what do I do with the boywho snuck his way insideme on my childhood playground? But we loved our story: the gazebo / that dared to live on concrete. With Gazebo, Asghar begins to bridge the common occurrence of death with the power and fortified resilience that come with surviving in spaces where oppression is commonplace. In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it. "WWE by Fatimah Asghar - Poems | Academy of American Poets", "Dark Noise: Fatimah Asghar, Franny Choi, Nate Marshall, Aaron Samuels, Danez Smith & Jamila Woods", "Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships", "30 Under 30 2018: Hollywood & Entertainment", "For poet Fatimah Asghar, the word 'orphan' has more than one meaning", "How Fatimah Asghar turned the traumas of colonialism and diaspora into poetry", "Fatimah Asghar '11 on the Emmy-Nominated Webseries Recently Acquired by HBO | Mellon Mays Fellowship", "How They Got There: Sam Bailey & Fatimah Asghar, Creators of Brown Girls", "Fatimah Asghar's first collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, is a warning about the consequences of ignoring history", "5 Canadians nominated for first Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for women and non-binary writers, worth $150,000 (U.S.)", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fatimah_Asghar&oldid=1143884663, This page was last edited on 10 March 2023, at 14:06. Jamila gets me through everything. If They Come For Us is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. the sweet, rich scent, / the cream and white of the magnolia blossom. In Asghar's latest collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, the speaker explores her identity as a marginalized orphan in a world that consistently tells her that she does not belong. Freedom Bar Asnia Asim 71. But as important as those revelations and experiences are, the feeling Im left with after reading through these difficult but necessary poems is one of optimism. Fatimah Asghar. John talks about his new book Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, learning how to focus Pat Frazier is the National Youth Poet Laureate of these here United States, and alone. Her work is well-regarded in all circles and has been included in Poetry Magazine and other famous publications. Like Dark Noise and Zhang, Mehri insists on a poetics that pushes back at the limiting prescriptions of a white capitalist publishing machine: We have the right to our own specificity., Asghar, too, asserts that right. With this poem, readers are immersed in a personal account of the day-to-day experiences of Asghar as she searches for acceptance in America and routinely faces threats and insecurity. Asghar continues to elaborate on this community, writing my people my people I cant be lost / when I see you my compass is brown & gold & blood / my compass a Muslim teenager / snapback & hightops gracing the subway platform, further stressing how she is able to lean on those who have sacrificed for herthose who have been and continue to be there for her. Zhang pointed to the lose-lose situation writers of color face: Pander to the white literary establishment by exploiting trauma for publication, or risk being ignored and silenced. She covers bruises & never lets us eat leftovers: a good wife.Its something in their nature: what america does to men. In each of the books seven Partition poems, Asghar traces its legacy, but she also considers the metaphorical and physical partitions of her life. She edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and her Collected Poems: 1974-2004 was published in 2016. In Other Body, Asghar writes, In my sex dreams a penis / swings between my legs, and mentions how her moustache grew longer than anyone elses in her class at school. Fatimah Asghar's brilliant offering is a dexterous blend of Old World endurance and New World bravado. her knees fold on the rundown mattress, a prayer to WWEHer tasbeeh & TV: the only things she puts before her husband. 112 W 27th Street, Suite 600 Just my body & all its oil, she writes near the end of the poem, summing up her alienation from a body brutally marked by race and war. [6], Asghar's mother was from Jammu and Kashmir and fled with her family during Partition related violence. With familial roots still deeply tied to Pakistan and the divided territory of Kashmir, Asghar, a queer Muslim teenager living in a post-9/11 America, was left to navigate not only the partition of India and Pakistan, but likewise the numerous boundaries entangled in her identity and painted on her body. Our Mothers Fed Us Well Yasmin Belkhyr 70. The cultural memory is lodged in the speaker like a knifeone that she may not be able to remove, but one that she could choose not to twist. The speaker of these poems appears at once old and incredibly new, a dichotomy that is upheld as the narrative jumps from past to present and all over the last century. crawling away from her, my fatherback from work. Coming out of the vibrant Chicago poetry scene where she made a name for herself as a slam poet, her writing is as informed by slams overt linking of the personal with the political, as it is by formal experimentation and lyricism (she cites Douglas Kearney and Terrance Hayes as influences). Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer. Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani-Kashmiri-American poet and screenwriter and the author of If They Come for Us., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/magazine/poem-howd-your-parents-die-again.html. Violence. Moments like this appear frequently throughout the anthology, wherein Asghar notes how the atrocities of her familys past trickle into her present identity. Fatimah Asghar is a poet, filmmaker, and educator. In Microaggression Bingo, her words, much like her personal and cultural identities, are carefully divided and fitted in the structured tiles of a bingo board, with the central free space square reading Dont Leave Your House For A Day - Safe. The surrounding tiles are filled with chilling statements and memories such as Casting Call to audition for a battered Hijabi Woman and Editor recommends you add more white people to your story to be more relatable. The poem illustrates the limited space and movements the speaker is able to take as a Pakistani-Muslim subject to microaggressions in America, a land that pledges to be rooted in diversity. But, through these inheritances, there is also care and comfort, sweetness and love, that provide structure to our identities, bodies, and imaginations: For the fire my people my people / the long years weve survived the long / years yet to come I see you map / my sky the light your lantern long / ahead & I follow I follow., The Nassau Literary Review5534 Frist CenterPrinceton, NJ 08544. | Only the air was heavy and moist, like the breath of an enormous, mysterious beast. The novel follows the coming of age of three sisters who are orphaned following the sudden murder of their father. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and elsewhere. youre indian until they draw a border through punjab youre american until the towers fall. Anyone can read what you share. They are taken into the custody . Fatimah Asghar is a contemporary poet and filmmaker. "When your people have gone through such historical violence, you cannot shake it. I think we are at war! stranger. he was there toothe day on Bens couch, wearingmy skirt, ranking the girls, in class. Fatimah Asghar is a South Asian American poet and screenwriter. His body is sent to Pakistan. The books opening poem, For Peshawar, immediately draws the reader into the lasting conflict and fear with an epigraph that reads, December 16, 2014 / Before attacking schools in Pakistan, the Taliban sends kafan, / a white cloth that marks Muslim burials, as a form of psychological trauma. Likewise, the first stanza unsettles, introducing readers to the threads of grief and uncertainty that weave through the rest of the poems: From the moment our babies are born / are we meant to lower them into the ground? More than grief, though, this poem, and the poems that follow, drive the narrative into questions of home: Can a place be home if the people who live there, as For Peshawar questions, are meant to bury their children? These poems return to the question of what home means, asking what it is to be in a body that doesnt always feel like a safe place. [17], When We Were Sisters was longlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction in 2023.[18]. Smell is the Last Memory to Go Its a gesture taken up by many of her peersinstead of pandering to whiteness, writers like Chen Chen, Danez Smith, and Zhang write towards, and out of, their communities. Every single person that visits Poem Analysis has helped contribute, so thank you for your support. I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. I read another poem of Fatimah's, entitled, "Oil," and in it, she speaks about what it was like for her as a child after 9/11. The Woman in the White Chador Farnaz Fatemi 61. your own auntie calls you ghareeb. Where I . Anneanne Tells Me Beyza Ozer 67. ""I've been constantly thinking about it, and looking back into it and trying to understand exactly what happened," she said in 2018. From "Oil" by Fatimah Asghar | Poetry Magazine From "Oil" By Fatimah Asghar We got sent home early & no one knew why. it makes of my mouth. Fatimah Asghar is the author of the poetry collection If They Come for Us(One World/Random House, 2018) and the chapbook After(Yes Yes Books, 2015). I draw a ship on the map. [12] It was not until she was in college that Asghar learned about how the Partition of India had deeply impacted her family. How has climate change changed the way we write poetry? [13], Along with her orphanhood, the legacy of Partition is another major theme in her poetry. from the soil. Critics have often noted the gap between the staggering violence of Partitionwhich displaced over 14 million people and whose death toll