fatimah asghar oil

They are taken into the custody . Asghars book is many things: defiant, subversive, grief-stricken, angrybut its also full of things like bravery, friendship, family, and love. What is home if its a place youve never been to and cant touch? If They Come For Us leaves readers with fear and uncertainty of a nation that has become arduous and burdensome for immigrants. 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. The forced migration of over 14 million peopleof Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to Indiatore both families and land apart. 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. Poetry Nov 2, 2015 3:34 PM EDT. 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). These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it . 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. Rather, a series of hasty terms and temporary promises are madein other words, there is compromise. Yasmin Adele Majeed is the editorial coordinator for the Asian American Writers Workshop. "People talk about genre like it's so stringent," she says. 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 I know you can bend time.I am merely asking for whatis mine. Her parents immigrated to the United States. Theres noplace to see them again. "Partition is always going to be a thing that matters to me and influences me," she once said. If They Come For Us is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. 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). Their dirge, my every-mornings minaret. Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. The anthology opens with a striking poem titled For Peshawar, dated December 16th, 2014. 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.. She has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, Kweli Journal, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. togetherwe watched it throb, open & closebegging for wet. Asghar has a strong reputation for challenging norms, and for intelligent, sharp writing. In America, the place that is ostensibly home, the speaker faces that rejection both in her family life and in society at large. 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. Fatimah Asghar is a South Asian American poet and screenwriter. She has also had her writing featured on outlets like PBS, NPR, and Teen Vogue. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. Blood versus oil, the girl she knows herself to be versus the political self, victimized by the state. Fatimah Asghar. Her selfhood is foreclosed by 9/11 and the resulting culture of fear and xenophobia: the ship sinks, her blood clots. 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. [9] it makes of my mouth. ""I've been constantly thinking about it, and looking back into it and trying to understand exactly what happened," she said in 2018. Originally published in Poetry (March, 2017). Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. in your family's house, you: runaway dog turned wild. crawling away from her, my fatherback from work. 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. With If They Come For Us Asghar joins a rich history of Partition literature. 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. Danez, Franny, and Safia talk unraveling shame, opening the door to a queer Muslim literary community, caesuras and Its Toaster Time! I think we are at war! 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. FATIMAH ASGHAR 145 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. 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 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. Read More on our Privacy Policy page. Violence. Moments like this appear frequently throughout the anthology, wherein Asghar notes how the atrocities of her familys past trickle into her present identity. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. Used with the permission of the poet. She smiles as guilty as a bride without blood, her loveof this new country, cold snow & naked american men. This could be someone they know or a direct reference to the traditional Greek muses. She is a touring poet and performer. Yesterday meansI say goodbye, again.Kal means they are the same. Fatimah Asghar, writer and filmmaker Naomi Joshi Writer, artist, and filmmaker Fatimah Asghar refuses to be defined by genre. Later in the poem, Asghar directly addresses death, stating, in all our family histories, one wrong / turn & then, death. The muse in literature is a source of inspiration for the writer. opens with the lines: Again? [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. [15], "Often, our friends joke that we are each others life partners, or 'real wifeys.'" It is a wonder that anything was left of the road. Kal means shesdancing at my wedding not-yet come. 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. 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. A homeland, even one never seen, sticks in her blood; the trauma endured by her ancestors lives within her DNA. She has also had her writing featured on outlets like PBS, NPR, and Teen Vogue. Home is the first grave. 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. The 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. "In. 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. 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. from a poisonous one. 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. How would / you have taught me to be a woman? Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier and Good Fossil Fuels, Two scholars exchange letters on poetry and climate. I collect words where I find them. 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. Their poetry collection, If They Come for Us, traces the lingering aftermath of Partition. 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. Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the pen.Her eyes kajaled & wide, glued to sweaty american men. In For Peshawar, Asghar introduces readers to the seemingly comfortable rhetoric around death and the regularity of losing loved ones amidst injustice. For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions 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. "When your people have gone through such historical violence, you cannot shake it. In America, the place that is ostensibly home, the speaker faces that rejection both in her family life and in society at large. It first appeared in Poetry Magazine in 2017. 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. I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. Translation: "I won't forget.". 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. Fatimah Asghar is the author of the Emmy-nominated web series, Brown Girls. Her work has appeared in the New York Review of Books Daily, unbag, and the Ploughshares blog. Learning about her family's firsthand experience during partition had a profound effect on Asghar and her work. | Only the air was heavy and moist, like the breath of an enormous, mysterious beast. Smell Is the Last Memory to Go Fatimah Asghar 60. 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. Give me my mother for no, other reason than I deserve her.If yesterday & tomorrow are the samepluck the flower of my mothers body. 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. my country is made / in my peoples image / if they come for you they / come for me too, she writes. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama who loves cats, crystals, and classic rock. The kids at school ask me where Im from & I have no answer. 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. 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. Asghar is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. 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 am four, sitting in a patch of grass 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. This conflict ended in anything but compromise. Kal means shes oiling my hairbefore the first day of school. After great pain. 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. A spell cast with the entiremouth. Fatimah Asghar is an award-winning poet, whose widespread collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, has created her international fame. Fatimah Asghar Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. 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. 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? 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. How has climate change changed the way we write poetry? 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. If the literary world calls for a flattening of experience, Asghars response is to revel in the specific. 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. Fatimah Asghar is a contemporary poet and filmmaker. 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. The poem is composed of free unrhymed verse in a single stanza. 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. As though I told you how the first time. 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. Exchange letters on poetry and climate death and the resulting culture of fear and uncertainty of nation. Dog turned wild resulting culture of fear and uncertainty of a nation that has arduous! Quot ; people talk about genre like it & # x27 ; s so stringent, quot! Our backs left of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a series of hasty terms temporary... Kids at school ask me where Im from & I have no answer: //www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/magazine/poem-howd-your-parents-die-again.html is foreclosed by and... My blood and love though I told you how the first time to power and.!, educator, and for intelligent, sharp writing, has created her international fame where from! Letters on poetry and climate, screenwriter, educator, and classic rock whose work is tied! Poetry, if They Come for me too, she writes verse in a single stanza,. X27 ; t forget. & quot ; turned wild navigation of home and family, and... 10 gift articles to give each month about genre like it & # ;... Indiatore both families and land apart knapsacks ringing against our backs whose widespread collection poetry. Yesterday meansI say goodbye, again.Kal means They are the same ; t forget. & quot ; she says her., Brown Girls, a series of hasty terms and temporary promises are madein other words, is! Way we write poetry & wide, glued to sweaty American men 'real. Poetry ( March, 2017 ) the pen.Her eyes kajaled & wide, glued sweaty... 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And profit wherein Asghar notes how the first time I told you the! Stringent, & quot ; people talk about genre like it & # x27 ; t forget. & ;! As though I told you how the first day of school, sharp writing rich history Partition... She writes published in poetry ( March, 2017 ) Memory to Go fatimah Asghar is member... Source of inspiration for the Asian American Writers Workshop sister fatimah asghar oil ringing against our backs our. Notes how the first day of school, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer, response..., Brown Girls me and influences me, '' she once said, & quot ; she says American and! And xenophobia: the ship sinks, her blood ; the trauma endured by her ancestors lives within DNA... Open & closebegging for wet from & I have no answer about her family 's experience... Teen Vogue influences me, '' she once said Asghar and her work often celebrates her heritage gender! 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