The experience of reading Fatimah Asghar's 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. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. The 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. / A man? And again, in The Last Summer of Innocence, questions of the role of the body, and of gender norms, resurface. 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? I buried it under a casket of scribbles. 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. 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 How would / you have taught me to be a woman? Smell is the Last Memory to Go The novel follows the coming of age of three sisters who are orphaned following the sudden murder of their father. Most of all, Asghar implies that in order to belong, we must have the courage to stand out and grapple with pain. Asghar documents trauma and its reverberations carefully, but her playfulness and insistence on joy is a refusal of the bind that Zhang writes about. Read More on our Privacy Policy page. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer. His body is sent to Pakistan. 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. "And in a lot of ways we are. Allah, you gave us a languagewhere yesterday & tomorroware the same word. Let's ask Fatimah Asghar, the author of the. "[16], Brown Girls received an Emmy nomination in 2017 in the Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series category. As a poet, Asghars work is deeply tied to collectivity and community. If the literary world calls for a flattening of experience, Asghars response is to revel in the specific. Asghar's identity as an orphan is a major theme in her work, her poem "How'd Your Parents Die Again?" 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. [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. In a later poem titled "Oil," Asghar further grapples with her identity, writing "My Auntie A says my people / might be Afghani. 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. Poetry The mother of Kausar, Aisha and Noreen - the youngest to oldest of three sisters - died years ago. The partition of If They Come For Us memorializes the violence of borders by refusing the limits of the word partition itself. 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 practice at night, the crater. A collection of poems, prose, and audio and video recordings that explore Islamic culture. In each of the books seven Partition poems, Asghar traces its legacy, but she also considers the metaphorical and physical partitions of her life. 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.. By Fatimah Asghar. Used with the permission of the poet. VS returns with a special bonus episode to tide you over until Season 3 drops in February. 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. 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. I know you can bend time.I am merely asking for whatis mine. III Hajj. But whenever its on you watchthem snarl like mad dogs in a cagethese american men. Is it the physical ground that separates, or the people, whose homes, languages, and rituals are woven into the land? Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and elsewhere. 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. Their poetry collection, If They Come for Us, traces the lingering aftermath of Partition. Kal means shes oiling my hairbefore the first day of school. A member of the Dark Noise Collective, Asghar has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation. Tomorrow means I might. From "Oil" by Fatimah Asghar | Poetry Magazine From "Oil" By Fatimah Asghar We got sent home early & no one knew why. Sacraments Ladan Osman 62. They both died by the time she was five, leaving her an orphan. scraped wrists & steady poundinghis eyes wide, untilhe stopped making a sound. 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. In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer. 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. Request Permissions. just in case. revealed to be a white man writing under a Chinese womans name. youre indian until they draw a border through punjab youre american until the towers fall. . This page is not available in other languages. In the same poem, the speakers sister defies Islamic law by shaving her arms, and Asghar writes in response, Haram, I hissed, but too wanted to be bare / armed & smooth, skin gentle & worthy / of touch. That is, until the sisters body betrays her with an ingrown hair that lands her in the hospital. Even now, you dont get it. Originally published in Poetry (March, 2017). like your little cousin who pops gum & wears bras now: a stranger. Everyone always tries to theft, bring them back out the grave. I look up & make sure no one heard. Violence. Moments like this appear frequently throughout the anthology, wherein Asghar notes how the atrocities of her familys past trickle into her present identity. to a pink useless pulp. 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. Her work has appeared in the New York Review of Books Daily, unbag, and the Ploughshares blog. But, as Rebecca Solnit writes,blood is what mixes things up. Its defining quality is that it circulates. In America, the place that is ostensibly home, the speaker faces that rejection both in her family life and in society at large. The muse in literature is a source of inspiration for the writer. 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. 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. As though I told you how the first time. What is home if its a place youve never been to and cant touch? Fatimah Asghars insistence on joy is a refusal of the demand that marginalized writers flatten trauma for the white gaze. This data is anonymized, and will not be used for marketing purposes. Fatimah Asghar, writer and filmmaker Naomi Joshi Writer, artist, and filmmaker Fatimah Asghar refuses to be defined by genre. 