All the worlds earth is my mommas grave.The water droplet on the parks sunflower petal: her name.I kiss every stone & it becomes my fathers tomb: his grave.They said I was too young for the funerals, so I playeddress up at home. 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. an aunt teaches me how to tell Stop living in a soap opera yells her husband, freshfrom work, demanding his dinner: american. [9] Raye is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she serves as the Web Editor for Bat City Review. Now that youre older your auntie calls to say he hither again, that this didnt happen before he became american. 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. The muse in literature is a source of inspiration for the writer. from the soil. She has also had her writing featured on outlets like PBS, NPR, and Teen Vogue. I look up & make sure no one heard. 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 . In Schizophrene, Kapil tackles the problem of representation by writing towards lacunae. Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038, my people I follow you like constellations. It is a deliberate rejection of a colonial logic, but its not always a successful gesture. Kal means Im in the crib. Even now, you dont get it. For poet Fatimah Asghar, the word 'orphan' has more than one meaning. Kal meansshes holding my unborn babyin her arms, helping me pick a name. It is through you visiting Poem Analysis that we are able to contribute to charity. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer. Fatimah Asghar's brilliant offering is a dexterous blend of Old World endurance and New World bravado. 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. 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. 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. Yesterday meansI say goodbye, again.Kal means they are the same. Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. Can't blame me for taking a good idea. Blood versus oil, the girl she knows herself to be versus the political self, victimized by the state. I whisper it to my sheets. 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. & my boy, my lovely boyhe clawed & bit & cried just likewe were back on the dirt playground. If you mean the poem, {From "Oil"}, I take it as one little girl living in the U.S. with her aunt. "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. Happy new year yall! They both died by the time she was five, leaving her an orphan. 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 Fatimah Asghar Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. 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. 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. 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. 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 . Give me my mother for no, other reason than I deserve her.If yesterday & tomorrow are the samepluck the flower of my mothers body. Everyday she prays. Rita Dove is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a former poet laureate of the United States. An orphan grapples with gender, siblinghood, family, and coming-of-age as a Muslim in America in this lyrical debut novel from the acclaimed author of If They Come For Us In this heartrending, lyrical debut work of fiction, Fatimah Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. Fatimah Asghars insistence on joy is a refusal of the demand that marginalized writers flatten trauma for the white gaze. Violence. Moments like this appear frequently throughout the anthology, wherein Asghar notes how the atrocities of her familys past trickle into her present identity. 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). ISSN 2577-9427.NOTE: Advertisements and sponsorships contribute to hosting costs. In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it. His body is sent to Pakistan. Smell Is the Last Memory to Go Fatimah Asghar 60. 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. [13], Along with her orphanhood, the legacy of Partition is another major theme in her poetry. She is a touring poet and performer. Poems covered in the Educational Syllabus. 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. 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. New York, NY 10001. [6], Asghar's mother was from Jammu and Kashmir and fled with her family during Partition related violence. 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 your family's house, you: runaway dog turned wild. Jan 02, 2023 | By Fatimah Asghar | American Poetry Review Verified. Again? Fatimah Asghar. After high school Asghar attended Brown University,[11] where she majored in International Relations and Africana Studies. Like many territorial disputes, the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir, an ethnically diverse Himalayan region known for its natural beauty, was rooted in religion. Originally published in Poetry (March, 2017). [12] It was not until she was in college that Asghar learned about how the Partition of India had deeply impacted her family. 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. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her parents immigrated to the United States. Is it the physical ground that separates, or the people, whose homes, languages, and rituals are woven into the land? I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. 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. Learn about the charties we donate to. her knees fold on the rundown mattress, a prayer to WWEHer tasbeeh & TV: the only things she puts before her husband. I collect words where I find them. 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. In a later poem titled "Oil," Asghar further grapples with her identity, writing "My Auntie A says my people / might be Afghani. Yasmin Adele Majeed is the editorial coordinator for the Asian American Writers Workshop. Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. Sometimes, English needs to be broken, according to poet Fatimah Asghar. 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 . 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. togetherwe watched it throb, open & closebegging for wet. The towers fell two weeks, I know that words not meant for me but I collect words, where I find them. Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama who loves cats, crystals, and classic rock. This conflict ended in anything but compromise. youre indian until they draw a border through punjab youre american until the towers fall. Her selfhood is foreclosed by 9/11 and the resulting culture of fear and xenophobia: the ship sinks, her blood clots. Sign up for the Asian American Writers' Workshop Newsletter: Asian American Writers Workshop 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. III Hajj. stranger. After the Orlando Shooting Juniper Cruz 65. 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. scraped wrists & steady poundinghis eyes wide, untilhe stopped making a sound. 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. 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. 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 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. Asghar has a strong reputation for challenging norms, and for intelligent, sharp writing. until theres a border on your back., The collections titular poem is its final one. The Poetry Foundation recognizes the power of words to transform lives. Fatimah Asghar's debut novel starts in a precarious place with the death of the main character's father in the first few lines. In For Peshawar, Asghar introduces readers to the seemingly comfortable rhetoric around death and the regularity of losing loved ones amidst injustice. 2017 Poetry Foundation The partition of If They Come For Us memorializes the violence of borders by refusing the limits of the word partition itself. Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the pen.Her eyes kajaled & wide, glued to sweaty american men. 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. 