Poetry Give me my mother for no, other reason than I deserve her.If yesterday & tomorrow are the samepluck the flower of my mothers body. 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. The kids at school ask me where Im from & I have no answer. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer. FATIMAH ASGHAR From "Oil" We got sent home early & no one knew why. After the Orlando Shooting Juniper Cruz 65. 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. It seemed peaceful enougheach group would have their separate homes. She addresses my people my people / a dance of strangers in my blood and identifies the individuals who died in war (blood) and those she now considers to be her own. These inheritances seep from country to country, body to body, and word to word, generating animosity and division. "And in a lot of ways we are. 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 . 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. Her work is well-regarded in all circles and has been included in Poetry Magazine and other famous publications. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer. 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. Let's ask Fatimah Asghar, the author of the. These sly, adept poems work through circumstances under threat with audacity, humor, and wonder. But, as Rebecca Solnit writes,blood is what mixes things up. Its defining quality is that it circulates. Now that youre older your auntie calls to say he hither again, that this didnt happen before he became american. Hindi na ibinalik / ng mga dayo ang kinuhang / lupain | The settlers never returned / the land they grabbed. "WWE by Fatimah Asghar - Poems | Academy of American Poets", "Dark Noise: Fatimah Asghar, Franny Choi, Nate Marshall, Aaron Samuels, Danez Smith & Jamila Woods", "Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships", "30 Under 30 2018: Hollywood & Entertainment", "For poet Fatimah Asghar, the word 'orphan' has more than one meaning", "How Fatimah Asghar turned the traumas of colonialism and diaspora into poetry", "Fatimah Asghar '11 on the Emmy-Nominated Webseries Recently Acquired by HBO | Mellon Mays Fellowship", "How They Got There: Sam Bailey & Fatimah Asghar, Creators of Brown Girls", "Fatimah Asghar's first collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, is a warning about the consequences of ignoring history", "5 Canadians nominated for first Carol Shields Prize for Fiction for women and non-binary writers, worth $150,000 (U.S.)", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fatimah_Asghar&oldid=1143884663, This page was last edited on 10 March 2023, at 14:06. [9] Main Na Bhoolunga. 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. And yet, even when were told some of these memories and experiences are not the the speakers, they still are, somehow. 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. Asghars book opens with invocations of history. The forced migration of over 14 million peopleof Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to Indiatore both families and land apart. Home is the first grave. A spell cast with the entiremouth. 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. 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. "[16], Brown Girls received an Emmy nomination in 2017 in the Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series category. Fatimah Asghar. Smell is the Last Memory to Go [15], "Often, our friends joke that we are each others life partners, or 'real wifeys.'" Her selfhood is foreclosed by 9/11 and the resulting culture of fear and xenophobia: the ship sinks, her blood clots. 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. 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. Im a silent girl, a rig ready to blow. 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). The mother of Kausar, Aisha and Noreen - the youngest to oldest of three sisters - died years ago. Yesterday meansI say goodbye, again.Kal means they are the same. Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Stop living in a soap opera yells her husband, freshfrom work, demanding his dinner: american. It is largely written in lower case, with the . 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. The towers fell two weeks, I know that words not meant for me but I collect words, where I find them. Kal meansshes holding my unborn babyin her arms, helping me pick a name. The blood clotting, oil in my veins. 112 W 27th Street, Suite 600 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. 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. the sweet, rich scent, / the cream and white of the magnolia blossom. In each of the books seven Partition poems, Asghar traces its legacy, but she also considers the metaphorical and physical partitions of her life. I copy-catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. Even now, you dont get it. Theres noplace to see them again. he was there toothe day on Bens couch, wearingmy skirt, ranking the girls, in class. 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. 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 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 Allah, you gave us a languagewhere yesterday & tomorroware the same word. 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 truly belong anywhere. If you mean the poem, {From "Oil"}, I take it as one little girl living in the U.S. with her aunt. [6], Asghar's mother was from Jammu and Kashmir and fled with her family during Partition related violence. I practice at night, the crater. 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. Her references to pop music, odes to her pussy, and jokes about microaggressions are purposefully incongruous, and with them she defies the gaze that Zhang and Mehri write about. 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. Every single person that visits Poem Analysis has helped contribute, so thank you for your support. If They Come For Us is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. And what is home if the place where you areboth in public and in privaterejects critical pieces of who you are? 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. Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. "I felt a palpable difference. 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. Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038, my people I follow you like constellations. 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. 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. Fatimah Asghar is a contemporary poet and filmmaker. In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it. [17], When We Were Sisters was longlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction in 2023.[18]. 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. 