Years ago, at a writers’ conference, I happened to sit across from a famous novelist at lunch. At the time, I was working on a novel about Moroccan immigrants and desperate for affirmation that the draft I had completed held worth, that I hadn’t been wasting my time. But as soon as I started talking about it, the writer leaned across the table and told me, with the weariness of a seasoned professional, “The novel of immigration doesn’t work. The narrative just isn’t interesting.”
I sat there, staring at my salad, holding back tears. The contempt for what was, to my mind, an essential part of the human condition was hard to swallow. For a long time afterward, I became furious every time I thought about this summary dismissal. But in my better moments, I think that perhaps what this writer meant was that the novel of exile and immigration sometimes relies on predictable tropes: the shock of arrival, the inescapable feeling of alienation, climactic scenes in which the protagonist witnesses or experiences discrimination, and then, after a series of trials, a moment of realization that signals a successful, if uneasy, integration.
The challenge (and, frankly, the pleasure) of writing about exile or immigration is to find, as with any other novel, new ways of exploring the familiar. In Someone Like Us, for example, Dinaw Mengestu cleverly flips the trope of arrival on its head, sending an American expat on a disorienting journey back to the United States. Jennine Capó Crucet’s inventive Say Hello to My Little Friend uses a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium as a stand-in for Cuban refugees, trapped in a place too small for their ambitions. All of this is in service of bringing alive “the overriding sensation,” as Edward Said once put it, “of being out of place.”
In her impressive debut, Good Girl, the poet Aria Aber turns to the bildungsroman, a form that allows her to narrate the immigrant’s dream of social ascent while also wrestling with the shame that comes with this ambition. Set in Berlin about 15 years ago, the story follows Nila, a teenage girl who aspires to be a photographer. At heart, the novel is about the allure of freedom and the estrangement from others that is the cost of both exile and artistic creation. If the immigrant is an outsider, even an “alien,” then so is the artist: Many of us make art not because we feel well adjusted and content with our life, but because we are weird or curious or different.
Good Girl opens with Nila returning home after graduating from boarding school. Home is a dingy apartment in Gropiussdat, a “nightmare of brutalist concrete” in a poor borough of Berlin, where her family settled after leaving Afghanistan. She pursues a philosophy and art-history degree at Humboldt Universität, she says, “not because I wanted to study, but because I wanted the free U-Bahn pass.” At the bar one night, she meets Marlowe Woods, an American writer who is something of a local celebrity, having published a well-received novel and secured an advance for his second book. He has a square jaw, a dimpled chin, and piercing blue eyes. The red flags are apparent from the start—he is nearly 20 years her senior and carries speed on him at all times. Nila’s attraction to him is immediate and intense, unimpeded by the appearance of a girlfriend. Nila tells Marlowe that she is Greek, banters with him, makes him laugh. The first part of the novel is taken up by her pursuit of Marlowe’s attention, which persists despite his initial indifference to her.
Eventually, the two of them begin a sexual relationship that is largely built on drugs and degradation, a spiral that is so harrowing and so meticulously chronicled that it is almost difficult to read. For Nila, Marlowe’s allure isn’t merely physical or chemical; it stems from the fact that he is everything she isn’t, and everything she strives to be. He is an American, so unburdened by history that he can say of a famous bombing in Germany, “Well, it was ten years ago. I’m sorry, how am I to remember that someone died?” More important, he is a working artist, perhaps the only one Nila knows. She takes pictures wherever she goes but is too stifled by shame to seize the freedom that art promises its practitioners—and that it also requires of them.
Why shame? Because back in Kabul, Nila’s parents were doctors. Karim and Anahita owned a handsome house and had live-in help, but after the Soviet invasion in 1979, they fled the country, using fake papers. Documents and identification loom large in Good Girl, determining the fates of multiple characters. Because they left Afghanistan under assumed names, Nila’s parents can’t recover copies of their medical licenses, making it impossible for them to achieve the middle-class life they left behind. Anahita works as a nurse in a retirement home (“she was just a maid for old people”), and Karim drives a taxi, just like his brothers—all of them refugees from both Afghanistan and the middle class.
Karim and Anahita view this fall from the petite bourgeoisie as a failure and try to hide it any way they can. If Karim has to drive a cab, it will be at night, when no one he knows can see him. And if Anahita has to visit the food bank, it will be in a thrifted fur coat. Nila grows up with this inherited shame, coupled with the surveillance and control that attends her conservative Muslim upbringing.
Nila’s shame about being Afghan in a world that dehumanizes Muslims is palpable on every page. She carries within her the weight of a country she has never known and a language in which she isn’t fully fluent, making her a stranger even to herself. It is not a coincidence that we discover her real name only after six chapters: Nilab Haddadi. Crushed by the pressure to be a “good girl,” she rebels with drugs and booze. But her relationship with Marlowe, though ostensibly transgressive, only mirrors the one she has with her parents. The question is whether she will manage to break away from it and find the true freedom she seeks for herself.
“I am going to be a photographer,” Nila announces early in the novel. But to make art, she will have to face the chaos and confusion she has been running away from all her life. She can neither travel back through time to restore her parents to their country and social class nor change the fact that she is both German and not quite German. Art comes from the acceptance and celebration of all that is broken within us. The act of taking a photograph—framing the subject, selecting the appropriate aperture, pressing the shutter button—is really the only form of control available to Nila.
All of this is revealed slowly. Aber writes with the masterful precision of an archivist. Each scene is carefully documented, and the narrative maintains its forward momentum even when it is out of chronological order. There is a deep naivete to Nila—after all, she is only 18—and this inexperience is reflected in the cycle she finds herself trapped in: Nila and Marlowe meet up, do ecstasy or cocaine or meth or ketamine, have sex, and have a fight—not always in that order. This repetitiveness can wear on the reader, but Aber manages to redeem it through the impeccable rhythm of her prose and her inspired choice of detail.
Exile, migration, displacement: These will splinter even the most solid self. But out of the shards, it is possible to make art, as Nila finally realizes—and as Aber has done in this touching novel.
The post The Curse and the Gift of Being Out of Place appeared first on The Atlantic.
