Amanda Larson
Interview with Aria Aber
Aria Aber knows exactly what words can do. Born to Afghan refugees in Münster, Germany, Aber’s writing is deeply concerned with the idea of how one can miss a home they have only experienced peripherally through the language and presentations of others, but never lived in. The speaker in Aber’s poems is acutely aware of the role that language plays in creating impressions of home, along with the grief that results from its endued state of inhospitality. That speaker also maintains a hopefulness that language can come to construct a meaningful life, while recognizing the privilege in being able to use it to do so. In “Afghan Funeral in Paris,” published recently in The New Yorker, she writes, “every aunt has a son / who fell, or a daughter who hid in rubble / for two years, until that knock of officers / holding a bin bag filled with a dress / and bones. But what do I know? / I get pedicures and eat croissants / while reading Swann’s Way.” Aber’s poems embody the contradiction of survivor’s guilt, asking how one can create a life in the face of loss, and whether one has the right to. Yet, Aber finds an answer in language: her poems are spaces where both feelings—joy and loss—can simultaneously exist with equal ferocity. In such a way, they take on a life of their own.
In an interview with The Paris Review in 1984, James Baldwin states, “The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” To read Aber’s debut collection, Hard Damage, is to witness Aber finding out what she does not know. Aber is trilingual, and her poems frequently ruminate on the spaces that exist in between languages, in what is lost in translation. Hard Dam- age opens with a poem titled “Reading Rilke in Berlin” that sets up the role of language throughout the volume: “Into English I splintered the way my father clutched / his valise at the airport, defeated and un-American.” Several poems, such as “Mother of All Balms,” highlight the beauty to be found in mispro- nunciations and miscommunications rendered through translation. Rather than working to frustratingly correct them, these poems give such utterances of family and friends the credence and grace they deserve. “This liminal space between languages can be bountiful,” Aber wrote in a recent essay for Poetry Magazine; her poems, which frequently ruminate on and exist in that space, are living proof that it is. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Muzzle Magazine, Wasafiri, and other publications. Aber holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, and was the 2018–2019 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. I corresponded with Aber via email; she is currently residing in London.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You said recently, in an interview with the Poetry Foundation, that you thought you couldn’t finish Hard Damage without having visited Afghanistan. Of course, you did, and your work often embodies this sense of liminality that exists in the space of real grief for an imagined home, or a home that one has only experienced peripherally, through relation to those who have left it. What was your recent experience of going to Afghanistan? How have you been writing about it?
ARIA ABER: Afghanistan was incredible. It was heartbreakingly beautiful and terribly destroyed. It felt like a returning, although I had never been there. Afghanistan is an ancient place, haunted by folklore, myth, and decades of war. The culture is unique in its friendliness and hospitality. It is a country at war, yet people just move on with their lives—they get up in the morning, go to work, bathe and feed their children. They fall in love and dance and get married. Survivor’s guilt was again amplified when I visited. It is my privilege and luck to not be there, and this in itself is a condition that is tied to the colonial powers spanning the globe. But I also understood that, beneath all decolonial theories and ideologies we construct about the politics of our home country in the diaspora, there are millions of individuals to whom this war is not abstract. It’s real—and the reality of that is more complicated than the idea of “freeing the land” or “sending the troops back home.” As to poetry . . . I am writing about it already, and my Afghanistan trip has changed my writing in subtle ways which I am still discovering. It’s an exciting shift.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I love what you said about nostalgia in the same interview, that “nostalgia is a disease reserved for very privileged people for whom the past was better than the present.” In “Nostalgia is Not the Right Word,” you write, “You flee into metaphor but return with another moth flapping inside your throat. It curls itself from the black in your mouth, whispering, I’m sorry about these ghosts knocking your bones.” The poem, to me, seems to come from a speaker who cannot escape the need to write, but also cannot escape their own past. What do you see as the relationship between writing poetry and romanticizing the past?
