Languages of Exile: On Aria Aber and Solmaz Sharif
Aria Aber | Hard Damage | University of Nebraska Press | September 2019 | 126 Pages
Solmaz Sharif | LOOK | Graywolf Press | July 2016 | 112 Pages
Political scientist Benedict Anderson writes in Imagined Communities that through “…language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.” Anderson conceives of language in relation to both mother and nation, which is a particularly useful frame for understanding how the poets Aria Aber and Solmaz Sharif conceive of language in their own respective exiles. Language is both what connects them to nation, Dari and Farsi, or Afghanistan and Iran respectively, and English, the language of their poetry, and the United States, the land in which they write and publish. The poets’ selves are mediated in relation to the mother, to the nation, and to war, only through language.
Anderson’s discussion of language and nation continues. He writes: “Something of the nature of this political love can be deciphered from the ways in which languages describe its object: either in the vocabulary of kinship… or that of home.” In this conception, an important tension in Aber and Sharif’s work is the complicated dynamic between the political and personal—the homeland is both a nation entangled in complicated geopolitical tensions and a site of familial love fractured by geopolitical tensions. The necessity of describing a motherland is particularly important: the “vocabulary of kinship” as Anderson describes it, allows the nations of Afghanistan and Iran to be tied to Aber and Sharif’s familial histories.
For these poets, the impossible home can only eventually be found in language. Aber’s Hard Damage takes as its epigraph Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Let everything happen to you, Beauty and Terror.” Sharif’s LOOK utilizes terms from the US Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (DMAT, denoted by capitalization, making visible the emotional aftereffects of the associated violence). For Aber, Rilke represents Germany itself, the result of her and her family’s displacement and perpetual exile from Afghanistan. For Sharif, the DMAT represents the US state, the cause of the violence she seeks to make visible in relation to her perpetual exile from Iran. Unable to find a home for themselves in America, both poets eventually create a home in language, as seen through their “America” poems and their respective collections. What may seem to be inherently at odds—Rilke and the exilic Afghan selfhood, the DMAT and the exilic Iranian selfhood—are connected and made whole. War, motherhood, exile, all become one in a language where poets imagine impossible homes for their fractured selves.
The daughter of Afghan refugees, Aber was born and raised in Germany, and subsequently immigrated to the United States. This element of her past shapes the tensions of linguistic exile that Hard Damage examines—the relationship between the self and other—whether that other is the speaker’s mother, or Rilke, among others. Structurally, the collection is divided into five parts, all of which track the same (semi-autobiographical) speaker across Afghanistan, Germany, and the US, as she grapples with linguistic displacement, war, and exile, shaped by her relationship to her mother. This relationship is largely framed by her mother’s silences about her own experiences of war, which include, among other things, political imprisonment prior to her departure to Germany.
Aber’s “America” first appeared in POETRY in 2021, and much like her other work is characterized by its lush and luxurious language, the richness of its images. The personal details in this poem indicate that this is the same speaker that we follow in Hard Damage. For Aber, America is not just the landscape of her final exile, but more crucially, America, and California in particular, is a landscape of violence and her parent’s unfulfilled dreams; America is both hell- and dream-scape.
Aber opens “America” with the lines: “America the footsteps of your ghosts are white stones weighting my center.” Subsequent lines also open with “America,” as the US anchors and shapes Aber’s life even before her arrival. America is the reason her parents had to leave Afghanistan, after all. For Aber, America is perpetually haunting, a presence that shapes all her relationships—to her family, to her mother, to Germany where she was raised, to geography, and to language itself. She goes on:
Day after day, I weep on the phone, saying Even the classroom is a prison
And my father still insists But is it good to become an American
And so I cement my semantics
I practice my pronunciations, I learn to say This country
After saying I love
There is tension in the juxtaposition of prison with the father’s insistence of goodness. There is a connection between “classroom” and “prison” that is also tied to the prison as a space that the speaker’s mother is affected by, and so just as Afghanistan became an impossible home for her (necessitating her departure to Germany), America became an impossible home for the speaker. Moreover, the fact that the phrase “I love this country” is broken into “this country” and “I love” suggests the impossibility of putting those words in proximity to each other. The implied hope that the speaker could love this country can certainly be an ideal, but it is also fundamentally impossible. There are too many ghosts, there is too much weight for America to be a utopia for the speaker, as much as she would like to realize the dreams of her father.
