In her poem “Azalea Azalea” from the collection Hard Damage, quoted in part in the above epigraph, American poet Aria Aber describes gardens and gardening as attempts at place-making that clash with the narrator’s memories and her family's experience of war, violence, death, and destruction in Afghanistan. In the US, they admire jasmine, evergreens, and azaleas “perk[ing] up … thousand heads” (Aber 2019, 13), but the US is also the country that bombed Afghanistan and tortured Afghan prisoners of war. The narrator and her family are making themselves a home, of sorts, in the US; gardening and tending to plants is clearly a form of place-making. But they also hide their Afghan origins out of fear. They want “to excel in” gardening in the US, in creating “elixirs of thought,” but “what is the order of violence?,” the narrator of the poem asks (Aber 2019, 12). In the poem, violence, overlapping memories and places, and place-making are associated with flight and migration; refuge and home-making with gardens, gardening, and growing plants. This home-making manifests in gardening and growing plants. Yet these gardens remain uncanny, always in tension and conversation with images of dirt, bombs, and decay (see Aber 2019, 12–13).

Aria Aber grew up in Germany as the daughter of refugees from Afghanistan; she studied in the US and currently lives in Oakland, California. Her poetry offers fierce reflections on violence, war, and flight and connects these reflections to questions of language, belonging, and place-making. Germany is a step on her journey, and the German language and German-language poetry (specifically Rilke) make their way into her work, mingling with English and some words in Dari. She describes her “hate-love relationship” to German and the “ghosts of various languages” that inhabit her poetry (O’Rourke 2020).