{"id":11876,"date":"2020-10-10T11:41:30","date_gmt":"2020-10-10T10:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11876"},"modified":"2020-10-10T11:41:48","modified_gmt":"2020-10-10T10:41:48","slug":"aria-aber-hard-damage-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11876","title":{"rendered":"Aria Aber | Hard Damage<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aria Aber |\u00a0Hard Damage |\u00a0<\/i>University of Nebraska Press: $17.95<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Not so long ago, I reviewed Patricia Smith\u2019s Incendiary Art<\/i> on this page. The title of Aria Aber\u2019s first volume, Hard Damage<\/i>, points in a similar rhetorical direction. The title is a gesture, a performative, which throws down a gauntlet to the reader. It is a title which has a somewhat \u2018take-me-or-leave-me\u2019 quality. If you came across it on a bookshop shelf, would it attract you or put you off? That feeling might also be compounded by the cover, which is a reproduction of Egon Schiele\u2019s 1911 painting \u2018Moa\u2019, from the Leopold Museum in Vienna. The painting depicts the dancer Moa, and the museum\u2019s own website describes the dancer\u2019s gaze from the canvas as, \u2018Out of the corner of her eye, this pale-faced figure\u2019s over-the-shoulder gaze \u2013 disparaging, devious, dramatic \u2013 meets the viewer\u2019s.\u2019 The eyes are reduced to slits in which the coal black pupil is emphasised by a tiny gash of white sclera. The figure of the dancer is formlessness, a dramatic wash of black, dark blue and a kind of excretory brown, that drapes down the canvas so that the dancer\u2019s gaze becomes the focus of the viewer\u2019s own. Nothing if not confrontational then!<\/p>\n

Aber, herself, was brought up in Germany by Afghan refugee parents. It\u2019s little surprise then that questions of identity, and, in particular, finding a voice dominate these fiery, dramatic poems. As Sally Wen Mao comments in a back cover blurb, these poems are \u2018searing\u2019. However, one of the first important things about this book is how carefully assembled, and orchestrated this book is. There is a prologue, which we\u2019ll return to, and then five tightly organised sections. One of which is called \u2018Rilke and I\u2019, and another which concentrates on the CIA\u2019s Operation Cyclone, in which the Americans funded mujahedeen operations in Afghanistan. This section, in turn, is prefaced by a chronology of \u2018Covert United States Involvement in Regime Change\u2019. This list starts in 1949 with US involvement in a Syrian coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, and finishes with Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan, 1979-89. So there are a number of constraints which act like Frost\u2019s tennis net, around these poems.<\/p>\n

That first poem, \u2018Reading Rilke in Berlin\u2019, is not so much about actually reading Rilke in Berlin as it is about the trials and tribulations of learning English in, we have to suppose in the US. The title perhaps suggests that reading Rilke in Berlin is much easier for Aber than learning English in the US. As Aber starts, \u2018Into English I splintered the way my father clutched \/ his valise at the airport, defeated and un-American.\u2019 The first sentence is,itself, splintered around the word \u2018splintered\u2019. Is \u2018the way\u2019 the object of the verb \u2018splintered\u2019, i.e. \u2018I splintered the way\u2019 where \u2018the way\u2019 is a route or direction, which the narrator splinters, and, perhaps, splinters into English. Or does it mean that the narrator \u2018splinters into English\u2019 in the same manner as her father clutches his valise at the airport, where he is \u2018defeated and un-American\u2019; meaning, I\u2019m assuming, that her father\u2019s defeat and being \u2018un-American\u2019 is similar to the way she works in English. With these ambiguities, we also have the emphasis falling on the final world in the sentence, \u2018un-American\u2019 with its obvious resonance with the McCarthy-ite, House Un-American Activities Committee.<\/p>\n

