& my boy, my lovely boyhe clawed & bit & cried just likewe were back on the dirt playground. But twist she does, and by doing so, opens herself to everything, from painful truths to the kindness of strangers. I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. 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. Elsewhere, a new history / Of touch, not pitted against the land. 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 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? Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and elsewhere. For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions Let's ask Fatimah Asghar, the author of the. Read More on our Privacy Policy page. 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? This data is anonymized, and will not be used for marketing purposes. But twist she does, and by doing so, opens herself to everything, from painful truths to the kindness of strangers. Tomorrow means I might. In each of the books seven Partition poems, Asghar traces its legacy, but she also considers the metaphorical and physical partitions of her life. A homeland, even one never seen, sticks in her blood; the trauma endured by her ancestors lives within her DNA. 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). Recent poems about pregnancy, birth, and being a mother. 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. 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. The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan is rarely addressed in American history textbooks and classes, much less in literature. 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. Poetry 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. 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. These inheritances seep from country to country, body to body, and word to word, generating animosity and division. I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. And yet, even when were told some of these memories and experiences are not the the speakers, they still are, somehow. 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. Now that youre older your auntie calls to say he hither again, that this didnt happen before he became american. 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 the kitchen. Later in the poem, Asghar directly addresses death, stating, in all our family histories, one wrong / turn & then, death. In high school, I briefly learned about this partition from a twenty-minute lecture complemented by a single paragraph in my World History textbook. from the soil. Fatimah Asghar is a contemporary poet and filmmaker. "I felt a palpable difference. If you mean the poem, {From "Oil"}, I take it as one little girl living in the U.S. with her aunt. black grass swaying in the field, glint of gold in her nose. I practice at night, the crater. Shes seen me at my worst, at my best, at my most insecure everything. / I write Afghani under its hull. The forced migration of over 14 million peopleof Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to Indiatore both families and land apart. Fatimah Asghar is a South Asian American poet and screenwriter. Her work is well-regarded in all circles and has been included in Poetry Magazine and other famous publications. She's told her family is from Afghanistan; she is shy and afraid to speak to the other students; their slang {The Bomb}, is not something to repeat, it shares a more sinister meaning to her. 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. 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. just in case. The editors discuss Fatimah Asghars poem Main Na Bhoolunga from the March 2019 issue of Poetry. 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. [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. [13], Along with her orphanhood, the legacy of Partition is another major theme in her poetry. A collection of poems, prose, and audio and video recordings that explore Islamic culture. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. Kal means Im in the crib,eyelashes wet as she looks over me.Kal means Im on the bed. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier and Good Fossil Fuels, Two scholars exchange letters on poetry and climate. In Microaggression Bingo, her words, much like her personal and cultural identities, are carefully divided and fitted in the structured tiles of a bingo board, with the central free space square reading Dont Leave Your House For A Day - Safe. The surrounding tiles are filled with chilling statements and memories such as Casting Call to audition for a battered Hijabi Woman and Editor recommends you add more white people to your story to be more relatable. The poem illustrates the limited space and movements the speaker is able to take as a Pakistani-Muslim subject to microaggressions in America, a land that pledges to be rooted in diversity. Im a silent girl, a rig ready to blow. Even now, you dont get it. Learn about the charties we donate to. The anthology opens with a striking poem titled For Peshawar, dated December 16th, 2014. I whisper it to my sheets. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. I look up & make sure no one heard. After great pain. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. If the literary world calls for a flattening of experience, Asghars response is to revel in the specific. 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. [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]. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer, Poems of Muslim Faith and Islamic Culture, VS Live with Fatimah Asghar, Jos Olivarez, and Paul Tran. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR,Time,Teen Vogue,Huffington Post, and others. 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. In For Peshawar, Asghar introduces readers to the seemingly comfortable rhetoric around death and the regularity of losing loved ones amidst injustice. your own auntie calls you ghareeb. Asghars book is many things: defiant, subversive, grief-stricken, angrybut its also full of things like bravery, friendship, family, and love. Rolls attah & pounds the keemaat night watches the bodies of these glistening men. In Schizophrene, Kapil tackles the problem of representation by writing towards lacunae. an edible flower 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. 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. 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?" I copy-catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. The mother of Kausar, Aisha and Noreen - the youngest to oldest of three sisters - died years ago. This is true not only of race and heritage, but also of gender identity and sexuality, and many poems attempt to navigate those complexitiesin terms of a relationship with the self and a relationship with religion. Their dirge, my every-mornings minaret. I know you can bend time.I am merely asking for whatis mine. Happy new year yall! from a poisonous one. Sign up for the Asian American Writers' Workshop Newsletter: Asian American Writers Workshop Kal meansshes holding my unborn babyin her arms, helping me pick a name. This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. 