ARIA ABER: One could argue that it is a poetic sensibility to be sentimental and look at what has passed, to elegize and to romanticize it. I love sentimentality; it is a form of tenderness. And it can be a great tool in poetry if applied rigorously (Mary Ruefle has a brilliant essay on this). The same is true for nostalgia; but for the collective—for societies in the world—nostalgia seems to be incredibly dangerous, and remains a method to manipulate the masses toward more divisiveness and discrimination, toward racist constructs. So then, the poet’s responsibility (or any artist’s responsibility, for that matter) is, I believe, to be suspicious of sentimentality and nostalgia, and to study and question those modes of human emotion. As individuals, we often feel nostalgic for an illusion or romanticized concept of our past; as poets, we must peel open the layers of those self-made constructs, which are the products of our fallible minds. Poetry must, perhaps, employ tools that are anti-romanticizing.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In “Stone,” you write, “So that was my womanhood, then, that great dormancy.” I love how your work demonstrates that part of being displaced from one’s home is, beyond the fact of that displacement, the inability to create a new home, a tangible feeling of stagnancy. How does writing create a shelter for you? How has your writing impacted your life?
ARIA ABER: Writing has, of course, saved my life. I dislike this platitude, but writing and reading—the world of letters—was everything to me from an early age on. I learned about the world through books. I lived in the world of books. I grew up knowing my parents were persecuted for their beliefs, for the books they read and cherished. When I felt sad, I wrote my way out of it; I created storylines and screenplays in which the characters lived the lives I dreamed. Some of my closest friends are other writers. In a way, we share this secret pact that not many other people can access. It is like a faith: believing in the magic of words, of world-making through language; believing in the magic of letting the music of words guide you through the world. It is like believing in the unseen power of ubiquitous connection, or believing in another world. Fiction writers and essayists often survey human connections, human characters, and the unexplainable ways we behave and think. As poets, we investigate the soul and the mind, God and the earth, the endless wonders of the body. Writing has taught me to heal, to remain curious, and to question the power structures of the world. Incredible, isn’t it? Writing has made me who I am. It has impacted everything.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What is your relationship with Rilke? How did you come to him?
ARIA ABER: I grew up in Germany, so Rilke was omnipresent. I grew up in a Farsi-speaking household . . . poetry is integral to Afghan culture, it’s ingrained in the Persian language. So, poetry was always there, and Rilke was always there. But I remember being particularly moved by Rilke’s poems when I was in my teens, a formative time for everyone. I had a friend whose house we would sometimes visit to seek shelter because my other friends were having a secret queer relationship they needed to hide from their parents. That friend was introverted and very invested in poetry. She would sit at her kitchen table, not talk much, and paint these little postcards with poems on them. She often used phrases from Rilke’s poems on the postcards. It seemed terribly meaningful at the time. We were a weird, artistic, and literary bunch; we studied Rilke’s letters and his opinions on the divine, on the flesh. For someone from his generation, he was quite democratic and queer in his views on love. Our fascination with him was complicated, too, because Rilke was terrible to the women in his life, and this was at odds with the feminism we fostered. Later on, when I realized Rilke’s profound and ubiquitous love for God and beauty, I grew even more interested in him. His writing, his letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé, and his early poems followed me everywhere I went. They still do. I will never grow tired of his wisdom.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I ask because of the poem in the middle of Hard Damage, “Rilke and I,” that alternates between German and English, and meditates on the way that each language differentiates in the construction of certain words and sentences. How do you see language as constructing your idea of agency?
ARIA ABER: This is an interesting question. Language constructs agency in that it allows you to speak your truth and your opinions. We live in a world of censorship, and I am actually censoring myself from writing the things I want to write because I fear consequences, both personal and public. I think that poets should be aware of their medium at all times when they write. Language is political because it is used by demagogues to manipulate the masses; figures of speech, metaphors, euphemisms, and all these devices we use—they are being used by politicians, too. It’s crucial to remember that there are countries in this world where poets are jailed and executed for using language, for writing about roses and the body. We must use language, and our agency to speak, carefully and with respect. We must use them in solidarity with those who are not allowed to speak. Agency is not something individual; it is, like language, part of the collective.