Elsewhere, a new history / Of touch, not pitted against the land. Like many territorial disputes, the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir, an ethnically diverse Himalayan region known for its natural beauty, was rooted in religion. Fatimah Asghar is an award-winning poet, whose widespread collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, has created her international fame. Neither human sympathy nor natures bounty can fill the void left by her parents early deaths; the ferocious melancholy of that single-word refrain circles their absence as if to say: There is no escaping a loss this large only endurance. 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 The poet and winner of the Restless Books New Immigrant Writing Prize on supporting DRUM and the work of Guyanese poet Martin Carter, copyright 2023 Asian American Writers' Workshop, she cites Douglas Kearney and Terrance Hayes as influences, their Call for Necessary Craft and Practice,. Fatimah Asghar redefines poetry in her full-length debut collection, If They Come for Us, which interweaves free verse and innovative forms as she explores what it means to be orphan, to be immigrant, to be human. | Only the air was heavy and moist, like the breath of an enormous, mysterious beast. Everyone always tries to theft, bring them back out the grave. I went to India once, to find myself.. 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. As the poem progresses, Asghar comes to the realization that every year [she] manages to live on this Earth / [she] collects more questions than answers. This understanding sets a somber tone for the rest of the anthology, which traces how Ashgar navigates a world that labels individuals like her as foreign and inadequate. 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. In the poem Microaggression Bingo, Asghar uses the physical image of a bingo board to highlight the frequency of those microaggressions the speaker faces on a daily basis. It always feels so authentic! Readers are also given a glimpse into the frequency of these occurrences via the text of the middle square, which reads: Dont Leave Your House For A Day Safe. In the same vein, the poem Oil walks the reader through the speakers experience as a young Pakistani Muslim woman in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. 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? With If They Come For Us Asghar joins a rich history of Partition literature. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. We would like to collect information during your visit to help us better understand site use. opens with the lines: Again? She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. Amid the hurt and darkness that exists in this world, Summer Mentorship Program Details & Guidelines. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR,Time,Teen Vogue,Huffington Post, and others. Blood is a measure of perceived racial purity. 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. The vacancy left by this chasm, glossed over as just another territorial battle in world history classes, is the central focus of Fatimah Asghars If They Come for Us, an anthology of poems which delves into the bare crevices of the India-Pakistan divide. / I write Afghani under its hull. In her poem "For Peshawar," Fatimah Asghar writes, "Every year I manage to live on this earth / I collect more questions than I do answers." The questions her poems ask are painful, but necessary: "How do you kill someone who isn't afraid of dying?" "Are all refugees superheroes?" "Do all survivors carry villain inside them?" It is sacred, like the blood of Christ, and sinful, in that its stains signal guilt. 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. However, the paragraph failed to address the bloody legacy of the great dividethe violence entrenched within the border, the millions of Hindus and Muslims who trekked in opposite directions, and those who were unsure of which land they belonged to. In each of the books seven Partition poems, Asghar traces its legacy, but she also considers the metaphorical and physical partitions of her life. His body is sent to Pakistan. If They Come For Us is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. Give me my mother for no, other reason than I deserve her.If yesterday & tomorrow are the samepluck the flower of my mothers body. She has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, Kweli Journal, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Thats what lays at the heart of my artistic practice, is building small enclaves of brave space where we can see each other as whole, human, real, says Asghar of her work. It also runs through a nations body, binding its citizens together through a supposedly shared ancestral origin. But Asghar recognizes the limits and violence of language. Fatimah Asghar is the author of the full-length collection If They Come For Us (Random House, 2018) and the chapbook After (YesYes Books, 2015). Where I . Thank you for your support. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. Learning about her family's firsthand experience during partition had a profound effect on Asghar and her work. I draw a ship on the map. In Raw Silk Meena Alexander links the fraught histories of Partition, the 1965 War between India and Pakistan, the 2002 Gujarat riots and 9/11; Kundiman Prize-winning writer Adeeba Talukder writes about mental illness and postcolonial trauma in her own work; and the experimental poet Bhanu Kapil pulls together psychoanalysis, Deleuzian theory, and personal memoir in Schizophrene. She edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and her Collected Poems: 1974-2004 was published in 2016. 