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. 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. [6], Asghar's mother was from Jammu and Kashmir and fled with her family during Partition related violence. FATIMAH ASGHAR 145 And what is home if the place where you areboth in public and in privaterejects critical pieces of who you are? The Poetry Foundation recognizes the power of words to transform lives. Freedom Bar Asnia Asim 71. Every nonhuman living thing is held captive by our actions. Our Mothers Fed Us Well Yasmin Belkhyr 70. Can't blame me for taking a good idea. How would / you have taught me to be a woman? scraped wrists & steady poundinghis eyes wide, untilhe stopped making a sound. She is a touring poet and performer. Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Jan 02, 2023 | By Fatimah Asghar | American Poetry Review Verified. Her father was from Pakistan. 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.. Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. Asghar is a member of the Dark Noise Collective[3] and a Kundiman Fellow. She covers bruises & never lets us eat leftovers: a good wife.Its something in their nature: what america does to men. 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. have her forever. 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. They cant touch anyone without teeth & spitunless one strips the other of their human skin. Fatimah Asghars brilliant offering is a dexterous blend of Old World endurance and New World bravado. Fatimah Asghar is an award-winning poet, whose widespread collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, has created her international fame. Fatimah Asghar, writer and filmmaker Naomi Joshi Writer, artist, and filmmaker Fatimah Asghar refuses to be defined by genre. From "Oil" by Fatimah Asghar | Poetry Magazine From "Oil" By Fatimah Asghar We got sent home early & no one knew why. Poetry Nov 2, 2015 3:34 PM EDT. But whenever its on you watchthem snarl like mad dogs in a cagethese american men. Asghar described . 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. I collect words where I find them. 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. I copy -catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. Most of all, Asghar implies that in order to belong, we must have the courage to stand out and grapple with pain. Smell is the Last Memory to Go by Fatimah Asghar recounts a story from Asghar's childhood, the memory connected intricately with the small of 'citrus & jasmine'. Asghar is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominatedBrown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. How has climate change changed the way we write poetry? Her selfhood is foreclosed by 9/11 and the resulting culture of fear and xenophobia: the ship sinks, her blood clots. That playfulness is central to the book, and appears through inventive formal choicesthere are poems written in the form of pop quizzes, film treatments, crossword clues, and bingo scorecards, in which each box contains a different example of casual racism, i.e. After the Orlando Shooting Juniper Cruz 65. Heres your auntie, in her best gold-threaded shalwaarkameez, made small by this land of american men. The muse in literature is a source of inspiration for the writer. what do I do with the boywho snuck his way insideme on my childhood playground? She has also had her writing featured on outlets like PBS, NPR, and Teen Vogue. Yesterday meansI say goodbye, again.Kal means they are the same. I learned that India had been split into two, with Hindus residing in Indian territories and Muslims living in Pakistan. 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. to a pink useless pulp. I draw a ship on the map. 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 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. Along with poets Jamila Woods, Nate Marshall, Aaron Samuels, Franny Choi, and Danez Smith, Asghar is a member of Dark Noise, a multiracial poetry collective whose work addresses shared themes of intergenerational trauma, racial injustice, and queer identity. 112 W 27th Street, Suite 600 Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. Shes also this weeks guest. VS returns with a special bonus episode to tide you over until Season 3 drops in February. Sacraments Ladan Osman 62. Fatimah Asghar is a poet, filmmaker, and educator. All rights reserved. Its estimated that 1-2 million people died and 75-100,000 women were abducted and raped in the ensuing months.) A spell cast with the entiremouth. The kids at school ask me where Im from & I have no answer. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. Where I . Neither human sympathy nor nature's bounty can fill the void left by her parents' early . 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? New York, NY 10001. 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). 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. Epigraphs from Korean-American poet Suji Kwock Kim and Rajinder Singh, a survivor of the India/Pakistan Partition, and an explanation of the Partition prepare us for the painful, but necessary, poems to come. "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. 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). What is home if its a place youve never been to and cant touch? Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038, my people I follow you like constellations. Allah, you gave us a languagewhere yesterday & tomorroware the same word. It first appeared in Poetry Magazine in 2017. Blood is a measure of perceived racial purity. Selected by Rita Dove. 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. Oftentimes, wars fought over land end in no particular victory. 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 a later poem titled "Oil," Asghar further grapples with her identity, writing "My Auntie A says my people / might be Afghani. youre indian until they draw a border through punjab youre american until the towers fall. 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. Yasmin Adele Majeed is the editorial coordinator for the Asian American Writers Workshop. I have a boy inside me & I dont knowhow to tell people. 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. Does it matter how? It is a deliberate rejection of a colonial logic, but its not always a successful gesture. Asghar's identity as an orphan is a major theme in her work, her poem "How'd Your Parents Die Again?" Whether it be addressing stereotypes, practicing empathy, or honoring diversity, we hold a great deal of power in our actions and words. Mercedes Zapata. 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. 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. her knees fold on the rundown mattress, a prayer to WWEHer tasbeeh & TV: the only things she puts before her husband. Peopleof Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to Indiatore both families and land apart snarl like mad dogs in a American! 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