Frank Muir used to joke about how possible it would be to explain to a foreign learner of English, the sentence, \u2018My wife has a little woman that runs up curtains for her.\u2019 And the complexities of the seemingly innocuous English prepositional system prove a touchstone for the complexities of life in an English-speaking country, \u2018So, I lay at a pavement. Under your Elegy. In a bridge. \/ Such starkness the want to put inside me a perfect sentence. \/ What would Lou Salome have done?\u2019 Lou Salome, was Rilke\u2019s lover and is, perhaps because of that fact, seemingly, an invisible mentor to Aber in her attempts to learn English. This is a language that acts as both an invisible and visible barrier. When her mother stumbles over a question at customs, the narrator comments, \u2018Oh, I shoved my hand right through \/ the officer\u2019s mouth and ripped out his tongue, \/ then under my pillow I placed it, and waited \/ for it to bloom new my blood.\u2019 That tongue in both meanings is both the locked door and the key to unlocking it; a key that can bloom anew for the narrator. This poem vividly rehearses finding a voice and the impediments to that for both Aber and her parents. So, it is no surprise that is placed first in the book and detached from the five sections that follow it.<\/p>\n

\u2018Reading Rilke in Berlin\u2019 also illustrates another aspect of Aber\u2019s technical achievement; the way in which poems are organised and orchestrated. This is an extraordinarily sure-footed collection. And that sure-footedness makes it very difficult to quote from individual poems with out wresting a line or a sentence from its beautifully constructed context.<\/p>\n

Hard Damage<\/i> goes on to painstakingly explore the way the search for identity in new countries and languages affects the whole of a family unit. In this the book is similar to Ocean Vuong\u2019s first book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. <\/i>That book also explored the theme of sexual identity in the newly immigrant. However, for all its incandescent imagination, Night Sky with Exit Wounds<\/i> lacked very slightly Aber\u2019s often forensic examination of how the immigrant experience almost metastasizes throughout the intellectual, emotional and spiritual dimensions of immigrant\u2019s lives. Thus, in the third section of the book, \u2018Rilke and I\u2019, Aber dissects individual words in German that Aber associates with a lexicon that is Rilke\u2019s, such as \u2018ich\/I\u2019 or \u2018Geschehn\/Happen\u2019. In \u2018Alles\/All\u2019, Aber picks up on a line from Rilke\u2019s First Duino Elegy, \u2018Every angel is terrible\u2019<\/p>\n

I wanted it all. I wanted the terrible angels of my home. When you, \/ Mother, were still the only you I had, you\u2019d say: German is so beautiful, look how green it is! <\/i>\/\/ From the back, in my car seat, I\u2019d protest: No, AFGHANISTAN IS MORE BEAUTIFUL. IT HAS EVERYTHING. \/\/ You\u2019d laugh, somewhat confounded: You have never been there. <\/i>\/\/ There: green macaws, A K 47s, faeces in water pipes, schools in clay huts, tiny crocheted shoes, market men sitting on upside down crates, landmines, mud, an abundance of apples, pomegranates, watermelons, flies, mosquitoes, that little house behind the river \u2013 does it still exist?\u2019<\/p>\n

That sense of wanting it all, of wanting \u2018the terrible angels of my home\u2019, not only shows the way in which immigration is pervaded by not only wanting, wanting what is there now, and wanting to hold onto the past even where that past is imagined or lost. But wanting the \u2018terrible angels of my home\u2019 also suggests that even the pain of the past is almost desired part of an experience which must not be lost. There is also the sense that Rilke can offer Aber a means of articulating such complex depths of emotion. This is not quite the same as \u2018standing on the shoulders of giants\u2019 but it allows Aber to range not only in the emotional range of her family, but to show how poetry might also provide the emotional perspectives of other cultures in history.<\/p>\n

Hard Damage<\/i> is an immensely satisfying book. It charts immigrant experience in a way which is highly imaginative but also sustained and controlled. It will be fascinating to read what Aber writes next.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aria Aber |\u00a0Hard Damage |\u00a0University of Nebraska Press: $17.95   Not so long ago, I reviewed Patricia Smith\u2019s Incendiary Art on this page. The title of Aria Aber\u2019s first volume, Hard Damage, points in a similar rhetorical direction. The title is a gesture, a performative, which throws down a gauntlet to the reader. 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