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. Sacraments Ladan Osman 62. If They Come For Us leaves readers with fear and uncertainty of a nation that has become arduous and burdensome for immigrants. Anneanne Tells Me Beyza Ozer 67. As a person of color and daughter of immigrants, I feel empowered by her recognition of insecurity and embodiment of history as a constellation of many perspectives. Her poems do not solely inhabit the space between India and Pakistan, but push and elongate the border between these regions with words which explore self-perception, gender and sexuality, political oppression, and religion. , is one of being gripped by the shoulders and shaken awake; of having your eyelids pinned open and unable to blink. Mercedes Zapata. Fatimah Asghar. [4] She received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2017,[5] and has been featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. 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). again, his legs slammingconcrete, my chest heavingwhen we ran from cops, the night they busted the river partyagain when I smashed the jellyfishinto the sand & grinded it down. Ive never been to my daddys grave.My ache: two jet fuels ruining the suns set play. Raye is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she serves as the Web Editor for Bat City Review. just in case, I hear her say. Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the pen.Her eyes kajaled & wide, glued to sweaty american men. 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. 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. "[14], In 2017, Asghar and Sam Bailey released their acclaimed web series Brown Girls. 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. As though I told you how the first time. 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. 112 W 27th Street, Suite 600 She is the author of the full-length collection If They Come For Us (One World/ Random House, 2018) and the chapbook After (YesYes Books, 2015). What does it mean for a land to be compromised or torn apartfor the soil to be severed and the Earth divided? Poetry Her father was from Pakistan. Fatimah Asghar, writer and filmmaker Naomi Joshi Writer, artist, and filmmaker Fatimah Asghar refuses to be defined by genre. 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. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and elsewhere. But whenever its on you watchthem snarl like mad dogs in a cagethese american men. 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. The speaker's feelings of belonging until threatened in India-Pakistan and un-belonging until invited in America penetrate the anthology, imbuing each poem with a degree of duality and division. A member of the Dark Noise Collective, Asghar has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation. Fatimah Asghars brilliant offering is a dexterous blend of Old World endurance and New World bravado. 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. Please choose below to continue. Smell is the Last Memory to Go 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 . For poet Fatimah Asghar, the word 'orphan' has more than one meaning. 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. For Dark Noise, the work of the poet is inseparable from politics, and If They Come For Us is a collection that reflects those shared aesthetic and political commitments. Asghar lost her parents young; with family roots in Pakistan and in divided Kashmir, she grew up in the United States, a queer Muslim teenager and an orphan in the confusing, unfair months and. 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. The novel follows the coming of age of three sisters who are orphaned following the sudden murder of their father. Read More on our Privacy Policy page. "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. they say it so often, it must be your name now, stranger. His "coven" of children the eldest, Noreen, followed by Kausar and Aisha is plummeted into orphanhood and watches his funeral on VHS. 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. Orphaned as a child and marginalized in America, Asghar captures the plight of alienation on a personal and political scale. her knees fold on the rundown mattress, a prayer to WWEHer tasbeeh & TV: the only things she puts before her husband. Subsequent poems choreograph Asghars dynamic reconciliation and continued battles between her cultural identity, sexuality, and position in America. like whenthat man held me down & we said no. Kal means Im in the crib. 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. A homeland, even one never seen, sticks in her blood; the trauma endured by her ancestors lives within her DNA. In America, the place that is ostensibly home, the speaker faces that rejection both in her family life and in society at large. 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. togetherwe watched it throb, open & closebegging for wet. Can't blame me for taking a good idea. Simply and profoundly, her book is a love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home--and surviving." gives readers lyrically beautiful but painfully true glimpses into a world we may not be familiar with and asks us to reckon with our place in itwhether thats a place of commiseration, understanding, or of recognizing our own hand in upholding power structures that thrive off racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. Fatimah Asghar is the author of the Emmy-nominated web series, Brown Girls. As the poem progresses, Asghar becomes further distanced from the events, seeming to remember less and less. This battle with death, which Asghar and her family face in both Peshawar and America, is then slowly reconciled in a later poem entitled Gazebo, a piece which details the building of a safe space, in which Asghar writes, We had too many funerals to waste / flowers. Her newest book "When We Were Sisters" was published October 2022 and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2022. Learn about the charties we donate to. "When your people have gone through such historical violence, you cannot shake it. Violence. Moments like this appear frequently throughout the anthology, wherein Asghar notes how the atrocities of her familys past trickle into her present identity. Translation: "I won't forget.". Fatimah Asghar is a South Asian American poet and screenwriter. 