She writes later in the same poem: “America I arrived to inhabit the realm of your language / I came to worry your words.” Aber explicitly situates the speaker’s comfort with America in its language, not in its geography, not in physical space. Opposite to her father, language is the dreamscape, and she must weather the hellscape to reach it. She comments: “I write Country of / Cowboys and Fame / America I have no cowboy / And I have no fame / All I gather is the scratching of ink against paper, the laugh of a skeptic.” Language becomes the only space for the self—the “ink against paper” when America is “cowboys and fame” (the latter echoing both the history of US imperial capitalism and the speaker’s westward migration).
Contrary to the abundance of Aber’s “America,” Sharif’s “America,” a poem published in Harper’s and subsequently in her 2022 collection Customs, employs an economy of language to examine the fragmentary aftereffects of war reflected in phrases that are necessarily sparse and fractured. None of the lines of the poem are longer than two words, after which the poet breaks the line, and after every three words, the sentence ends. There are nineteen lines, and twelve sentences. The only noun to appear in the poem is “thing.” It is an incredibly specific poem, while on the level of individual words remaining incredibly unspecific. Yet this is the beauty of Sharif’s work, evidence of her precision. Sharif, at every moment, can make the most ambiguous words precise, loaded them with meaning, make sure they carry weight.
“America” is bookended by the lines “I had to. I learned it,” appearing in reverse order at the start and at the end. Repeated as if in a mirror, Sharif emphasizes the necessity of learning America, and so America becomes a thing that can be learned, like any language. She repeats words, repeats entire sentences. At the center of the poem is a repetition of the line: “One / more thing. / One more / thing.” In the monotonous tone of Sharif’s repetition, we experience an affective precision articulating the emotional experience of the speaker and her experience of America: it becomes a thing of repetition, a rote memorization. In the vagueness of words themselves, Sharif is able to craft the way this speaker understands America—that voice bears down ceaselessly, moving forward even in its lacking originality. In precise, short sentences and lines, necessity drives the poem—economy allows precision in a way abundance does not.
Other than the three sentences in the center of the poem, each sentence begins with the letter “I,” whether “I” or “It” or “If.” So the speaker’s self surrounds everything, and is central to how Sharif reads, has learned, America. America itself is only legible through language, via the “I” of the speaker. But again, there is the echoing tension of displacement, the unfamiliarity of home in America. The last three sentences of the poem are “I / was dead. / I learned / it. I / had to.” The death of the speaker’s self reminds us how deeply hostile “America” is; nothing changes. We come full circle and are returned to the beginning. America is inevitable, and irreparably damages the speaker.
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Such technics of return call to mind Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, a craft book in which the novelist Jane Alison explores what she labels the “radial form” in narrative: “those in which a powerful center holds the fictional world—character’s obsessions, incidents in time—tightly in its gravitational force.” Alison’s book as whole largely focuses on forms of craft in fiction, but one notable aspect of the radial form she highlights is that it often circles a topic rather than moving linearly in time. In her examination of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Alison asks “How does each person fit around that central point of common anxiety?” The radial form becomes the perfect lens through which to view these two collections, and to best understand the essential nature of Aber and Sharif’s circling, swirling poetics of exile.
The central anxiety for Aber and Sharif is always language, even in their speakers’ attempts to belong in their “America” poems. Both ultimately circle back narratively and back to language itself. What can hold so much loss, so much fracture? For both poets the language of the other—Rilke for Aber, and the DMAT for Sharif—and how one comes to live within and mediate the world through it, is the primary concern.
Aber’s “Rilke and I” forms the third of five parts of Hard Damage. While this lyric essay is itself radial, circling the center of the Rilke line “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror,” the essay becomes a stand-in for the collection itself and uses the radial form to navigate complicated, non-linear understandings of language.
“Rilke and I” is broken into eight separate sections, each based on a different German word and its English translation. By framing it in this context, Aber connects both the spatial and literary landscapes of her life—English and German become one, Rilke and Aber become one. But, most importantly, Aber does not read the “beauty and terror” line the way Rilke writes it, instead, she frames it more actively: “I / Let / You / All / Happen / Beauty / And / Terror.” Later, in the section about the word “Happen,” Aber writes how “happen” is a verb that requires the dative case in German, a case that takes the passive form. Aber, in using the “I,” reclaims the agency that this passivity denies in order to make the “I” the subject.
