The search for identity doesn’t always take place in a sweaty, pulsing Berlin nightclub while high on ecstasy, but if it works, who are we to judge?
That’s the story in Good Girl, the debut novel from German-born Afghani poet Aria Aber, now longlisted for the Women’s Prize For Fiction.
Good Girl’s main character, 19-year-old Nila, descends from the same lineage, the narrative following as she escapes into Berlin’s techno scene to outrun anxieties around her racial identity and strict culture, grief over her dead mother and Germany’s simmering sinister racism.
The novel starts with aspiring artist Nila meeting Marlowe Woods, an American author who is perhaps best known in club circles for always having speed. He asks Nila where she’s from, then where she’s really from. Nila responds with a lie – “I’m Greek.” An entanglement blossoms between Nila and Marlowe, drawing her into a new group that allows her to leave behind her reality – that is, until, she no longer wants to.
Set against a backdrop of racial violence, something the police refer to as the Kebab Mafia murders, blaming Turkish organised crime gangs instead of the racists most likely at fault, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Nila wants to conceal her true identity.
Safety, for sure, but sometimes it’s also just easier to meet new people without immediately handing them a set of assumptions about who you are.
"It’s a familiar feeling for many children of immigrants to the West, coming of age in what’s sometimes erroneously seen to be a more permissive and liberal environment while still living with familial expectations from ‘home’"
Nila is also avoiding judgements from her father and taxi driver uncles, who come from a strict Shia family. There seem to be spies on every corner, ready to report on the latest shame Nila has brought on the family by daring to lose herself in loud, dark dancefloors, returning home in ‘unsuitable’ outfits in broad daylight.
It’s a familiar feeling for many children of immigrants to the West, coming of age in what’s sometimes erroneously seen to be a more permissive and liberal environment while still living with familial expectations from ‘home.’
It’s a struggle for Nila’s father too, particularly after the loss of his wife. Nila’s parents wanted her to have freedom and political opinions, but they struggled with which rules to keep from their patriarchal upbringing.
Nila must be a “dokhtare khub, a good girl, in order not to turn into a dokhtare kharab, a broken, bad, ruined girl,” shunned by the Afghani-Berlin community – a fate worse than death.
Over the next 350 pages, Aria plants Afghani political history as a backdrop for her inherited tensions, Nila a baby conceived to postpone deportation, her birth a “consequence of a long chain of geopolitical events, which began with the US National Security Advisor, Brzezinski, considering Afghanistan a chessboard to save Poland, his home, and ended a decade later with the Russians… ready to accede to the collapse of the USSR.”
Aria speaks of Nila’s educated, middle-class parents, her mother a feminist revolutionary who liked dinner parties. They “didn’t walk barefoot over mountains,” they “boarded a plane and never returned… They were people back home.”
The tension between perceptions and mundane realities echoes throughout the novel, where Nila comes to accept that hating her nose and “the whiff of family history” she carries with her does not negate the happiness she feels when hearing someone say her name the way her mother pronounced it. It’s a remarkable feat from Aria, who writes in English, her third language, to capture the complexities of never quite feeling at home in the world.
Nila is carried along on this unexpected journey of understanding herself as a whole woman, soundtracked by BPMs higher than her heart rate. Marlowe brings her into situations that show Nila exactly who she doesn’t want to become – a fundraiser for Afghanistan, Nila still living her Greek lie, is particularly painful, listening to her newfound ‘friends’ pity her country.
She begins to shed the imposed shame of being Muslim, welcoming in all the pain and confusion that entails. She longs for her mother, to be seen as she is, interrogating the resentment she feels for faces that look like her own and the “spartan” cafe where she picks up cardamom cookies.
She ponders the true meaning of liberation, defiance and rebellion, Aria writing with dexterity to never feel didactic or worthy. The worth comes from Nila’s humanity, how truly she is written and how relatable she is for so many.
Good Girl is a compulsive and singular story of one woman grappling for a grounded sense of self in a world that tells her she’s less than.
Nobody puts it better than her father, who reminds Nila, “You cannot forget where you come from – it’s not a death sentence.”
Isabella Silvers is a multi-award-winning editor and journalist, having written for Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Refinery 29 and more. She also writes a weekly newsletter on mixed-race identity, titled Mixed Messages
Follow her on Twitter: @izzymks
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