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. It seemed peaceful enougheach group would have their separate homes. 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 Im in the crib,eyelashes wet as she looks over me.Kal means Im on the bed. 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. crawling away from her, my fatherback from work. 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. Their experiences mirror the game: move into any squarein any direction on the board, and a microaggression takes place; the only safe haven on the board sits in the center: Home. what do I do with the boywho snuck his way insideme on my childhood playground? Hindi na ibinalik / ng mga dayo ang kinuhang / lupain | The settlers never returned / the land they grabbed. on visits back your english sticks to everything. A member of the Dark Noise Collective, Asghar has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation. 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. 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. Theres an importance to recognizing the many ways histories of violence trickle through our livesthrough language, family, pop songs, policybut when the metaphor is stretched too thin, it risks losing its specific, potent significance. 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. [17], When We Were Sisters was longlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction in 2023.[18]. She has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, Kweli Journal, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. You know its true & try to help, but what can you do?You, little Fatimah, who still worships him? 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.. your own auntie calls you ghareeb. Its estimated that 1-2 million people died and 75-100,000 women were abducted and raped in the ensuing months.) 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. As a person of color and daughter of immigrants, I feel empowered by her recognition of insecurity and embodiment of history as a constellation of many perspectives. Her uncle described how the family was forced to leave Kashmir for Lahore and told her about the impact of being refugees in a new land affected them. Kal. from the soil. out on the map. 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 learned that India had been split into two, with Hindus residing in Indian territories and Muslims living in Pakistan. The Woman in the White Chador Farnaz Fatemi 61. Recent poems about pregnancy, birth, and being a mother. One quick perusal through the shelves of world literature in any bookstore confirms just what the literary world wants to see from writers of color and writers from developing nations: trauma, she writes. I practice at night, the crater. The novel follows the coming of age of three sisters who are orphaned following the sudden murder of their father. my country is made / in my peoples image / if they come for you they / come for me too, she writes. Her father was from Pakistan. 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. Asghars book is many things: defiant, subversive, grief-stricken, angrybut its also full of things like bravery, friendship, family, and love. Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. 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 Asghar's work, Partition becomes the wound that wounds all wounds. Fatimah Asghar is a contemporary poet and filmmaker. they say it so often, it must be your name now, stranger. If They Come For Us , by Fatimah Asghar (One World/Penguin Random House, 2018). I know you can bend time.I am merely asking for whatis mine. Asghar is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. Orphaned as a girl, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. It first appeared in Poetry Magazine in 2017. Back of the throatto teeth. Then one day, their baba, their father dies, too. 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. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer. Every single person that visits Poem Analysis has helped contribute, so thank you for your support. "[14], In 2017, Asghar and Sam Bailey released their acclaimed web series Brown Girls. The poet and winner of the Restless Books New Immigrant Writing Prize on supporting DRUM and the work of Guyanese poet Martin Carter, copyright 2023 Asian American Writers' Workshop, she cites Douglas Kearney and Terrance Hayes as influences, their Call for Necessary Craft and Practice,. an edible flower 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?" like your little cousin who pops gum & wears bras now: a stranger. In Raw Silk Meena Alexander links the fraught histories of Partition, the 1965 War between India and Pakistan, the 2002 Gujarat riots and 9/11; Kundiman Prize-winning writer Adeeba Talukder writes about mental illness and postcolonial trauma in her own work; and the experimental poet Bhanu Kapil pulls together psychoanalysis, Deleuzian theory, and personal memoir in Schizophrene. But twist she does, and by doing so, opens herself to everything, from painful truths to the kindness of strangers. I collect words where I find them. Freedom Bar Asnia Asim 71. The speakers feeling of un-belonging continues even at home, as she comes of age without the guidance of a mother and father. I think we are at war! 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. Asghars book is many things: defiant, subversive, grief-stricken, angrybut its also full of things like bravery, friendship, family, and love. Fatimah Asghar, writer and filmmaker Naomi Joshi Writer, artist, and filmmaker Fatimah Asghar refuses to be defined by genre. 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. Selected by Rita Dove. In America, the place that is ostensibly home, the speaker faces that rejection both in her family life and in society at large. 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. The blood clotting, oil in my veins. And what is home if the place where you areboth in public and in privaterejects critical pieces of who you are? She edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and her Collected Poems: 1974-2004 was published in 2016. opens with the lines: Again? 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. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. 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. But, as Rebecca Solnit writes,blood is what mixes things up. Its defining quality is that it circulates. American Poetry Review - Fatimah Asghar - "when we thought the world would end, I didn. 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. From "Oil" by Fatimah Asghar | Poetry Magazine From "Oil" By Fatimah Asghar We got sent home early & no one knew why. Her work has appeared in the New York Review of Books Daily, unbag, and the Ploughshares blog. Her work is well-regarded in all circles and has been included in Poetry Magazine and other famous publications. How would / you have taught me to be a woman? from a poisonous one. I copy -catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. Asghar continues to elaborate on this community, writing my people my people I cant be lost / when I see you my compass is brown & gold & blood / my compass a Muslim teenager / snapback & hightops gracing the subway platform, further stressing how she is able to lean on those who have sacrificed for herthose who have been and continue to be there for her. Request Permissions. is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. [15], "Often, our friends joke that we are each others life partners, or 'real wifeys.'" Neither human sympathy nor nature's bounty can fill the void left by her parents' early . I went to India once, to find myself.. 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. 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. In her poem "Super Orphan," Asghar once again explores the impact of their absence. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In essence, the speakers world is as dissected and limiting as the Bingo board. 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. 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