Building on this reclamation of agency in restructuring Rilke, each section title features the German word first, followed by its English translation, which highlights the connections between spatial and literary landscapes and the order in which Aber lived in these spaces. Aber also situates this essay within her speaker’s upbringing in German, writing “Ich, in German, my default language.” She highlights how German, in this role , has implications for the distance it might create between herself and her parents, whose first language is Dari. Again, language is a space of tension; beginning with the self of the speaker, a stand-in for Aber, situates the poem within the coming-into-being of the self. The default setting of German here becomes in many ways synonymous with the diasporic reality of Aber’s speaker—an admission that there is a fracture related to linguistic exile. That language is the first site of fracture speaks to its importance for Aber, and why it becomes the center of the radial form here.
With “ich/I” as the first section of this essay, there is also an explicit idea of how deeply the understanding of the self is connected to war, to daughterhood, to exile. Everything is fractured, and thus the speaker can only make a home for herself and her diasporic selves through the language of the other, through German and through English. Aber writes, “We learn early on, especially in English, to use the active voice. It’s inelegant to assume things happen to you; you do them. So the English I is active, capitalized. I has agency, so I must have agency.” For Aber, the way to claim the agency that has been denied to her and her mother through war, exile, and displacement is through a language that requires that.
Aber continues this exploration, writing: “Ich, the German first-person singular pronoun, is not capitalized. / Is my German selfhood humbler, does it fold into itself? Why is the English I so prominent, so searing on the page?” Beginning here with the abstract “Ich” as the German self, Aber then brings into question her own self in German (the image of “folding” here is particularly crucial in how these exiles are folded into themselves) and moves further into the abstract “I” in English. Aber’s noting of the fact that the “ich” in German is not capitalized is crucial. The prominence of the “I” is reflective here of the way in which the exile from the mother—Aber’s coming into selfhood as a diasporic daughter, is what this third exile builds on. Layered onto the more tangible exiles of mother and nation, here Aber moves us outwards into an abstract understanding of what it might mean to be in the liminal space of language and thereby be exiled from both or all or neither—where Aber’s choice to be a poet writing in English as opposed to German, and the exophonic nature of the text itself, becomes a form of exile.
In the penultimate section, the thread of this essay and of the collection come to a close in a non-linear fashion. The construction of intertwined exiles is perfectly closed in “und/And.” Aber writes: “And” comes from the Germanic; it’s related to und, Proto-Germanic unda, Old Norse enn. / In Persian, it’s merely a vowel… “o” we say. It doesn’t take much to create connective tissue.” This line is really compelling. To end this linguistic arc on Persian and “connective tissue” is to connect all the exiles Aber has constructed so far. The exile from the mother of the child requires the connective tissue of recognition, the connective tissue of the child’s self as the mother’s before coming into its own, the exile of the refugee from the nation requires the connective tissue of inherited exile, and the exile of the multilingual diasporic person from language requires the connective tissue of the movement between languages, both linguistic and spatial. In this same section, Aber writes: “You and I. You, who made me. And = the umbilical cord.” Here, the self and the other, the mother, and linguistic exile all come together as deeply connected, analogous. And “connective tissue”, the umbilical cord for Aber, allows her ultimately to theorize herself in relation to exile, instead of the other way around.
Notably, the political stakes of breaking and reclaiming Rilke are, for Aber, different than breaking the DMAT is for Sharif. Aber’s love for Rilke always shines through, but is shaped by the absence of the political, in itself for Aber a political choice. She ends the lyric essay with the lines:
What does Rilke have to do with terrorism, you ask.
Didn’t Rilke live through a war? Didn’t he see Europe fall to ruins?
Didn’t he, instead, write about the soul inside a bowl of rotten fruit?Didn’t he ignore?
Let me not turn away. Whatever is purity—let me not be pure.
No. Let everything happen to the word I worry.
Here, Aber is making clear the political stakes of breaking Rilke. Aber must break Rilke to make Rilke political, to make Rilke hers, to find home in Rilke. To find a home in language for a self that is fractured by exile and war is only possible if that language makes clear its political dimensions.
