The Brooklyn Rail

Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith, wrote:

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

Good Girl is a striking first novel by Aria Aber that effortlessly employs her innate poetic lyricism to examine all of these yearnings in a way that is distinctively articulated, yet universally resonant.

The story focuses on Nila—born in Germany to Afghan parents forced to leave their country—as she navigates early adulthood in Berlin, exploring her artistic vision and determining who she is, and what she desires. Aber’s nuanced and revealing exploration of Nila’s creative life is framed against a larger background of how emigration—exile—can deconstruct individuals, families, and society itself. What are the expectations foisted on us by culture, society, and even our friends? What do we elect to hide or release as we balance creating new roots with building an identity that speaks for who we are now, and flexible enough to contain who we might be in the future? In short: the essence of the human condition.

Aber’s ear for the immigrant/first generation experience, especially those who hail from “Othered” countries, is pitch perfect, as is her nuanced and revealing depiction of the struggles that Nila faces as she explores her artistic development and desires, resisting the strictures of being a good girl. Above all, this is a novel that is beautifully crafted and distinctly voiced, and remarkably, a debut.

Mandana Chaffa (Rail): “Who do I want to be?” is a powerful question in the novel, and though I’m well beyond the age of most of the characters, it’s one that I’m still asking myself, perhaps even more strongly now than in my youth. The novel ends right when it needs to, and the rest of Nila’s story is her own, but did you have an idea of where her life might have gone when she made her own emigration? (I was taken with that subtle parallel: Nila’s story starts because of her parents’ exile to Berlin; her move to the UK is the more hopeful journey, her first real effort at personal agency.)

Aria Aber: Those last few paragraphs were actually some of the first I wrote. So I always knew it would end with the scene of Nila returning back home to her childhood bedroom, where she stands in front of her bookshelf, looking through the pages of her favorite books. Emotionally, this is where it ends—with the realization that no one else has written her story before, and that it’s hers to tell now. Because it’s a first-person narrative, in some ways I consider Good Girl as the book about Berlin that Marlowe failed to write.

To answer your question: I don’t know what will happen to her afterwards. We see her have the first inkling of a political awakening after the murders of the Qurabni brothers, and of course, we learn that she is going to move to London to pursue an undergraduate degree in photography, but we don’t actually see her leave the city. It was important to me to end the story while she is still in Berlin. There’s a long and complex journey ahead of her, and I don’t think she is fully changed by the end, but she knows that change is inevitable; it has begun, and it will continue to come. 

Rail: You have a striking sense of place as a complex character; Good Girl is as much about Berlin—and the ghost of Afghanistan—as it is about Nila. How do the different cities you’ve lived in figure into how you work and what you create?

Aber: I consider myself a writer of exile first and foremost. All my work is concerned with geographic displacement, as my life has been shaped by the lack of a place. I’m forever uprooted; forever absent from the original place. On the one hand, this has made me a very adaptable person—I can write anywhere, as long as I have a warm bed and good lighting, no matter if I’m in Berlin, in New York, in Fès, or in Wisconsin. On the other hand, it’s an incredibly melancholy fate—I’m aware that I’m never really at home anywhere. For Good Girl, I wanted Nila’s Berlin to exist in juxtaposition to the unseen Afghanistan of her parents’ stories. Her father mentions that he felt more at home in the warmer temperatures of California, which is true for myself as well, because the flora, fauna, and light are more similar to that of Afghanistan. Marlowe is from California, and thus serves as a proxy to her father’s ambitions—the other, better country, which still glimmers with the possibility of living a life without physical alienation. But I was also living in Northern California while writing the background chapters to Marlowe’s character; so, quite literally, the places I’ve lived in make their way into my work one way or the other. 

Rail: What language do you write in? Dream in? Speak most comfortably? Given my background, I don’t have the same answer to each, and reading the scope of your work, I imagine a delicious polyglotism, the way one might creatively use the pantry to make an impromptu dinner. Are you a different Aria in Dari, or German, or English?

Aber: I love this question. I write in English, most of the time, and I dream most frequently in both German and English. I speak in my sleep, and according to my husband, I verbalize my dream arguments in both languages. I dream less often in Dari, because I just don’t speak it as frequently on a daily basis anymore. I only use it to speak to my family (and sometimes to my cat). I guess I speak German most comfortably; though it’s technically my second language, I think of it as my default language, as it’s the language I grew up with until I was twenty. And I suspect I am a slightly different person in each language, but it would be incredibly difficult to analyze how. After all, other people see you through a much clearer lens than you can see yourself!

Rail: The novel is also a study of the impact of daily, ordinary violences, to women, to the Other. Henry David Thoreau said that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I’d add that the mass of refugees bear untold humiliations. Belonging is a luxury afforded to some, and often temporarily, and a mistake by one person can impact the entire community. I’m somewhat embarrassed by the number of times I’ve seen news of a crime by someone from the Middle East and thought: “Oh, please don’t let this be an Iranian.” Related to that is the imperative that we must be “good” immigrants. Grateful. Productive. Quiet.

