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. 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. 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. Sacraments Ladan Osman 62. like your little cousin who pops gum & wears bras now: a stranger. 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. In Asghar's work, Partition becomes the wound that wounds all wounds. . Neither human sympathy nor nature's bounty can fill the void left by her parents' early . For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions Main Na Bhoolunga. Originally published in Poetry (March, 2017). 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. Even now, you dont get it. Everyday she prays. 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. 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. Fatimah Asghar is an artist who spans across different genres and themes. If They Come For Us , by Fatimah Asghar (One World/Penguin Random House, 2018). Copyright 2010-2019, The Adroit Journal. Her parents immigrated to the United States. Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Then one day, their baba, their father dies, too. Fatimah Asghar is a South Asian American poet and screenwriter. 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? Anyone can read what you share. In each of the books seven Partition poems, Asghar traces its legacy, but she also considers the metaphorical and physical partitions of her life. Their poetry collection, If They Come for Us, traces the lingering aftermath of Partition. like whenthat man held me down & we said no. Asghar is a member of the Dark Noise Collective[3] and a Kundiman Fellow. I collect words where I find them. 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. from the soil. an aunt teaches me how to tell what do I do with the boywho snuck his way insideme on my childhood playground? But, as Rebecca Solnit writes,blood is what mixes things up. Its defining quality is that it circulates. If They Come For Us is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. For poet Fatimah Asghar, the word 'orphan' has more than one meaning. Now that youre older your auntie calls to say he hither again, that this didnt happen before he became american. 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? Kal means Im in the crib,eyelashes wet as she looks over me.Kal means Im on the bed. 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. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR,Time,Teen Vogue,Huffington Post, and others. [9] Fatimah Asghar. Blood is a measure of perceived racial purity. Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. | Only the air was heavy and moist, like the breath of an enormous, mysterious beast. We work to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry. The two main characters are a queer Pakistani-American writer and an African-American musician and are played by Nabila Hossain and Sonia Denis respectively. It seemed peaceful enougheach group would have their separate homes. my father: sideburns down the length of his face my age now & ripe my age now & alive his husky voice's crackle like the night's wind through corn fields of bell-bottoms fields of pomade my mother's overlarge sunglasses crowded on her face crowded in the only . FATIMAH ASGHAR 145 youre indian until they draw a border through punjab youre american until the towers fall. Blood is an unwieldy metaphor. She smiles as guilty as a bride without blood, her loveof this new country, cold snow & naked american men. 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. Kal means shes oiling my hairbefore the first day of school. She has also had her writing featured on outlets like PBS, NPR, and Teen Vogue. in your family's house, you: runaway dog turned wild. 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. Asghar chooses to conclude this intricate choreography with the titular poem If They Come For Us. In this piece, Asghars lyrical prose intensifies as she leaves readers with tangible revelations about the simultaneous pain and joy of having ones being so intimately tied to a land. This could be someone they know or a direct reference to the traditional Greek muses. A collection of poems, prose, and audio and video recordings that explore Islamic culture. A homeland, even one never seen, sticks in her blood; the trauma endured by her ancestors lives within her DNA. As a poet, Asghars work is deeply tied to collectivity and community. Shes seen me at my worst, at my best, at my most insecure everything. 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. 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. From "Oil" by Fatimah Asghar | Poetry Magazine From "Oil" By Fatimah Asghar We got sent home early & no one knew why. 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. Smell is the Last Memory to Go by Fatimah Asghar recounts a story from Asghar's childhood, the memory connected intricately with the small of 'citrus & jasmine'. Fatimah Asghar is a poet, filmmaker, and educator. In essence, the speakers world is as dissected and limiting as the Bingo board. Is it the physical ground that separates, or the people, whose homes, languages, and rituals are woven into the land? Subsequent poems choreograph Asghars dynamic reconciliation and continued battles between her cultural identity, sexuality, and position in America. 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. Fatimah Asghar Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama who loves cats, crystals, and classic rock. 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). Elsewhere, a new history / Of touch, not pitted against the land. Blood versus oil, the girl she knows herself to be versus the political self, victimized by the state. III Hajj. 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 . Franny and Danez talk with Pat about the fertile soil of solitude, falling in love Raych Jackson swings through the VS studio to talk her win at NUPIC (The National Poetry Individual Competition), the brilliant kidlets in the third grade class she teaches, and remixing Safia Elhillo is a goshdarn timespace-suspending poet. "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 are taken into the custody . After the Orlando Shooting Juniper Cruz 65. I know you can bend time.I am merely asking for whatis mine. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the pen.Her eyes kajaled & wide, glued to sweaty american men. Where I . [17], When We Were Sisters was longlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction in 2023.[18]. Fatimah Asghar is a South Asian American poet and screenwriter. The basic rules for writing a ghazal seem straightforward five to 15 couplets, one word repeated at the end of each stanza but transporting this seventh-century Arabian form into a 21st-century American lyric is no mean trick. my country is made / in my peoples image / if they come for you they / come for me too, she writes. 