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. Men, take & take & yet you idolize them still, watchyour auntie as she builds her silent altar to them. Her selfhood is foreclosed by 9/11 and the resulting culture of fear and xenophobia: the ship sinks, her blood clots. 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. on visits back your english sticks to everything. 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. 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. 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). If They Come For Us 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. Ive never been to my daddys grave.My ache: two jet fuels ruining the suns set play. It is through you visiting Poem Analysis that we are able to contribute to charity. 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. 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. Neither human sympathy nor nature's bounty can fill the void left by her parents' early . I copy -catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. an edible flower Poems covered in the Educational Syllabus. The body isnt home to an uncontaminated stagnant bloodstream, but to one that is continually ferrying a variety of substances. In essence, the speakers world is as dissected and limiting as the Bingo board. out on the map. She covers bruises & never lets us eat leftovers: a good wife.Its something in their nature: what america does to men. This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. The speakers feeling of un-belonging continues even at home, as she comes of age without the guidance of a mother and father. Ashgar lost her parents at a young age, leaving her in a world where she had to derive cultural awareness and connection on her own. Where I . It is a wonder that anything was left of the road. 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. Largely autobiographical, the poems in this collection link together Asghars coming-of-age as a queer Pakistani American woman in post-9/11 America to the Partition of India and occupation of Kashmir, where her late parents were from, to the present day in the U.S. under Trump. 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). 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. It is a deliberate rejection of a colonial logic, but its not always a successful gesture. It first appeared in Poetry Magazine in 2017. Learning about her family's firsthand experience during partition had a profound effect on Asghar and her work. In Asghar's work, Partition becomes the wound that wounds all wounds. Happy new year yall! One of the collections several Partition poems begins with a riff on the Beyonc song (If I say the word enough I can write myself out of it: / like the driver rolling down that partition, please). 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. I copy-catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. Raye is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she serves as the Web Editor for Bat City Review. Threads of embodying courage in the face of danger are woven into the anthology, building on Asghars initial juxtaposition of death and resilience in For Peshawar'' and Gazebo. Asghar, who has a fierce reputation of wielding words packed with sharpness and intelligence, likewise challenges the conventional practices of writing poetry. In For Peshawar, Asghar introduces readers to the seemingly comfortable rhetoric around death and the regularity of losing loved ones amidst injustice. You can withdraw permission at any time or update your privacy settings here. Yesterday meansI say goodbye, again.Kal means they are the same. 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. 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?" 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. Fatimah Asghar is a South Asian American poet and screenwriter. The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan is rarely addressed in American history textbooks and classes, much less in literature. Shes seen me at my worst, at my best, at my most insecure everything. 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. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. 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. Asghars book is many things: defiant, subversive, grief-stricken, angrybut its also full of things like bravery, friendship, family, and love. The poem is composed of free unrhymed verse in a single stanza. Fatimah Asghar's debut novel starts in a precarious place with the death of the main character's father in the first few lines. just in case, I hear her say. Its estimated that 1-2 million people died and 75-100,000 women were abducted and raped in the ensuing months.) But Asghar recognizes the limits and violence of language. [7] "As an orphan, something I learned was that I could never take love for granted, so I would actively build it," she told HelloGiggles in 2018.[8]. Later in the poem, Asghar directly addresses death, stating, in all our family histories, one wrong / turn & then, death. [15], "Often, our friends joke that we are each others life partners, or 'real wifeys.'" Snake Oil, Snake Bite Dilruba Ahmed 73 Fatimah Asghar Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. The anthology opens with a striking poem titled For Peshawar, dated December 16th, 2014. 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. Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. 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 NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. he was there. She writes of her heritage, All the people I could be are dangerous. The speaker, whose parents have passed away, learns of her heritage from her relatives, who are not-blood but could be, further muddying notions of home, or where she truly belongsoften, this results in the idea that she doesnt. It is largely written in lower case, with the . Stop living in a soap opera yells her husband, freshfrom work, demanding his dinner: american. How has climate change changed the way we write poetry? 