would define a poet’s novel versus a novelist’s novel. Moreover, I was definitely not thinking about these demarcations while writing.
A friend of mine, a great novelist, actually called me after reading the book to tell me how surprised she was that it was not a poet’s novel. She spoke about techniques of foreshadowing and Freytag’s pyramid, which of course builds upon Aristotelian ideas of climax and reversal. We don’t really think of those conventions when we consider Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge or Eileen Myles’s Inferno, which are perhaps the most classic examples of a poet’s novel.
The history of the novel emerges, as with all literary writing, out of the oral tradition of storytelling, with books such as The Aesop Romance or Subandhu’s Vasavadatta. They are closely related to the epic, and while Good Girl is not an epic, it definitely has a clear beginning, middle, and end, and variations of a hero and antihero in its set of characters. My “The Art of the Novel” class in undergrad began with Homer’s Odyssey and ended with Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, which speaks to the variegated ways one could conceive of a long narrative form. There are so many different ways to go about it!
While writing and revising the novel, I was referring to Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. All those are impeccable examples of an exilic character drifting through an urban space, experiencing both alienation and desire. The stream-of-consciousness narratives of the first-person protagonists in those three books have poetic qualities, but we don’t think of those books as poet’s novels, per se, even though Baldwin did write poetry.
The generic binary between poet and novelist is a rather modern invention, as most writers write in more than one genre. Are Shakespeare’s plays poet’s plays? Is Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther a poet’s novel? Does Raven Leilani’s Luster count as a poet’s novel? What about the novels of Margaret Atwood, who also started as a poet? At the same time, it’s also true that I allowed myself to play with language and sound while composing, especially in the childhood chapters. So I’d say that my poet’s education saturates the prose style more than the character construction or development.
FR: Mario Vargas Llosa’s essay on William Faulkner made me conscious of how the lyrical and grotesque can coexist within the fictional space offered by the novel. Likewise, even though your voice is largely realistic, it is also contemplative: The diction becomes by turns tender and lyrical, but also darkly disorienting and grotesque.
How do you view your style? How do you connect it to your grappling with the history that created Nilab and the feelings engendered in her—specifically, the cultural uprooting and the bright hauntings of the war as well as nightmarish destruction caused by the drones that fell over Afghanistan?
AA: This question builds beautifully on the idea of a poet’s novel, or rather, a poet’s style. An early professor and mentor of mine, Meghan O’Rourke, once said that one cannot choose their style. Your style, just like your obsessions, is often inherent.
My aesthetic preoccupations are an extension of my ethical view of the world. And this view is inundated by simultaneity: My weltanschauung is quite grotesque, in the sense that it collapses spatial and temporal boundaries. The past overshadows the present, just as the Eastern countries overshadow the Western ones. I feel a kinship to Faulkner in that regard; he too was preoccupied with the violence that undergirds our daily lives, even though his theme was the American South and not the so-called Middle East.
Like most people who live in exile, I am always aware of what is not here, what is lost: While I teach at a university in the US, Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls are not allowed to pursue education beyond sixth grade. Today—while children and families in Palestine are slaughtered, entire villages are ethnically cleansed, and Afghan refugees are mass deported from Pakistan—I order a vanilla almond latte at a coffee cart in Brooklyn and look up at the red foliage of autumn trees. My tax dollars pay for the bombs that rain down on the other side of the world.
The violence of war and empire perpetually drones on in my mind, sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, but it’s always present. Perhaps that’s why, for this book, I was drawn to lushness and excess—not just because it comes to me naturally, but because I was interested in how lushness can enact an embodied experience of a splintered life on earth. The style speaks to the paradoxes of life in exile: the intense knowledge and ignorance, the tragedy and privilege of survival abroad.
Personally, I’m quite obsessed with the textures of the physical world, because all of it—architecture, interior decor, nature—speaks to my degrees of belonging. The Northern flora and fauna of the East Coast in the US, just like the topographies of Germany, have always alienated me. The colors of the trees here feel wrong, and I didn’t quite understand it until I saw Afghanistan for the first time—even the light looks different. I tell my students to keep observation notebooks, because I want their texts to meditate on the sensory data of their lives. This is not purely about excess of syntax and style, but rather about observing the world around them as a text, and the text as a world in itself.
After all, even the make of a table can tell us about a character’s background, their preoccupations, and material conditions. This is not a hard rule—of course, there are writers such as Beckett or Oppen or even Kafka, who wonderfully write about the ironies and complexities of life without paying too much attention to sweat and cherry blossom petals and the way sunlight reflects through a glass of tea on a nightstand. And sometimes the lack of excess is actually the preferred style. The pain of exile can lead to depression and “fractured speech,” or what Julia Kristeva calls “frugal musicality,” as beautifully quoted by Solmaz Sharif in her poem “Beauty.” I guess Nilab hasn’t arrived at that frugal musicality yet—her consciousness is still exuberant, overflowing, Whitmanesque.
Nilab in Good Girl is still young and hopeful, but she is also very attuned to her position’s heightened contradictions. Because she is full of rage, her language at times erupts with sensory detail: Even in moments of absolute self-destruction, she yearns for life. 
Featured image: Photograph of Aria Aber by Samantha Hillman