Hard Damage: Poems of Witness and the Self
by Sara Fan
The poems in Aria Aber’s debut collection, Hard Damage, are timely and particularly important in the current geopolitical climate. The poems range impressively from zoomed out catalogues of US military interventions to focused considerations of how the political impacts family and the displaced self.
The poems of Hard Damage resonate in new ways with each reading. I first read the collection while my time was consumed by continually checking my Twitter for updates from Hong Kong journalists about the seemingly unending clashes between pro-democracy protestors and police forces, and looking at endless photos of arrested protestors. With this in my mind, Aber’s poems about coming to understand her mother’s experience as a political prisoner in Afghanistan seem to be of the present rather than the past. In the section “Lass / Let,” Aber writes:
My mother let me happen to her. She let prison happen to her, simply because she believed in Women’s Rights and Afghanistan as a sovereign state. She went to prison with her little sister, and she emerged. She was, I can say now, a political prisoner. She let it happen to her; then she decided to leave her family behind, move on for love, for family, for me.
As the decade neared its end, I found myself rereading the book while waiting for an icy road to reopen at the Grand Canyon, in the northern region of a state where the US government continues to separate families and detain immigrants at the southern border. The sun slowly melted the layers of snow in the distance as I read the opening poems “Reading Rilke in Berlin” and “First Snow.” “Hunger borders / this land, while snow turns us all to immigrants,” Aber writes in the latter as she recounts refugees taking shelter in an abandoned warehouse. Throughout the book, the personal and political are expertly observed with her careful eye.
In “Reading Rilke at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin,” memory continually turns over language and displacement:
To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue
pears laced with needles. I had no life
in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor,
its longing before?
The poem’s ending seems to call forward to the poem “Stone,” which considers lineage and the body in beautifully exact tercets. The speaker wonders: “Docile, I submitted to my flesh, / never asked it questions—what did it mean / to be an Afghan and a woman?” in a poem that contemplates coming to understand the self and what we can control. Likewise, “Foreign Policies” looks at the life of the speaker removed from the continual threat of war and violence. Moving between the alien language of history and government decision-making, the poem gives the illusion of separation, but in reality, everything is interwoven.
Displacement is most compellingly rendered in the language of the long poem “Rilke and I.” Blurring meaning in English and German, each section builds and turns words and ideas as though each word is a prism to see in new and different lights. Aber’s focused and careful consideration of language begins with “ich / I” where she asks, “Is my German selfhood humbler, does it fold into itself? Why is the / English I so prominent, so searing on the page?” The sequence feels like a labyrinth where we follow a mind at work, exploring thoughts of the self and the separation between mother and daughter. By the last section, “Schreken / Terror,” we emerge with the speaker, transformed by a new vision of identity, and unwilling to look away.
“Operation Cyclone” addresses the history and politics of US intervention in Afghanistan as well as Aber’s family history. The interweaving of family tragedy, images of war, and the long history of military intervention creates a complex and nuanced story that is often overlooked when discussing Afghan-American relations. In the second section of the long poem she announces, “What I mean is, I don’t want / your sympathy, I want your attention, / and even that bothers me,” but the reader’s attention is earned. Geopolitical and personal history is deftly handled throughout the sections and continually implicates all actors involved—but Aber also narrows her scope to see fighters as individual people without being overly sympathetic. In this way, the poem avoids stereotypical depictions of war as amorphous evil.
“Catalogue of Grief,” inspired by Carolyn Forché’s poetry of witness, works alphabetically in an attempt to impose order on what is orderless, thereby highlighting the impossible nature of containing the horrors of war. The relentless accumulation and continued returns enact the energy and churn of a cyclone. Similarly, in “Operation Cyclone, Years Later,” Aber considers, “And a cyclone is not a Cyclops / although it too has an eye— / it can see. But would it testify?” Aber’s continued eye of witness forces us to churn and look with her because we must not turn away.
Sara Fan received her MFA in poetry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and her MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of San Francisco.