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. 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. Asghar is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. Asghar described . 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. I collect words where I find them. 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. 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. 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. Rather, a series of hasty terms and temporary promises are madein other words, there is compromise. These inheritances seep from country to country, body to body, and word to word, generating animosity and division. We work to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry. Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama who loves cats, crystals, and classic rock. They are taken into the custody . With If They Come For Us Asghar joins a rich history of Partition literature. they say it so often, it must be your name now, stranger. She is a touring poet and performer. Fatimah Asghar is a South Asian American poet and screenwriter. I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. Play is critical in the development of their work, as is intentionally building relationship and . In the midst of all of this, she conveys how sorrow and pain can be inherited. [12] It was not until she was in college that Asghar learned about how the Partition of India had deeply impacted her family. ""I've been constantly thinking about it, and looking back into it and trying to understand exactly what happened," she said in 2018. Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the pen.Her eyes kajaled & wide, glued to sweaty american men. 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. Asghar is a member of the Dark Noise Collective[3] and a Kundiman Fellow. "People talk about genre like it's so stringent," she says. If They Come For Us is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. I learned that India had been split into two, with Hindus residing in Indian territories and Muslims living in Pakistan. until theres a border on your back., The collections titular poem is its final one. 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. 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. 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. 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 . She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominatedBrown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. by pathmark. 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. In high school, I briefly learned about this partition from a twenty-minute lecture complemented by a single paragraph in my World History textbook. 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. (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. 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. Poetry Nov 2, 2015 3:34 PM EDT. 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? I have no blood. 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. Asghar told NBC News of her friendship with Woods. Subsequent poems choreograph Asghars dynamic reconciliation and continued battles between her cultural identity, sexuality, and position in America. Give me my mother for no, other reason than I deserve her.If yesterday & tomorrow are the samepluck the flower of my mothers body. 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 Everywhere I look graves.Would I trust a God that promised me my family?Does it matter how, if theyre gone, twenty-five years, a gravewhats left of their remains? from the soil. They cant touch anyone without teeth & spitunless one strips the other of their human skin. 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. 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. in the kitchen. [6], Asghar's mother was from Jammu and Kashmir and fled with her family during Partition related violence. 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). 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 forced migration of over 14 million peopleof Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to Indiatore both families and land apart. 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. Fatimah Asghar is an artist who spans across different genres and themes. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In 2011, she created a spoken word collective in Bosnia and . Blood versus oil, the girl she knows herself to be versus the political self, victimized by the state. 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 . 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And father the Penguin anthology of Twentieth-Century American poetry, and audio and recordings... Created a spoken word Collective in Bosnia and knows herself to be versus the political self, by... History textbooks and classes, much less in literature is a navigation of home and family, religion fatimah asghar oil.... A poet, screenwriter, educator, and position in america it is through visiting. Yesterday & tomorroware the same any time or update your privacy settings here x27 ;.... Response is to revel in the specific friendship with Woods of Books,! A South Asian American poet and screenwriter, bring them back out the grave am merely asking for mine... Other of their human skin News of her friendship with Woods conventional practices of writing poetry grave.My:... In these poems, Asghar implies that in order to belong, we must the! Briefly learned about this partition from a twenty-minute lecture complemented by a single stanza, Chattahoochee... Successful gesture someone whose work is inevitably tied to power and profit kajaled... Mother was from fatimah asghar oil and Kashmir and fled with her family 's firsthand experience during partition a..., freshfrom work, as she builds her silent altar to them the collections titular poem If They Come Us!

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