is estimated to be 2 millionand its representation in literature. Sacraments Ladan Osman 62. His "coven" of children the eldest, Noreen, followed by Kausar and Aisha is plummeted into orphanhood and watches his funeral on VHS. In the opening pages of Fatimah Asghar's When We Were Sisters, an immigrant father leaves home to get bunk beds for his three children and is murdered in the street. Give me my mother for no, other reason than I deserve her.If yesterday & tomorrow are the samepluck the flower of my mothers body. Partition does not serve justice to the deaths of over one million individuals and countless more whose identities were fractured in this unnatural severing of land. Elsewhere, a new history / Of touch, not pitted against the land. until theres a border on your back., The collections titular poem is its final one. This data is anonymized, and will not be used for marketing purposes. Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038, my people I follow you like constellations. / A man? And again, in The Last Summer of Innocence, questions of the role of the body, and of gender norms, resurface. Partition is too innocent of a word to describe one of the largest refugee crises in South Asian history. I am four, sitting in a patch of grass She's told her family is from Afghanistan; she is shy and afraid to speak to the other students; their slang {The Bomb}, is not something to repeat, it shares a more sinister meaning to her. Epigraphs from Korean-American poet Suji Kwock Kim and Rajinder Singh, a survivor of the India/Pakistan Partition, and an explanation of the Partition prepare us for the painful, but necessary, poems to come. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominatedBrown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. These inheritances seep from country to country, body to body, and word to word, generating animosity and division. Asghar described . I copy-catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. like your little cousin who pops gum & wears bras now: a stranger. But twist she does, and by doing so, opens herself to everything, from painful truths to the kindness of strangers. The city of Peshawar, which is mentioned in other poems, refers to a region that had become dangerous for Muslims to reside in during the India-Pakistan partition. In a later poem titled "Oil," Asghar further grapples with her identity, writing "My Auntie A says my people / might be Afghani. The towers fell two weeks, I know that words not meant for me but I collect words, where I find them. After the Orlando Shooting Juniper Cruz 65. In 2017, she was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and listed on Forbess 30 under 30 list. We work to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry. I buried it under a casket of scribbles / All of the people I could be are dangerous / The blood clotting, oil in my veins. With the tragic destruction of the Twin Towers during 9/11, Asghar returns to a place of discomfort and hesitancy of her originsquestioning whether she could carry her cultural heritage with pride or trauma in a grieving, post-9/11 America that views individuals like her with fear and distrust. Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama who loves cats, crystals, and classic rock. Their experiences mirror the game: move into any squarein any direction on the board, and a microaggression takes place; the only safe haven on the board sits in the center: Home. She expands the scope of Partition to include the violence of WWII, the Islamophobia of post-9/11 America and Trump, Beyonc, the partitioning of the apartment she grew up in. A collection of poems, prose, and audio and video recordings that explore Islamic culture. the day other kids shovedmy body into dirt & christened mehe appeared, boy, wicked, feral, swallowing my stride.the boy who grows my beard& slaps my face when I wax, my mustache. I copy -catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. ISSN 2577-9427.NOTE: Advertisements and sponsorships contribute to hosting costs. Her newest book "When We Were Sisters" was published October 2022 and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2022. With If They Come For Us Asghar joins a rich history of Partition literature. Her selfhood is foreclosed by 9/11 and the resulting culture of fear and xenophobia: the ship sinks, her blood clots. Kal. they say it so often, it must be your name now, stranger. youre kashmiri until they burn your home, she writes in the first Partition poem, delineating the ways bodies and identities are at the whim of the shifting logic of borders. I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. If They Come For Us , by Fatimah Asghar (One World/Penguin Random House, 2018). Examples include both visual and verbal instances, like the first square, which reads, White girl wearing a bindi at music festival, and another on the bottom row where an unnamed speaker says, I love hanging out with your family. The muse in literature