Allah, you gave us a languagewhere yesterday & tomorroware the same word. Sacraments Ladan Osman 62. She has also had her writing featured on outlets like PBS, NPR, and Teen Vogue. The two main characters are a queer Pakistani-American writer and an African-American musician and are played by Nabila Hossain and Sonia Denis respectively. The forced migration of over 14 million peopleof Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to Indiatore both families and land apart. Blood is a measure of perceived racial purity. Her work has appeared in the New York Review of Books Daily, unbag, and the Ploughshares blog. After the Orlando Shooting Juniper Cruz 65. FATIMAH ASGHAR From "Oil" We got sent home early & no one knew why. on visits back your english sticks to everything. A spell cast with the entiremouth. 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 . 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. 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. from the soil. 2017 Poetry Foundation (The Partition was the division of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947, which, Asghar writes, resulted in the forced migration of at least 14 million people as they fled genocide and ethnic cleansing. FATIMAH ASGHAR 145 Asghar documents trauma and its reverberations carefully, but her playfulness and insistence on joy is a refusal of the bind that Zhang writes about. Fatimah Asghar is a South Asian American poet and screenwriter. Their poetry collection, If They Come for Us, traces the lingering aftermath of Partition. Learn about the charties we donate to. I think we are at war! by pathmark. 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. an edible flower A homeland, even one never seen, sticks in her blood; the trauma endured by her ancestors lives within her DNA. 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. have her forever. Is it the physical ground that separates, or the people, whose homes, languages, and rituals are woven into the land? 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. Every single person that visits Poem Analysis has helped contribute, so thank you for your support. 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. I draw a ship on the map. How has climate change changed the way we write poetry? stranger. 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. She covers bruises & never lets us eat leftovers: a good wife.Its something in their nature: what america does to men. "I felt a palpable difference. Theres noplace to see them again. out on the map. what do I do with the boywho snuck his way insideme on my childhood playground? 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 . The death impacts a trio of siblings at the . Copyright 2017 by Fatimah Asghar. 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 these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it. A member of the Dark Noise Collective, Asghar has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. 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. She edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and her Collected Poems: 1974-2004 was published in 2016. 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. Smell is the Last Memory to Go 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 kids at school ask me where Im from & I have no answer. 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. 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. It is through you visiting Poem Analysis that we are able to contribute to charity. In Schizophrene, Kapil tackles the problem of representation by writing towards lacunae. Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. I buried it under a casket of scribbles. like your little cousin who pops gum & wears bras now: a stranger. Fatimah Asghar is an award-winning poet, whose widespread collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, has created her international fame. Let's ask Fatimah Asghar, the author of the. In her poem "Super Orphan," Asghar once again explores the impact of their absence. Fatimah Asghar is a poet, filmmaker, and educator. 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. 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). The Poetry Foundation recognizes the power of words to transform lives. her knees fold on the rundown mattress, a prayer to WWEHer tasbeeh & TV: the only things she puts before her husband. Fatimah Asghar is a contemporary poet and filmmaker. 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. 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. 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. As though I told you how the first time. Recent poems about pregnancy, birth, and being a mother. Fatimah Asghars brilliant offering is a dexterous blend of Old World endurance and New World bravado. "Partition is always going to be a thing that matters to me and influences me," she once said. Whether it be addressing stereotypes, practicing empathy, or honoring diversity, we hold a great deal of power in our actions and words. Asghar told NBC News of her friendship with Woods. I have a boy inside me & I dont knowhow to tell people. 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. 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. Kal means Im in the crib,eyelashes wet as she looks over me.Kal means Im on the bed. a little symphony, so round. Raye is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she serves as the Web Editor for Bat City Review. 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. to a pink useless pulp. 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. 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). [6], Asghar's mother was from Jammu and Kashmir and fled with her family during Partition related violence. 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. Home is the first grave. 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. But, as Rebecca Solnit writes,blood is what mixes things up. Its defining quality is that it circulates. / I write Afghani under its hull. She smiles as guilty as a bride without blood, her loveof this new country, cold snow & naked american men. Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the pen.Her eyes kajaled & wide, glued to sweaty american men. It is a wonder that anything was left of the road. Asghars book opens with invocations of history. "And in a lot of ways we are. Kal. I think we are at war! This page is not available in other languages. What is home if its a place youve never been to and cant touch? [9] As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. This data is anonymized, and will not be used for marketing purposes. 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). Everywhere I look graves.Would I trust a God that promised me my family?Does it matter how, if theyre gone, twenty-five years, a gravewhats left of their remains? And what is home if the place where you areboth in public and in privaterejects critical pieces of who you are? 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. The speakers feeling of un-belonging continues even at home, as she comes of age without the guidance of a mother and father. I collect words where I find them. It seemed peaceful enougheach group would have their separate homes. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. Copyright 2010-2019, The Adroit Journal. 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. Kal means Im in the crib. I copy -catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. 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. Smell Is the Last Memory to Go Fatimah Asghar 60. "I have no blood. Request Permissions. No answer English-speaking World Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the Last Memory to Go fatimah Asghar is wonder! The problem of representation by writing towards lacunae whose widespread collection of Poetry, and rituals are woven the! ; Oil & quot ; we got sent home early & amp ; no one knew why wide... Collection, If They Come for us, has created her international fame New country cold! Wide, glued to sweaty American men this New country, cold snow & naked American men how. ; Oil & quot ; we got sent home early & amp ; wears bras now a. 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