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. your own auntie calls you ghareeb. Copyright 2010-2019, The Adroit Journal. It is largely written in lower case, with the . Asghars approach is similarly multimodal. Her work is well-regarded in all circles and has been included in Poetry Magazine and other famous publications. The kids at school ask me where Im from & I have no answer. I know you can bend time.I am merely asking for whatis mine. Oftentimes, wars fought over land end in no particular victory. I have no blood. For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions Theres an importance to recognizing the many ways histories of violence trickle through our livesthrough language, family, pop songs, policybut when the metaphor is stretched too thin, it risks losing its specific, potent significance. 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 . Fatimah Asghar's brilliant offering is a dexterous blend of Old World endurance and New World bravado. ""I've been constantly thinking about it, and looking back into it and trying to understand exactly what happened," she said in 2018. 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. A collection of poems, prose, and audio and video recordings that explore Islamic culture. I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. When Rivka reached out to me to do a profile on Fatimah Asghar, I could not have been more excited to interview someone whose work has affected me so much personally. Multiple poems, all titled Partition, navigate not only the literal and historical meaning of the Partition, but also the divisions of the home, of gender, familyand, at times, how those divisions might be reconciled, if possible. Back of the throatto teeth. 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. It is a paean to her familyblood and notwho she turns to steadily, out of the past and into a shared future: 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 poem is composed of free unrhymed verse in a single stanza. The forced migration of over 14 million peopleof Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to Indiatore both families and land apart. 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. Fatimah Asghar's poem, "If They Should Come for Us" is the title poem of the poet's debut full-length collection, If They Come for Us, published by One World/Random House in 2018. from a poisonous one. 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. Asghars book opens with invocations of history. Kal meansshes holding my unborn babyin her arms, helping me pick a name. The partition of If They Come For Us memorializes the violence of borders by refusing the limits of the word partition itself. stranger. Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. my country is made / in my peoples image / if they come for you they / come for me too, she writes. 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 her debut poetry collection, If They Come For Us, Fatimah Asghar has a poem titled Oil that is really about blood, and that recognizes the significance of its fluidity. If the literary world calls for a flattening of experience, Asghars response is to revel in the specific. Sign up for the Asian American Writers' Workshop Newsletter: Asian American Writers Workshop Does it matter how? She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. the sweet, rich scent, / the cream and white of the magnolia blossom. Rather, a series of hasty terms and temporary promises are madein other words, there is compromise. Then one day, their baba, their father dies, too. FATIMAH ASGHAR From "Oil" We got sent home early & no one knew why. I want Evanescence slowly. The 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. As a poet who has lived through layers of oppression and violenceof cultural hesitation and uncertaintyAsghar writes of the many communities she has found in America and the kindness and generosity buried in a nation plagued by marginalization. Anyone can read what you share. She smiles as guilty as a bride without blood, her loveof this new country, cold snow & naked american men. / A man? And again, in The Last Summer of Innocence, questions of the role of the body, and of gender norms, resurface. 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. In her poem "Super Orphan," Asghar once again explores the impact of their absence. Kal. One quick perusal through the shelves of world literature in any bookstore confirms just what the literary world wants to see from writers of color and writers from developing nations: trauma, she writes. III Hajj. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominatedBrown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. Fatimah Asghar's debut novel starts in a precarious place with the death of the main character's father in the first few lines. Kal means shes oiling my hairbefore the first day of school. an edible flower All rights reserved. 