Aber: Recently, I had an illuminating conversation with an older Palestinian man in Vermont. I made a joke about how Afghanistan under Taliban rule is “good for the men, bad for everyone else.” He said he’d like to experience a world in which he, as a Muslim-Arab man, felt safe and respected. He said he’d had to defang himself in America, in order to not be seen as an intruder. While Nila is plagued by the idea of what it means to be good in the eyes of her patriarchal community, ironically, the men in this book—both in Nila’s Afghan community and outside of it—suffer from a similar affliction, though for them, the struggle is with the German ideal of a “good foreign man.” For brown men, especially those that are read as Muslim or Arab, the West only offers very limited roles they can fall into if they don’t want to be considered a terrorist or a threat to the social order. Often, this incurs social and psychological self-castration. It’s a terrible fate. Every time a war breaks out in a Middle Eastern country, those who are allowed to be saved are “women and children,” or educated men, men who worked for the US government. What about everyone else? What about the farmers, the old men, the young men in the countryside, those who suffer the most? Muslim and Arab men have been so dehumanized in the Western imagination that they’re not even considered civilians anymore. Of course, the violence of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which I discuss in the book, illustrates exactly that problem—these right-wing terrorists murdered men “of reproductive age,” because they didn’t want their genes to infiltrate “pure” German society.

Rail: Nila—in my notes I found myself using all her different names: Nilab, Nila, Nilou, as if they are different perfumes she wears—asks Marlowe what it’s like to complete a book, and he says, “If I’m honest, it feels like it isn’t mine anymore….” What was it like to complete this book, Aria? How does it feel now on the eve of its publication?

Aber: It’s quite astonishing how every character in a novel is an iteration of the author. I see glimpses of myself in every character, and for the conversations about art and writing between Nila and Marlowe, I instilled many of my own opinions into Marlowe. That particular sentence is something I felt about my poetry collection, Hard Damage; the book has had a life of its own and I keep being amazed at the ways it’s affecting other people. It’s magical, really. Even though poetry feels more removed from capital than fiction (no one reads poetry, we hear over and over again; there is no money in poetry, and so on…), I’m lucky that the poetry collection did in fact effect real material change in my life. I had to publish Hard Damage a little earlier than I wanted to, because I needed a book contract in order to apply for an artist green card. While writing Good Girl, on the other hand, I had more time. Because of the lack of material constraints, Good Girl feels like my real first book on a spiritual level. And yet, I was really racing to finish it, because I’m growing older and was afraid I wouldn’t have access to the consciousness of a young person anymore, as Nila’s character is on the precipice of growing up. As of now, the book still feels like it’s mine, though I’m sure it will change the minute it’s published and available for other readers, because this book, too, will become a product and enter the marketplace. 

Rail: Can we get a little metaphysical? Nila’s experiences with drugs—I’d suggest also experiences with art—often contend with a divinity of sorts: “As if the fabric between this realm and the other could rupture at any moment and we’d comprehend we weren’t real at all.” Perhaps it’s because our times feel more apocalyptic than ever—or that there are moments where time feels especially multidirectional—but this felt especially relatable. What experiences raise these kinds of emotions for you?

Aber: Club culture appropriates, and exists in relation to, ancient religious rituals (physical and spiritual connection, dance, consciousness-expanding substances, drum machines, etc.) even though all sacred elements are lost for the sake of hedonism, of course. For Nila, clubbing becomes a way to blur the boundaries between self and other. Early on, there’s a scene where she takes ketamine with her friends and has all these visions of her life as detached from her own subjecthood. Epiphany or religious ecstasy, as strived for in Sufism, are not necessarily always available to Nila and her friends—they’re more interested in escapism rather than spirituality—but glimmers of enlightenment are still present as a distant possibility. This was true for me in my youth as well. But now as I’m older and don’t partake in such epicurean activities anymore, I tend to feel the divine in everyday life: in nature, with friends, while reading a good book, or while looking at my cat or spending time with my family. Love for the world is the most divine feeling of all. I know this sounds saccharine, but sometimes I think I can see God even in the seeds of a perfect kiwi fruit. There’s magic everywhere if you’re willing to look at it. More recently, I’ve also experienced meaningful moments of connection during political organization—at protests, rallies, or even sometimes at conferences. It’s not necessarily the final event that activates the connection to the divine for me, but the entire journey beforehand—a group of people in Vermont, students and elders, who collectively work to raise the consciousness of the public for the people of Palestine, whom they feel in solidarity with. It restores my faith in humanity that you’re willing to risk your livelihood to stand for something, for someone you don’t even know and don’t have any cultural connection to. I always think of C.D. Wright’s quote “You have your life / until you use it. You forfeit the only life you know / or go to your grave with the song curled inside of you.” Following the song inside of you—allowing your life to be changed by something you believe in—that’s where the divine comes to life.