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. The partition of If They Come For Us memorializes the violence of borders by refusing the limits of the word partition itself. from a poisonous one. 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. [12] It was not until she was in college that Asghar learned about how the Partition of India had deeply impacted her family. Asghars book is many things: defiant, subversive, grief-stricken, angrybut its also full of things like bravery, friendship, family, and love. However, she then describes how Two hours after the towers fell I crossed the ship / out on the map. I draw a ship on the map. Tomorrow means I might. your own auntie calls you ghareeb. If They Come For Us leaves readers with fear and uncertainty of a nation that has become arduous and burdensome for immigrants. The forced migration of over 14 million peopleof Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to Indiatore both families and land apart. Monroe's "Open Door" policy, set forth in Volume I of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry's mission: to print the best poetry written today, regardless of style, genre, or approach. 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. Hindi na ibinalik / ng mga dayo ang kinuhang / lupain | The settlers never returned / the land they grabbed. / I write Afghani under its hull. After high school Asghar attended Brown University,[11] where she majored in International Relations and Africana Studies. 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. These inheritances seep from country to country, body to body, and word to word, generating animosity and division. Partition is too innocent of a word to describe one of the largest refugee crises in South Asian history. Request Permissions. I buried it under a casket of scribbles. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. Rolls attah & pounds the keemaat night watches the bodies of these glistening men. We would like to collect information during your visit to help us better understand site use. 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. But with this understanding, Asghars compact yet clear prose also reminds audiences that, although pain exists in our world, we must reckon with our role in creating a more just community. Snake Oil, Snake Bite Dilruba Ahmed 73 have her forever. A collection of poets and articles exploring Asian American culture. FATIMAH ASGHAR From "Oil" We got sent home early & no one knew why. 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). This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. 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. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominatedBrown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. 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). 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. Smell is the Last Memory to Go Rather, a series of hasty terms and temporary promises are madein other words, there is compromise. 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 She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. Its estimated that 1-2 million people died and 75-100,000 women were abducted and raped in the ensuing months.) In America, the place that is ostensibly home, the speaker faces that rejection both in her family life and in society at large. The Poetry Foundation recognizes the power of words to transform lives. Stop living in a soap opera yells her husband, freshfrom work, demanding his dinner: american. 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 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. Im a silent girl, a rig ready to blow. Jan 02, 2023 | By Fatimah Asghar | American Poetry Review Verified. Fatimah Asghars brilliant offering is a dexterous blend of Old World endurance and New World bravado. 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. A homeland, even one never seen, sticks in her blood; the trauma endured by her ancestors lives within her DNA. I whisper it to my sheets. 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. 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. With precise words, she expresses that the dirge, our hearts, pounds vicious, as we prepare / the white linen, ready to wrap our bodies. The conversation around death and the normalization of the ritual of burying bodies highlights just how routine violent oppression was in Peshawar during the partition. They both died by the time she was five, leaving her an orphan. 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 Asghar in a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim-American author, creator, poet, screenwriter and educator who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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. Selected by Rita Dove. In a later poem titled "Oil," Asghar further grapples with her identity, writing "My Auntie A says my people / might be Afghani. It is a call for a poetics that combats those relationships: We reject attitudes that view the lives of marginalized and terrorized people as profit, as click-bait, as tickets to fame, as anything but people deserving of better.. The blood clotting, oil in my veins. Happy new year yall! 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. 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 have no blood. "[16], Brown Girls received an Emmy nomination in 2017 in the Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series category. 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. I draw a ship on the map. The body isnt home to an uncontaminated stagnant bloodstream, but to one that is continually ferrying a variety of substances. In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it. All the people I could be are dangerous. The poem begins with the 2014 terrorist attack on The Army Public School in Peshawar, forcing Ashghar to question whether we are meant to lower [our babies] into the ground / from the moment they are born. Asghars tone is pensive as she grapples with the notion of something as brutal and wrongful as death proximate to young individuals who have yet to understand what it means to be threatened. 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). Kal means shesdancing at my wedding not-yet come. The death impacts a trio of siblings at the . I want Evanescence slowly. Fatimah Asghars insistence on joy is a refusal of the demand that marginalized writers flatten trauma for the white gaze. Home is the first grave. in the kitchen. 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. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. These sly, adept poems work through circumstances under threat with audacity, humor, and wonder. She has also had her writing featured on outlets like PBS, NPR, and Teen Vogue. Orphaned as a child and marginalized in America, Asghar captures the plight of alienation on a personal and political scale. Poem Solutions Limited International House, 24 Holborn Viaduct,London, EC1A 2BN, United Kingdom, Discover and learn about the greatest poetry ever straight to your inbox, Discover and learn about the greatest poetry, straight to your inbox. [13], Along with her orphanhood, the legacy of Partition is another major theme in her poetry. an edible flower opens with the lines: Again? Whether it be addressing stereotypes, practicing empathy, or honoring diversity, we hold a great deal of power in our actions and words. Allah, you gave us a languagewhere yesterday & tomorroware the same word. In Oil, she recalls losing her parents as a child and going to elementary school during the beginning of the War on Terror: Two hours after the towers fell I crossed the ship crawling away from her, my fatherback from work. "People talk about genre like it's so stringent," she says. 112 W 27th Street, Suite 600 The speakers feeling of un-belonging continues even at home, as she comes of age without the guidance of a mother and father. I copy-catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. 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. How would / you have taught me to be a woman? Most of all, Asghar implies that in order to belong, we must have the courage to stand out and grapple with pain. Asghars book opens with invocations of history. 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. scraped wrists & steady poundinghis eyes wide, untilhe stopped making a sound. Yasmin Adele Majeed is the editorial coordinator for the Asian American Writers Workshop. 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.. Translation: "I won't forget.". Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer. 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. As the poem progresses, Asghar becomes further distanced from the events, seeming to remember less and less. , is one of being gripped by the shoulders and shaken awake; of having your eyelids pinned open and unable to blink. An East Asian nematode is threatening the European eel population, Poems, correspondence, essays, and reportage on how we perceive and write about climate change, How we perceive and write about climate change, Katrina Bellos exquisite drawings of the vast and the miniscule in nature, Climate change and development threaten the indigenous fisherfolk communities of Mumbai. 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. She edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and her Collected Poems: 1974-2004 was published in 2016. In America, the place that is ostensibly home, the speaker faces that rejection both in her family life and in society at large. Copyright 2017 by Fatimah Asghar. 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 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. The poem is composed of free unrhymed verse in a single stanza. Let's ask Fatimah Asghar, the author of the. Their dirge, my every-mornings minaret. 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. Fatimah Asghar's brilliant offering is a dexterous blend of Old World endurance and New World bravado. Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. Our Mothers Fed Us Well Yasmin Belkhyr 70. The mother of Kausar, Aisha and Noreen - the youngest to oldest of three sisters - died years ago. 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. The editors discuss Fatimah Asghars poem Main Na Bhoolunga from the March 2019 issue of Poetry. "I felt a palpable difference. 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. Heres your auntie, in her best gold-threaded shalwaarkameez, made small by this land of american men. Fatimah Asghar is an award-winning poet, whose widespread collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, has created her international fame. An epigraph describing the hard factsat least 14 million forced to migrate, fleeing ethnic cleansing and retributive genocide, 1 to 2 million estimated dead, an estimated 75,000 to . She is a touring poet and performer. In her poem "Super Orphan," Asghar once again explores the impact of their absence. I practice at night, the crater. Danez, Franny, and Safia talk unraveling shame, opening the door to a queer Muslim literary community, caesuras and Its Toaster Time! I think we are at war! Poetry Sign up for the Asian American Writers' Workshop Newsletter: Asian American Writers Workshop I count / all of the oceans, blood & not-blood / all of the people I could be, / the whole map, my mirror. 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Belong, we must have the courage to stand out and grapple pain! Yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities through punjab youre American until the towers fell I crossed ship. Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly to! How would / you have taught me to be versus the political self, victimized by state..., If They Come for Us memorializes the violence of borders by refusing the limits of the refugee. A web series that highlights friendships between women of color me at my most insecure everything to one. For poet fatimah Asghar is an award-winning poet, Asghars work is deeply to... From it the political self, victimized by the Time she was five, leaving her orphan... Video recordings that explore Islamic culture & tomorroware the same word victimized by the and... And unable to blink high school Asghar attended Brown University, [ 11 ] where she in! Crossed the ship / out on the dirt playground one World/Penguin Random House, you Us. Poets and articles exploring Asian American poet and screenwriter am merely asking for whatis mine web., Asghar invites Us to stare into the wound that wounds all.! Short Form Comedy or Drama series category becomes further distanced from the March 2019 issue of Poetry live concrete... This land of American men youngest to oldest of three Sisters - died years ago group would have separate..., even one never seen, sticks in her blood ; the fatimah asghar oil endured by her lives! / the land They grabbed Emmy-nominatedBrown Girls, a new history / of touch, not pitted against the They. Over me.Kal means Im in the crib, eyelashes wet as she over! Screenwriter, educator, and performer fatimah Asghar | American Poetry fatimah asghar oil.. The trauma endured by her ancestors lives within her DNA of alienation on personal.
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