Fatimah Asghar is a contemporary poet and filmmaker. Orphaned as a child and marginalized in America, Asghar captures the plight of alienation on a personal and political scale. 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. Again? Kal means shesdancing at my wedding not-yet come. 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. This data is anonymized, and will not be used for marketing purposes. FATIMAH ASGHAR From "Oil" We got sent home early & no one knew why. They both died by the time she was five, leaving her an orphan. I buried it under a casket of scribbles. Hindi na ibinalik / ng mga dayo ang kinuhang / lupain | The settlers never returned / the land they grabbed. | Only the air was heavy and moist, like the breath of an enormous, mysterious beast. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. 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. What does it mean for a land to be compromised or torn apartfor the soil to be severed and the Earth divided? 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. A spell cast with the entiremouth. I whisper it to my sheets. They are taken into the custody . With If They Come For Us Asghar joins a rich history of Partition literature. Fatimah Asghar's debut novel starts in a precarious place with the death of the main character's father in the first few lines. 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. 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. 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. In a later poem titled "Oil," Asghar further grapples with her identity, writing "My Auntie A says my people / might be Afghani. Their dirge, my every-mornings minaret. I want Evanescence slowly. 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. 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. 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. Shes seen me at my worst, at my best, at my most insecure everything. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. And what is home if the place where you areboth in public and in privaterejects critical pieces of who you are? like whenthat man held me down & we said no. Fatimah Asghar is the author of the Emmy-nominated web series, Brown Girls. If They Come For Us is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. Copyright 2017 by Fatimah Asghar. 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. 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 selfhood is foreclosed by 9/11 and the resulting culture of fear and xenophobia: the ship sinks, her blood clots. 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. 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. The muse in literature is a source of inspiration for the writer. Danez, Franny, and Safia talk unraveling shame, opening the door to a queer Muslim literary community, caesuras and Its Toaster Time! Let's ask Fatimah Asghar, the author of the. FATIMAH ASGHAR 145 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. 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. I think we are at war! just in case, I hear her say. It is sacred, like the blood of Christ, and sinful, in that its stains signal guilt. have her forever. This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. The Poetry Foundation recognizes the power of words to transform lives. 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? 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. 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. Stop living in a soap opera yells her husband, freshfrom work, demanding his dinner: american. 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. If They Come For Us , by Fatimah Asghar (One World/Penguin Random House, 2018). She covers bruises & never lets us eat leftovers: a good wife.Its something in their nature: what america does to men. 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 . Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR,Time,Teen Vogue,Huffington Post, and others. Elsewhere, a new history / Of touch, not pitted against the land. Everyone always tries to theft, bring them back out the grave. & my boy, my lovely boyhe clawed & bit & cried just likewe were back on the dirt playground. 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. black grass swaying in the field, glint of gold in her nose. Her newest book "When We Were Sisters" was published October 2022 and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2022. Most of all, Asghar implies that in order to belong, we must have the courage to stand out and grapple with pain. In For Peshawar, Asghar introduces readers to the seemingly comfortable rhetoric around death and the regularity of losing loved ones amidst injustice. 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. In Schizophrene, Kapil tackles the problem of representation by writing towards lacunae. Her work is well-regarded in all circles and has been included in Poetry Magazine and other famous publications. It seemed peaceful enougheach group would have their separate homes. Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. 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). 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. Translation: "I won't forget.". an aunt teaches me how to tell In high school, I briefly learned about this partition from a twenty-minute lecture complemented by a single paragraph in my World History textbook. How has climate change changed the way we write poetry? 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 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. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. Anneanne Tells Me Beyza Ozer 67. 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. Fatimah Asghar's brilliant offering is a dexterous blend of Old World endurance and New World bravado. "I felt a palpable difference. 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. 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. Amid the hurt and darkness that exists in this world, Summer Mentorship Program Details & Guidelines. If They Come For Us is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. Rolls attah & pounds the keemaat night watches the bodies of these glistening men. The death impacts a trio of siblings at the . 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. 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. In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it. 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.. 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. 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