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. Where I . 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. 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. 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. Play is critical in the development of their work, as is intentionally building relationship and . 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. 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. The muse in literature is a source of inspiration for the writer. Every nonhuman living thing is held captive by our actions. just in case, I hear her say. 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. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. Mercedes Zapata. I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. 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. Asghar told NBC News of her friendship with Woods. She is a touring poet and performer. But Asghar recognizes the limits and violence of language. is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. VS returns with a special bonus episode to tide you over until Season 3 drops in February. I have a boy inside me & I dont knowhow to tell people. Sign up for the Asian American Writers' Workshop Newsletter: Asian American Writers Workshop Then one day, their baba, their father dies, too. Selected by Rita Dove. 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. If the literary world calls for a flattening of experience, Asghars response is to revel in the specific. 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. 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. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. After high school Asghar attended Brown University,[11] where she majored in International Relations and Africana Studies. "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. 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. In the midst of all of this, she conveys how sorrow and pain can be inherited. 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). Kalmeans I wake to her strange voice. 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). Our Mothers Fed Us Well Yasmin Belkhyr 70. They both died by the time she was five, leaving her an orphan. 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.. Simply and profoundly, her book is a love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home--and surviving." This conflict ended in anything but compromise. In a later poem titled Oil, Asghar further grapples with her identity, writing My Auntie A says my people / might be Afghani. And yet, even when were told some of these memories and experiences are not the the speakers, they still are, somehow. Please choose below to continue. 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. 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. I want Evanescence slowly. 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). 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. If They Come For Us , by Fatimah Asghar (One World/Penguin Random House, 2018). She refers to herself, not unlovingly, as a boy-girl. Towards the center of the poem, that desire for a guiding maternal figure enters with the lines, Mother, where are you? / A man? And again, in The Last Summer of Innocence, questions of the role of the body, and of gender norms, resurface. In America, the place that is ostensibly home, the speaker faces that rejection both in her family life and in society at large. I am four, sitting in a patch of grass Jan 02, 2023 | By Fatimah Asghar | American Poetry Review Verified. Freedom Bar Asnia Asim 71. As the poem progresses, Asghar becomes further distanced from the events, seeming to remember less and less. they say it so often, it must be your name now, stranger. Poems covered in the Educational Syllabus. A homeland, even one never seen, sticks in her blood; the trauma endured by her ancestors lives within her DNA. Their poetry collection, If They Come for Us, traces the lingering aftermath of Partition. Does it matter how? It first appeared in Poetry Magazine in 2017. 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. The experience of reading Fatimah Asghars debut book of poems, If They Come For Us, is one of being gripped by the shoulders and shaken awake; of having your eyelids pinned open and unable to blink. "In. His "coven" of children the eldest, Noreen, followed by Kausar and Aisha is plummeted into orphanhood and watches his funeral on VHS. She edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and her Collected Poems: 1974-2004 was published in 2016. It is a wonder that anything was left of the road. | Only the air was heavy and moist, like the breath of an enormous, mysterious beast. How would / you have taught me to be a woman? I read another poem of Fatimah's, entitled, "Oil," and in it, she speaks about what it was like for her as a child after 9/11. The 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. 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. However, she then describes how Two hours after the towers fell I crossed the ship / out on the map. Neither human sympathy nor nature's bounty can fill the void left by her parents' early . Asghars approach is similarly multimodal. Copyright 2017 by Fatimah Asghar. Learn about the charties we donate to. "People talk about genre like it's so stringent," she says. Asghars book is many things: defiant, subversive, grief-stricken, angrybut its also full of things like bravery, friendship, family, and love. 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. 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. The anthology opens with a striking poem titled For Peshawar, dated December 16th, 2014. 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. For poet Fatimah Asghar, the word 'orphan' has more than one meaning. 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. from the soil. The body isnt home to an uncontaminated stagnant bloodstream, but to one that is continually ferrying a variety of substances. She has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, Kweli Journal, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Elsewhere, a new history / Of touch, not pitted against the land. Kal. Used with the permission of the poet. She covers bruises & never lets us eat leftovers: a good wife.Its something in their nature: what america does to men. 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 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. You know its true & try to help, but what can you do?You, little Fatimah, who still worships him? 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. In Schizophrene, Kapil tackles the problem of representation by writing towards lacunae. It always feels so authentic! 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