Sharif’s LOOK begins with the DMAT definition of “look,” using it as an epigraph: “In mine warfare, a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence.” Sharif’s collection, much like this definition, engages deeply with questions of influence—how her own life has been impacted by war, and also how narrativizing loss and war is influenced by the interruptions caused by the DMAT.
This epigraph leads into Sharif’s first poem, which situates the central anxiety of the collection. “Look” is a poem about language, about war, and about witnessing. As its title suggests, it works similarly to the collection as whole and is a microcosm of how Sharif uses the radial form to make a coherent narrative out of the fractures of war and exile. For Sharif, narrative form centers the poem even as we move towards more abstract and fractured poems of war. Like all of Sharif’s work, this poem itself is in free verse. It has three main narrative threads—the speaker and her lover, a man at the Republican National Convention, and a federal judge. Each of these threads thematizes the central questions of address and naming. As its key formal device, most lines begin with the word “whereas,” although the last four all begin with “let.” In evoking the language of formal documents of government, she reclaims this language in her poem; explicitly engaging with how often such documents are directly tied to how the nation is understood and created.
Sharif begins “Look” with the line “Let it matter what you call a thing: Exquisite, a lover called me. / Exquisite.” Sharif immediately situates questions of intimacy here in relation to the perception of the self. In “Rilke and I,” Aber quotes Claudia Rankine from Citizen: An American Lyric, writing: “Rankine: To be addressable is to be wounded.” Sharif here is directly in conversation with Rankine’s idea of the addressable as a site of wounding. In situating the very first line of the poem as one that addresses, uses the “you” form, Sharif is using this introductory preamble to set up the ways the collection engages with what it means to wound and be wounded.
Sharif then switches tracks to the second narrative, that of a man at the Republican National Convention. She writes of a conversation the speaker has with this man, who insists that he would “put up with that for this country.” Here, the broader themes of Sharif’s work intersect with the radial form and the question of naming. At first, the man uses the ambiguous wording of the demonstrative pronoun “that,” but the speaker insists he clarify: what he means is “torture.” Sharif forces the act of naming, forces him to look, forces him to witness what he identifies initially ambiguously. The speaker recognizes the violence as the subject of their conversation, and how the conversation itself furthers that violence. “Let it matter what you call a thing” becomes her directing principle. It organizes everything around her use of the DMAT, as she reorganizes and reclaims its language.
Sharif also writes shortly thereafter: “Whereas the lover made my heat rise, rise so that if heat sensors were trained on me, they could read my THERMAL SHADOW through the roof and through the wardrobe.” In this line, the weaponized language of the DMAT invades the relationship between the speaker and her lover, and in doing so, Sharif unites the language of the violence of the state with the intimacy of the speaker and her lover. This intimacy then is understood to always be shaped by the violence of the US in Iran. Yet, in bringing this language into this space of intimacy, Sharif in some ways also reclaims it by making it a part of the vocabulary of romantic encounter.
Building on this mutability of language, in the last section of the poem, Sharif brings back the first line again: “Let it matter what we call a thing. / Let it be the exquisite face for at least 16 seconds./ Let me LOOK at you. / Let me LOOK at you in a light that takes years to get here.” Sharif, in making the idea of “LOOK” and witness so central, emphasizes again that the center of the radial form here is the DMAT, encircled by the self of the speaker, emphasized by the “me” and “you” of the third line. In “LOOK” being the center of that line, Sharif emphasizes how the construction of the self and the other surrounds this idea of language.
There remains a tense undercurrent between the economy of language in Sharif’s work and the lyric abundance in Aber’s. Aber’s most in-depth exploration of language is a ten-page long lyric essay, Sharif’s is a three-page poem. Each poet’s engagement with the radial form differs, but both begin in the language of the other. Sharif reclaims it metaphorically, while Aber does so formally. Both navigate the intertwining of the personal with the perpetual haunting of the histories of exile they live with always. Recognizing that these experiences are non-linear, that they can only work backwards and even then not linearly, only a radial form can give these histories meaningful narrative structure. The radial form becomes a productive, coherent way to make whole this fractured self and history, broken by war, exile, motherhood.