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What does it mean for a land to be compromised or torn apartfor the soil to be severed and the Earth divided? 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. The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan is rarely addressed in American history textbooks and classes, much less in literature. 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. it makes of my mouth. This page is not available in other languages. Used with the permission of the poet. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. As the poem progresses, Asghar becomes further distanced from the events, seeming to remember less and less. 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? 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. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. 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?" Anyone can read what you share. Her selfhood is foreclosed by 9/11 and the resulting culture of fear and xenophobia: the ship sinks, her blood clots. 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,. The blood clotting, oil in my veins. 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. Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. In the same poem, the speakers sister defies Islamic law by shaving her arms, and Asghar writes in response, Haram, I hissed, but too wanted to be bare / armed & smooth, skin gentle & worthy / of touch. That is, until the sisters body betrays her with an ingrown hair that lands her in the hospital. 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. I learned that India had been split into two, with Hindus residing in Indian territories and Muslims living in Pakistan. They both died by the time she was five, leaving her an orphan. by pathmark. Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama who loves cats, crystals, and classic rock. 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. 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. 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). As though I told you how the first time. Smell is the Last Memory to Go 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.. "And in a lot of ways we are. in the kitchen. Everyone always tries to theft, bring them back out the grave. Orphaned as a child and marginalized in America, Asghar captures the plight of alienation on a personal and political scale. just in case. One of the collections several Partition poems begins with a riff on the Beyonc song (If I say the word enough I can write myself out of it: / like the driver rolling down that partition, please). 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. His "coven" of children the eldest, Noreen, followed by Kausar and Aisha is plummeted into orphanhood and watches his funeral on VHS. 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 . She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. 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. Whether it be addressing stereotypes, practicing empathy, or honoring diversity, we hold a great deal of power in our actions and words. 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 . If They Come For Us ends with an honest declaration of love and appreciationloyalty and unwavering commitmentto the many communities she wholeheartedly identifies with: my country is made / in my peoples image / if they come for you they / come for me too in the dead. Paying homage to all her familywhether they be blood relatives or friendsAsghar celebrates the communities shes battled with, fought against, and finally embraced. Heres your auntie, in her best gold-threaded shalwaarkameez, made small by this land of american men. It is a wonder that anything was left of the road. from the soil. "When your people have gone through such historical violence, you cannot shake it. 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. As though I told you how the first time.Everyone always tries to theft, bring them back out the grave.Let them rest; my parents stay dead. 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 . Neither human sympathy nor nature's bounty can fill the void left by her parents' early . 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. 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). If They Come For Us leaves readers with fear and uncertainty of a nation that has become arduous and burdensome for immigrants. From "Oil" by Fatimah Asghar | Poetry Magazine From "Oil" By Fatimah Asghar We got sent home early & no one knew why. The body isnt home to an uncontaminated stagnant bloodstream, but to one that is continually ferrying a variety of substances. 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. 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'. Their dirge, my every-mornings minaret. Amid the hurt and darkness that exists in this world, Asghars poems prove that hope is out there, if only we have the courage to look for it. 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. 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. I went to India once, to find myself.. For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions 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. I draw a ship on the map. In the opening pages of Fatimah Asghar's When We Were Sisters, an immigrant father leaves home to get bunk beds for his three children and is murdered in the street. 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. Asghar told NBC News of her friendship with Woods. The In the midst of all of this, she conveys how sorrow and pain can be inherited. Yesterday meansI say goodbye, again.Kal means they are the same. They cant touch anyone without teeth & spitunless one strips the other of their human skin. Fatimah Asghar is an award-winning poet, whose widespread collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, has created her international fame. The Poetry Foundation recognizes the power of words to transform lives. from a poisonous one. 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. 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. Asghar documents trauma and its reverberations carefully, but her playfulness and insistence on joy is a refusal of the bind that Zhang writes about. Everyday she prays. Shes seen me at my worst, at my best, at my most insecure everything. I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. 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. Kalmeans I wake to her strange voice. A collection of poems, prose, and audio and video recordings that explore Islamic culture. 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. what do I do with the boywho snuck his way insideme on my childhood playground? 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. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. 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. In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it. The mother of Kausar, Aisha and Noreen - the youngest to oldest of three sisters - died years ago. 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 have a boy inside me & I dont knowhow to tell people. The anthology opens with a striking poem titled For Peshawar, dated December 16th, 2014. The muse in literature is a source of inspiration for the writer. I am four, sitting in a patch of grass In high school, I briefly learned about this partition from a twenty-minute lecture complemented by a single paragraph in my World History textbook. For poet Fatimah Asghar, the word 'orphan' has more than one meaning. stranger. my country is made / in my peoples image / if they come for you they / come for me too, she writes. Copyright 2010-2019, The Adroit Journal. 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. I think we are at war! Fatimah Asghar is a contemporary poet and filmmaker. 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. Rolls attah & pounds the keemaat night watches the bodies of these glistening men. Every single person that visits Poem Analysis has helped contribute, so thank you for your support. the sweet, rich scent, / the cream and white of the magnolia blossom. (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. 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. Be inherited for immigrants a fierce reputation of wielding words packed with sharpness and intelligence, likewise challenges conventional. Distanced from the fatimah asghar oil, seeming to remember less and less how sorrow pain... Huffington Post, and classic rock shake it into the wound andhopefullylearn from.... 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