Homesick for an Imagined Place

About halfway through Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Aria Aber’s debut poetry collection, there is this section epigraph: “Lass dir alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken.” It’s a line from Rainer Maria Rilke imploring readers to let everything happen to them—beauty and terror alike. In Hard Damage, piercing sorrow and lush desire—beauty and terror—mix as Aber explores her family’s history of exile from their home in Afghanistan. These poems are seared by sacrifice, the lives of refugees, and the longing for a home Aber has yet to visit.

Aber was raised in Germany; her parents were Afghan refugees. She was the Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the winner of the Prairie Schooner Poetry Prize for Hard Damage. We talked about pushing against nostalgia, a collective diasporic narrative, and how children of refugees represent possibility. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

There’s so much longing and grief in this collection, but it’s rendered without nostalgia or sentimentality. An example: “When I tell / one aunt I’d like to go back, / she screams it is not yours to want,” from “Funeral in Paris.” How do you write about mourning a home you can only imagine?

I love that you think there’s no sentimentality or “cheap” nostalgia. I try to work against that notion, because I think nostalgia is a disease reserved for very privileged people for whom the past was better than the present. And that is often not true for marginalized groups. So I try to be careful not to romanticize a home I haven’t been to. As children of refugees, as part of the diaspora, it is our inheritance to always “look back” because we either belong to two countries, or to none at all. Since this dilemma of existing in a liminal space occupies my entire life, writing about it in this way almost seems natural.

But, of course, there is an active attempt to interrogate the self. I want a “lyric I” who is self-aware, self-reflective, and able to distinguish between the romanticized and the actual version of home. Grief can be real, even if it is for something imagined. For a long time, I thought I couldn’t complete my first book without having been to Afghanistan. But then I realized that living in the imagination, and embodying the question, and experiencing “home” as a conglomerate of shifting, unreliable stories is at the heart of the experience of life as a refugee kid.

I am actually visiting Afghanistan for the first time this fall. I don’t know how that will shape my work, but I’m excited, scared, full of joy.

It’s so succinct to say that it is a “dilemma of existing in a liminal space” as a child of refugees. It makes me think of how much heartbreak is in this collection. There’s a feeling of lack, of being unfulfilled, of asking what comes after sacrifice.

It’s true there is a lot of heartbreak, both personal and collective. For a long time, for maybe the first 15 years of my life, I saw my parents’ sadness, their yearning for a return, their displacement and unease. I didn’t have the language for it, but even as a child, I noticed how uncomfortable they felt navigating a world of whiteness in a country where they didn’t have papers, and everything was based on uncertainty. Now I know that this is the fate of many people born into immigrant families. It’s not a singular occurrence; I am not special in my grief. I think sacrifice is a part of the immigrant story, the martyrdom of self-sacrifice, regardless of the reasons for your immigration. The children often carry the guilt of their parents who “gave up everything to come to this country.”

Another way you grapple with your “child of refugee-ness” is in how the book relays your family’s story. You not only wrestle with your own experience in a self-aware way—as when the speaker is reminded that she has never been to Afghanistan—but you also reflect on the lives of your elders, the people who fled their home country.

Yes, that’s right. Maybe I wrote about the elders because their stories are all so different and diverse. It’s astonishing to me that within the same family, some of the siblings never made it out of political prison, and others are now doctors in Canada. They have the same origin story. They lived through the same war. And yet it is possible to surpass that, to build a life on top of the shards of trauma. And, of course, there’s survivor’s guilt involved, too. Who am I to write about this, I who have never been there, have not witnessed anything? Reaching for the stories, voices, and fates of my ancestors is a way to honor them and thank them, because without their courage I wouldn’t be here.

Your mother’s imprisonment as a political dissident recurs throughout the book, as in these lines from “Can You Describe Your Years in Prison?”:

And because my beloved is not a person
but a place in a headline I point to
and avert my gaze, I can now ask: would I have given
up my mother for an alyssum
instead of asylum? Or one glass of water that did not
contain war? Her wound isn’t mine, yet what I needed most
was our roof to collapse on her like earth around stones.

Does your mother read your work?

I am actually a bit apprehensive about the book coming out and my family reading it. My mother has not read the book yet, especially not the poems about her, although she does occasionally read my work and will ask for a translation whenever necessary. In a way, writing in a language that is not “my own” and not “my family’s” works as a shield from their eyes; it provides me with more liberty. English is a room in which I can dance and scream and laugh in whichever way I like. But I also have a special relationship to English. I know it is the colonizer’s language, but now it has opened the barriers between so many of us. I can speak to you because we both speak English. Adrienne Rich says, “This is the oppressor’s language / yet I need it to talk to you.”

My family knows their own stories. They don’t need me to retell them. But the rest of the world has not yet heard of what they’ve been through. So I’m thinking of writing in English as offering our narrative to the collective.

It hurts me, physically pains me, to think that my own parents cannot comprehend my work. But the other side of that is: I have freedom to say things I’m literally unable to say in my native language, because it’s no longer a language I have. Throughout the collection, you dive into the relationship between English and German. Since you grew up speaking German, why do you choose to make work in English?

I love this question. And I want to hug you, because I feel the pain of the linguistic border between you and your parents, too.

Since my mother tongue is Farsi, and I cannot fluently write or read it, it’s impossible to compose poetry for my parents in that language. That would always be out of the question. Although I still understand Farsi, and I speak it, and sometimes think in Farsi, the written word is an entirely different world. There is something intractable that’s forever lost, and the grief haunts me.

German is definitely more natural to me, or was, since I grew up in Germany and lived there until I was 20. However, I went to a bilingual school for many years and had to take a lot of subjects in English. English being the lingua franca of the world, we were taught that we must be fluent in it in order to succeed internationally. I don’t know when I decided to write in English, but when I moved to London to do my undergraduate degree in English Literature, it was over for me and German.     

The part in the book you asked about deals with the difference between German and English, but it is also about translation, and what is lost in translation, and what can never be translated. In a way, you and I live in that space between languages that is untranslatable.

Yes, it’s the section with the Rilke epigraph. While I was reading this section it made me think of how, in a way, we are our parents’ wounds and we are our parents’ greatest possibilities.

You’ve put it so beautifully. It moves me to tears. What else can I add? I guess you hit a universal truth, which applies to all children. I can only hope to be my parents’ greatest possibilities. Their wound is a gift, too. This sounds like a platitude, but the wound gives me a lens through which I can examine the world.

You mentioned earlier that this book is a contribution to a larger diasporic narrative. The book feels like an opening. For some of us, I don’t know if we’ll ever truly have a home, and so we try to build it with our words.

I think you’re right, this first book was, like I imagine a lot of first books are, a door I had to build in order to enter a new space, to be free. And I also think that you’re right: we don’t have a home, and we probably will never have one. Our parents had one, even if they had to leave it, and if we’re lucky and Earth remains sustainable, our children will hopefully have the feeling of home.

Literature provides a shelter. I like the idea of contributing to that shelter with our words. That’s also why I think we have the opportunity to make English beautiful. Immigrants make English beautiful.