Rail: You write poems—and now novels—the way that Nila takes photographs. I love how she describes it almost as a gerund of creative expression: “A single picture—It can . . . contain everything. It’s magic, really. There are no verbs. Nothing moves, everything is.” Is photography another talent of yours that I’m just learning about? Beyond your literary transfigurations, what other artistic endeavors keep the fire burning for you, keep inspiring you to create, or perhaps, restore your spirit so you may do so?

Aber: My sister is a photographer, so as an artform it’s been very present in my life. I wanted to become a filmmaker when I was younger, and I still dream of making a film one day, but photography as a medium felt incredible not just because I am familiar with it, but because it’s both ubiquitous and incredibly mystical. What makes a photograph art? What makes it advertising? What makes it a candid Instagram post? What makes it a meme? Walter Benjamin wrote about the unconscious knowledge inherent in the earliest photographs, and I am obsessed with his concept of the aura, but also with the “accidental” magic that occurs when a photograph reveals something about the subject that is unknown to the photographer themselves. Benjamin highlights the example of the photograph of Dauthendey and his wife, who looks forlorn, her gaze directed away from the camera. The wife would end up committing suicide, and there is an eerie prescience surrounding this photograph. Do we credit this presence to our post-hoc knowledge? Or is there really a knowing essence within the picture, a psychological reality that never escaped the instrument and hence made itself eternal? I love these kinds of questions, and I chose to make Nila a photographer, because analog photographs, more often than digital ones, contain these accidental slips that transcend time. And, of course, analog photography produces a true physical original. Film and photography remain incredible sources of inspiration for me, even if I don’t work in those mediums. I love looking at, thinking about, and studying objects of visual art because I’m riveted by the technical, material, and aesthetic elements of their creation.

Rail: The depth of historical excavation that this novel explores is breathtaking: from personal to that of the family, from cultural history within or without the country of birth, and of course national history. Nila has to consider this all as she chips away at the core of who she is and who she might yet be. Can we escape our history? Let alone the history that isn’t directly ours but part of our DNA? Does it all collapse if we poke at it too long or too roughly?

Aber: I guess the point of Good Girl is that we cannot escape our history, national or familial, no matter how hard we try. Nila is haunted by history, but so is the city of Berlin, which is a big character in the book. The city is scarred by both World Wars, and then also by the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). I am deeply interested in how physical structures, such as buildings or monuments, can be considered historical artifacts even if they don’t stand in a museum. Nila walks through Berlin and brushes against the past even when she touches the wall of a building, such as the hallway leading up to Marlowe’s apartment, which is a hundred years old and has housed many generations before her. On a more granular level, inherited trauma or inherited history impacts our lives in a myriad ways, both consciously and subconsciously. Whether or not one wants to reckon with their family’s history is ultimately up to the individual. Even though Germany takes immense pride in its memory culture, the country has a long way ahead of appropriately dealing with the violence it incurred globally, for example in Herero and Namibia.

Rail: My marginalia—well, colored tabs; I can’t write in books; all those years of buying used books, it feels sacrilegious to write in a new one—is all over this book, but there are several places where I had to stop entirely. One of them was Nila’s declaration: “I lied. I am Afghan.” Many times in my life, especially after the Iranian hostage crisis in the late seventies, I’ve bobbed and weaved around the question: “Where are you from?” I’d start off with New York. Then, the Middle East. Or I’d say that my “family” was from Persia. Until one day, I started lobbing the coup de foudre of Iran even before they asked the question. “The acknowledged shame of our origins” is real, but by the end, Nila embraces it as her power.

Aber: Thank you for sharing this anecdote with me: I’ve seen this specific type of shame in so many people from North African and Western Asian countries. But not everyone can benefit from having an ethnically ambiguous name and features as I can, not everyone is as “white-passing” as people in the Middle East. I mean, when did Armenians become white? Since the Kardashians? And why aren’t Iranians considered white? Because they’re Muslim-coded, rather than Christian? Either way, it was important to me to write through that dilemma. But yes, there is no way around it rather than claiming it, even if it’s out of spite. Just as Nila cannot escape her family history, she cannot escape her identity. Ultimately, claiming her Afghan-Muslim heritage with pride is also a political decision—and when you embrace it, you can wield it as a sword and as protection rather than as a wound that only disenfranchises you.

Rail: Sense—and scent—memories are everywhere in Good Girl, these evocative reminders of what makes a place or product hold inexplicable emotion; that madeleine—or perhaps that cardamom cookie—that can capsizes us into another time, another place, another self. What can disarm you, and bring you back to your truest Aria-ness?

Aber: Smell and music are sensory experiences that will often catapult me back to past versions of myself or even to my current inner self. But so does reading a good book. I always remember how terrified I was when I finished Anna Karenina for the first time and finally made sense of Anna’s dream of the little ugly man on the train tracks. Even though that book was written well over a hundred years ago, it brought me back to my own self. I guess Franz Kafka’s famous quote continues to ring true: “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”