I had always wanted to write a book about a party girl who drifts through Berlin’s subterranean worlds, but I didn’t seriously start writing this novel until 2020, when I had just moved back to Berlin from the Bay Area for a few months. Both landscapes seeped into my consciousness while composing the first draft, which is why Nila and Marlowe come from Berlin and Northern California, respectively. Walking through the deserted streets of Friedrichshain and Neukölln that summer, I was almost electrified by my grief for the world. And I vividly remembered my own life a decade prior, when I was stumbling through those same streets with big dreams and a penchant for danger. Now that it’s out in the world, I feel very happy that the book has both hedonistic and political elements to it.
368pp, ₹699; Bloomsbury
Berlin comes across as one of the central characters if not the main protagonist of your novel. Was that how you had intended it to be?
Yes, that was on purpose; it’s one of my favourite cities in the world, an unruly and yet extremely generous place. It’s a place where history is very tactile: you can touch it, you can walk through it, you live within it. Berlin, like any cosmopolitan city, houses so many variegated communities, and I was drawn to writing a character who can navigate the worlds of different milieus. On the one hand, we have the refugee and immigrant community, and on the other, we have the thriving club and techno scene – Nila is a product of both, and she seamlessly moves through them. I guess in some ways, the novel functions as a love letter to Berlin, in all its complexity.
Franz Kafka and his writing permeate the text. What made you draw on his work in your own fictional narrative centred on the life of a young woman as a second-generation immigrant of colour in Germany?
Kafka was a minor writer during his lifetime, not the canonized major writer we categorize him as today. He was a Jewish man living in Prague, writing in German, and stuck between the mysticism and traditions of his family and the modernization of the capital he lived in. He suffered from the demands of his family, especially his father. Although Nila lives a hundred years later, in a different city in Europe, she suffers from similar conundrums as Kafka. Her love for him builds a bridge between the present and the past, making her feel less alone in her exilic fate.
The maze of administrative language and the slow violence inherent to it, specifically as it pertains to asylum seekers and refugees, is poignantly examined through Nila and her family’s experiences. Jenny Erpenbeck makes a similar exposition in Go, Went, Gone, where the very access to basic rights for refugees from the Global South is shown to be an uphill battle. Was that something you had consciously wished to draw attention to?
Of course. I guess there is another reason why I was drawn to Kafka. His writings, as in parables such as “Before the Law” or the novel “The Trial”, manage to elucidate the absurd and labyrinthine world of bureaucracy and law. I am very aware of the machinery of these linguistic impediments because I grew up with my parents still in asylum; and even nowadays, I am sometimes astonished by the opacity of legalese.
Which contemporary writers, in your opinion, have responded through their fiction to the multi-layered and nuanced histories of migration and contemporary anti-immigrant populist rhetoric that invisibilizes those histories and can be found in political campaigns and mainstream media narratives of nations of the ‘Global North’?
There are some poets listed here, as well, but in general, this is my list: Solmaz Sharif, Zaina Alsous, Lena Khalaf-Tuffaha, Yasmin Zaher, Isabella Hammad, Mohammed El-Kurd, Jamil Jan Kochai, Sahar Muradi, Adania Shibli, Jenny Erpenbeck, Şeyda Kurt, Ayşegül Savaş, Alena Jabarine.
Deleuze and Guattari’s exposition of Kafka’s oeuvre as an example of ‘minor literature’ is alluded to in the narrative. By opting to write in your third language (English, which comes after Farsi and German) was Good Girl an attempt at similarly expressing yourself through a ‘major language’, making it ‘minor’ through an attempt at an articulation of migrant lives through it?
I’m not sure if I do this consciously or not but, of course, regarding my relationship to the English language, one could speak of a “deterritorializing” effect.
Having made the shift from poetry to prose, which literary mode of expression do you find more challenging to compose in and why?
I recently described myself as having a novelistic disposition rather than a poetic one. By that I mean that I tend to think of certain periods in my life, or other people’s lives, as story arcs rather than as poems. Narrative has always felt very natural to me, probably because I was raised in a household of storytellers, and because formal linearity affords me a sense of aesthetic control over my very haphazard, exilic life. I am also one of those poets who lie in their lyric poems — I will make up settings, scenarios, and objects in order to bring across the emotional truth of the particular poem. So, fiction didn’t feel as alienating as one might think, even though it was extremely difficult to maintain pacing and tension in long-form fiction. I diligently studied and deconstructed some of my favourite novels for inspiration, and I also read a lot of movie scripts and theatre plays to learn more about dialogue. It was an exciting project as an autodidact.
What are you working on currently?
I’m working on a second poetry collection and a novel-in-progress. But I also wrote some non fiction for upcoming poetry books –-an anthology called Hair on Fire, which collects Afghan women’s poetry (forthcoming with Calico), and one called Smoke Drifts, which is a newly translated collection of Nadia Anjuman’s poetry, translated by Diana Arterian and Marina Omar (forthcoming with World Poetry Books).
Simar Bhasin is a literary critic and research scholar who lives in Delhi. Her essay ‘A Qissa of Resistance: Desire and Dissent in Selma Dabbagh’s Short Fiction’ was awarded ‘Highly Commended’ by the Wasafiri Essay Prize 2024.
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