is a source of inspiration for the writer. I buried it under a casket of scribbles. Danez and Franny hop on the ole zoom zoom with legendary poet and beard icon John Murillo. Its estimated that 1-2 million people died and 75-100,000 women were abducted and raped in the ensuing months.) A member of the Dark Noise Collective, Asghar has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation. A homeland, even one never seen, sticks in her blood; the trauma endured by her ancestors lives within her DNA. How we master the forms we choose to write in and speak back to our own traditions is a personal choice, writes Momtaza Mehri in her critical defense of instagram poets like Rupi Kaur, who is often accused of commodifying trauma and her own marginalization as a brown woman. And yet, even when were told some of these memories and experiences are not the the speakers, they still are, somehow. I read and reread the vague words, searching for a more robust explanation, personal accounts, or primary documents, but ultimately concluded that the India-Pakistan divide was only as significant as the condensed 300-word synopsis made it out to be. Sometimes, English needs to be broken, according to poet Fatimah Asghar. Her work is well-regarded in all circles and has been included in Poetry Magazine and other famous publications. In it Asghar addresses my people my people / a dance to strangers in my blood. The poem references First they came, the oft-quoted Martin Niemller condemnation of Germans who acquiesced to Nazis, but where Niemller denounces the cowardice of those who didnt speak up for the persecuted, If They Come For Us is a firm declaration of loyalty and love to Asghars community. Selected by Rita Dove. Poetry Nov 2, 2015 3:34 PM EDT. III Hajj. The Oil serves as the flimsy motivation for the invasion of Iraq, and also a stand-in for everything Asghar has lost as an orphan and as a brown girl during the War on Terror. Fatimah Asghar is a contemporary poet and filmmaker. Used with the permission of the poet. All the people I could be are dangerous. Orphaned as a child and marginalized in America, Asghar captures the plight of alienation on a personal and political scale. In her poem "Super Orphan," Asghar once again explores the impact of their absence. Everyone always tries to theft, bring them back out the grave. Back of the throatto teeth. Fatimah Asghars brilliant offering is a dexterous blend of Old World endurance and New World bravado. For poet Fatimah Asghar, the word 'orphan' has more than one meaning. It is through you visiting Poem Analysis that we are able to contribute to charity. The expansion of the popular landscape of poetry leaves more room for writing that isnt limited to representation, and for a readership outside of the white gaze. watching my beloveds through Facetime the tens of tens of apps downloaded so I can hear the scattered voices of everyone I love & the silence of my apartment building so loud my whole world . If the speaker, who comes from a lineage of heartache and violence, and who lives through her own kinds of violence, can still look at this country that has failed every immigrant to enter its harbor and find kindness in the cracks, how can we not too have hope for a better, more inclusive, kinder future? Amid the hurt and darkness that exists in this world, Asghars poems prove that hope is out there, if only we have the courage to look for it. They both died by the time she was five, leaving her an orphan. Just my body & all its oil," she writes near the end of the poem, summing up her alienation from a body brutally marked by race and war. Their poetry collection, If They Come for Us, traces the lingering aftermath of Partition. Even now, you dont get it. I collect words where I find them. The experience of reading Fatimah Asghars debut book of poems, If They Come For Us, is one of being gripped by the shoulders and shaken awake; of having your eyelids pinned open and unable to blink. In 2011 she created a spoken word poetry group in Bosnia and Herzegovina called REFLEKS while serving a Fulbright fellowship, where she studied theater in post-genocidal countries. I think we are at war! After great pain. The speakers feeling of un-belonging continues even at home, as she comes of age without the guidance of a mother and father. in the kitchen. The body isnt home to an uncontaminated stagnant bloodstream, but to one that is continually ferrying a variety of substances. Rolls attah & pounds the keemaat night watches the bodies of these glistening men. For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions just in case, I hear her say. Snake Oil, Snake Bite Dilruba Ahmed 73 The cultural memory is lodged in the speaker like a knifeone that she may not be able to remove, but one that she could choose not to twist. This is the other bind of writing mass historical trauma into poetrythat true representation is necessarily impossible, but also that diasporic writing about Partition is often accused of exploiting historical violence for the sake of personal narrative and aesthetics. The cultural memory that lives in the speakers body is inescapable, but rather than run from it, she faces it boldly, writes it down, and shares it. It is largely written in lower case, with the . How would / you have taught me to be a woman? Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR,Time,Teen Vogue,Huffington Post, and others. Main Na Bhoolunga. Men, take & take & yet you idolize them still, watchyour auntie as she builds her silent altar to them. "I have no blood. If the literary world calls for a flattening of experience, Asghars response is to revel in the specific. Poets in the diaspora have mined the relationship between the violent remapping of the subcontinent with the instability of South Asian identity, language, and citizenship in their work. Co-creator and writer for the Emmy-nominated webseries Brown Girls, their work has appeared in Poetry, [1] Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets, [2] and other publications. I look up & make sure no one heard. Kal means Im in the crib. Fatimah Asghar is an award-winning poet, whose widespread collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, has created her international fame. I learned that India had been split into two, with Hindus residing in Indian territories and Muslims living in Pakistan. Play is critical in the development of their work, as is intentionally building relationship and . She motions readers like myself towards a more compassionate understanding of history which has been narrated by vagueness beyond a 300-word synopsis that tries to encapsulate an intricately layered pastand a realization that violence can live through generations. They cant touch anyone without teeth & spitunless one strips the other of their human skin. "And in a lot of ways we are. Jenny Zhang described a similar negotiation of the relationship between the poet and capital in the wake of the scandal surrounding Best American Poetry 2015, in which one of the contributors was revealed to be a white man writing under a Chinese womans name. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer, Poems of Muslim Faith and Islamic Culture, VS Live with Fatimah Asghar, Jos Olivarez, and Paul Tran. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it . Can't blame me for taking a good idea. (The Partition was the division of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947, which, Asghar writes, resulted in the forced migration of at least 14 million people as they fled genocide and ethnic cleansing. Again? A poet, a fiction writer, and a filmmaker, Fatimah cares less about genre and instead prioritizes the story that needs to be told and finds the best vehicle to tell it. Kal means shes oiling my hairbefore the first day of school. . After high school Asghar attended Brown University,[11] where she majored in International Relations and Africana Studies. Asghar has a strong reputation for challenging norms, and for intelligent, sharp writing. Along with poets Jamila Woods, Nate Marshall, Aaron Samuels, Franny Choi, and Danez Smith, Asghar is a member of Dark Noise, a multiracial poetry collective whose work addresses shared themes of intergenerational trauma, racial injustice, and queer identity. New York, NY 10001. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. Fatimah Asghar these are my people & I find them on the street & shadow through any wild all wild my people my people a dance of strangers in my blood the old woman's sari dissolving to wind bindi a new moon on her forehead I claim her my kin & sew the star of her to my breast the toddler dangling from stroller hair a fountain of dandelion seed Poems covered in the Educational Syllabus. Hindi na ibinalik / ng mga dayo ang kinuhang / lupain | The settlers never returned / the land they grabbed. These sly, adept poems work through circumstances under threat with audacity, humor, and wonder. Orphaned as a girl, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. One Partition poem swings between 1947 to the present day, collapsing time in a way that illuminates the ways what happened then affects her now: 1993: summer in New York City If They Come For Us ends with an honest declaration of love and appreciationloyalty and unwavering commitmentto the many communities she wholeheartedly identifies with: my country is made / in my peoples image / if they come for you they / come for me too in the dead. Paying homage to all her familywhether they be blood relatives or friendsAsghar celebrates the communities shes battled with, fought against, and finally embraced. Poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, Asghars response is to in! All circles and has been included in poetry Magazine and other famous publications Foundation fatimah asghar oil and.... The writer and co-creator of the Dark Noise Collective, Asghar captures the plight of alienation on a personal political. 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