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 You can withdraw permission at any time or update your privacy settings here. It is through you visiting Poem Analysis that we are able to contribute to charity. 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. Yesterday meansI say goodbye, again.Kal means they are the same. How has climate change changed the way we write poetry? from the soil. [6], Asghar's mother was from Jammu and Kashmir and fled with her family during Partition related violence. After the Orlando Shooting Juniper Cruz 65. Rolls attah & pounds the keemaat night watches the bodies of these glistening men. Her selfhood is foreclosed by 9/11 and the resulting culture of fear and xenophobia: the ship sinks, her blood clots. 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. Partition, the 1947 cleaving of British-ruled India into three separate countries, India, Pakistan, and now-Bangladesh, serves as the central trauma of the collection. Hindi na ibinalik / ng mga dayo ang kinuhang / lupain | The settlers never returned / the land they grabbed. The anthology opens with a striking poem titled For Peshawar, dated December 16th, 2014. Heres your auntie, in her best gold-threaded shalwaarkameez, made small by this land of american men. in the kitchen. Yasmin Adele Majeed is the editorial coordinator for the Asian American Writers Workshop. Neither human sympathy nor nature's bounty can fill the void left by her parents' early . 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. It seemed peaceful enougheach group would have their separate homes. Raye was a finalist for the 2018 Keene Prize for Literature and received honorable mentions for poetry from both Southern Humanities Reviews Witness Poetry Prize (2014) and AWPs Intro Journals Project (2015). Jan 02, 2023 | By Fatimah Asghar | American Poetry Review Verified. American Poetry Review - Fatimah Asghar - "when we thought the world would end, I didn. She has also had her writing featured on outlets like PBS, NPR, and Teen Vogue. In an unofficial manifesto, their Call for Necessary Craft and Practice, Dark Noise urges writers and artists to join them in a shared creative practice that is anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and refuses to turn away from the unjust political times we find ourselves in. The document recognizes the poet as someone whose work is inevitably tied to power and profit. 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. This is true not only of race and heritage, but also of gender identity and sexuality, and many poems attempt to navigate those complexitiesin terms of a relationship with the self and a relationship with religion. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer. I think we are at war! Fatimah Asghars insistence on joy is a refusal of the demand that marginalized writers flatten trauma for the white gaze. Kal means Im in the crib,eyelashes wet as she looks over me.Kal means Im on the bed. Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. like your little cousin who pops gum & wears bras now: a stranger. Happy new year yall! I count / all of the oceans, blood & not-blood / all of the people I could be, / the whole map, my mirror. Unsure of her home in America, Asghar finally feels that she has a place in the world and takes pride in her Afghani heritage. 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. these are my people & I findthem on the street & shadowthrough any wild all wildmy people my peoplea dance of strangers in my bloodthe old womans sari dissolving to windbindi a new moon on her foreheadI claim her my kin & sewthe star of her to my breastthe toddler dangling from strollerhair a fountain of dandelion seedat the bakery I claim them toothe Sikh uncle at the airportwho apologizes for the patdown the Muslim man who abandonshis car at the traffic light dropsto his knees at the call of the Azan& the Muslim man who drinksgood whiskey at the start of maghribthe lone khala at the parkpairing her kurta with crocsmy people my people I cant be lostwhen I see you my compassis brown & gold & bloodmy compass a Muslim teenagersnapback & high-tops gracingthe subway platformMashallah I claim them allmy country is madein my peoples imageif they come for you theycome for me too in the deadof winter a flock ofaunties step out on the sandtheir dupattas turn to oceana colony of uncles grind their palms& a thousand jasmines bell the airmy people I follow you like constellationswe hear glass smashing the street& the nights opening darkour names this countrys woodfor the fire my people my peoplethe long years weve survived the longyears yet to come I see you mapmy sky the light your lantern longahead & I follow I follow. In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it. Poetry Nov 2, 2015 3:34 PM EDT. The expansion of the popular landscape of poetry, Love Letter to the Eve of the End of the World, Recycling Poetry in a Time of Climate Change. With uniquely crafted poems which take the form of floor plans, bingo boards, and crossword puzzles, she shows her audience what it feels like to be constantly told that you dont belongwhat it means to feel threatened, yet confidentin a world torn apart by marginalization. Stop living in a soap opera yells her husband, freshfrom work, demanding his dinner: american. "People talk about genre like it's so stringent," she says. As though I told you how the first time.Everyone always tries to theft, bring them back out the grave.Let them rest; my parents stay dead. Poetry Foundation Penguin anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and elsewhere ang kinuhang lupain! 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