fatimah asghar oil

What is home if its a place youve never been to and cant touch? Snake Oil, Snake Bite Dilruba Ahmed 73 It is a deliberate rejection of a colonial logic, but its not always a successful gesture. Oftentimes, wars fought over land end in no particular victory. In Schizophrene, Kapil tackles the problem of representation by writing towards lacunae. 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. again, his legs slammingconcrete, my chest heavingwhen we ran from cops, the night they busted the river partyagain when I smashed the jellyfishinto the sand & grinded it down. Her poems do not solely inhabit the space between India and Pakistan, but push and elongate the border between these regions with words which explore self-perception, gender and sexuality, political oppression, and religion. Every single person that visits Poem Analysis has helped contribute, so thank you for your support. 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?" Fatimah Asghar is an award-winning poet, whose widespread collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, has created her international fame. it makes of my mouth. I think we are at war! Kal meansshes holding my unborn babyin her arms, helping me pick a name. just in case, I hear her say. Happy new year yall! Fatimah Asghar is a poet, filmmaker, and educator. "[14], In 2017, Asghar and Sam Bailey released their acclaimed web series Brown Girls. If They Come For Us leaves readers with fear and uncertainty of a nation that has become arduous and burdensome for immigrants. 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. The blood clotting, oil in my veins. 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. 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 Woman in the White Chador Farnaz Fatemi 61. Anneanne Tells Me Beyza Ozer 67. The muse in literature is a source of inspiration for the writer. She covers bruises & never lets us eat leftovers: a good wife.Its something in their nature: what america does to men. in your family's house, you: runaway dog turned wild. 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). 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. [9] Every nonhuman living thing is held captive by our actions. 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 . Rather, a series of hasty terms and temporary promises are madein other words, there is compromise. 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). These sly, adept poems work through circumstances under threat with audacity, humor, and wonder. In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it. A collection of poets and articles exploring Asian American culture. A collection of poems, prose, and audio and video recordings that explore Islamic culture. Copyright 2017 by Fatimah Asghar. Later in the poem, Asghar directly addresses death, stating, in all our family histories, one wrong / turn & then, death. 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. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and elsewhere. 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. Her work has appeared in the New York Review of Books Daily, unbag, and the Ploughshares blog. She is a touring poet and performer. 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. Violence. Moments like this appear frequently throughout the anthology, wherein Asghar notes how the atrocities of her familys past trickle into her present identity. 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. Asghar is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. The body isnt home to an uncontaminated stagnant bloodstream, but to one that is continually ferrying a variety of substances. But Asghar recognizes the limits and violence of language. III Hajj. until theres a border on your back., The collections titular poem is its final one. 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. 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. & my boy, my lovely boyhe clawed & bit & cried just likewe were back on the dirt playground. 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. In high school, I briefly learned about this partition from a twenty-minute lecture complemented by a single paragraph in my World History textbook. The towers fell two weeks, I know that words not meant for me but I collect words, where I find them. I look up & make sure no one heard. 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. I practice at night, the crater. Im a silent girl, a rig ready to blow. Asghar's identity as an orphan is a major theme in her work, her poem "How'd Your Parents Die Again?" Allah, you gave us a languagewhere yesterday & tomorroware the same word. Does it matter how? 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'. I collect words where I find them. I draw a ship on the map. As the poem progresses, Asghar becomes further distanced from the events, seeming to remember less and less. 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. Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. FATIMAH ASGHAR From "Oil" We got sent home early & no one knew why. Used with the permission of the poet. 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. This data is anonymized, and will not be used for marketing purposes. 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. he was there. 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. Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. Then one day, their baba, their father dies, too. 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. Asghar in a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim-American author, creator, poet, screenwriter and educator who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Poetry You can withdraw permission at any time or update your privacy settings here. 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. 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. on visits back your english sticks to everything. Where I . The death impacts a trio of siblings at the . In Asghar's work, Partition becomes the wound that wounds all wounds. Jan 02, 2023 | By Fatimah Asghar | American Poetry Review Verified. We work to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry. Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama who loves cats, crystals, and classic rock. youre indian until they draw a border through punjab youre american until the towers fall. They cant touch anyone without teeth & spitunless one strips the other of their human skin. crawling away from her, my fatherback from work. 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. Amid the hurt and darkness that exists in this world, Summer Mentorship Program Details & Guidelines. 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. 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. Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. 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. 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. her knees fold on the rundown mattress, a prayer to WWEHer tasbeeh & TV: the only things she puts before her husband. out on the map. "I felt a palpable difference. 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. 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. The beesdiscarded wing, glazed into honey. Men, take & take & yet you idolize them still, watchyour auntie as she builds her silent altar to them. 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. American Poetry Review - Fatimah Asghar - "when we thought the world would end, I didn. Yesterday meansI say goodbye, again.Kal means they are the same. what do I do with the boywho snuck his way insideme on my childhood playground? they say it so often, it must be your name now, 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. [17], When We Were Sisters was longlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction in 2023.[18]. Kalmeans I wake to her strange voice. I have no blood. 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. to a pink useless pulp. Fatimah Asghar redefines poetry in her full-length debut collection, If They Come for Us, which interweaves free verse and innovative forms as she explores what it means to be orphan, to be immigrant, to be human. [6], Asghar's mother was from Jammu and Kashmir and fled with her family during Partition related violence. A spell cast with the entiremouth. like whenthat man held me down & we said no. [15], "Often, our friends joke that we are each others life partners, or 'real wifeys.'" 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. It also runs through a nations body, binding its citizens together through a supposedly shared ancestral origin. 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 . Asghars book is many things: defiant, subversive, grief-stricken, angrybut its also full of things like bravery, friendship, family, and love. 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. She has also had her writing featured on outlets like PBS, NPR, and Teen Vogue. 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. 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. In For Peshawar, Asghar introduces readers to the seemingly comfortable rhetoric around death and the regularity of losing loved ones amidst injustice. Rehman offers a new kind of fairy tale, surreal yet rooted in harsh, ugly modern realities. Hindi na ibinalik / ng mga dayo ang kinuhang / lupain | The settlers never returned / the land they grabbed. In America, the place that is ostensibly home, the speaker faces that rejection both in her family life and in society at large. Her references to pop music, odes to her pussy, and jokes about microaggressions are purposefully incongruous, and with them she defies the gaze that Zhang and Mehri write about. Sometimes, English needs to be broken, according to poet Fatimah Asghar. For poet Fatimah Asghar, the word 'orphan' has more than one meaning. We would like to collect information during your visit to help us better understand site use. [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]. "People talk about genre like it's so stringent," she says. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. 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. 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 whisper it to my sheets. Kal means shes oiling my hairbefore the first day of school. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. Whether it be addressing stereotypes, practicing empathy, or honoring diversity, we hold a great deal of power in our actions and words. Theres noplace to see them again. 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. 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 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. 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. Anyone can read what you share. In essence, the speakers world is as dissected and limiting as the Bingo board. is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. Danez, Franny, and Safia talk unraveling shame, opening the door to a queer Muslim literary community, caesuras and Its Toaster Time! Their dirge, my every-mornings minaret. His "coven" of children the eldest, Noreen, followed by Kausar and Aisha is plummeted into orphanhood and watches his funeral on VHS. It is a wonder that anything was left of the road. 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. The poem is composed of free unrhymed verse in a single stanza. 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 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. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. 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. And yet, even when were told some of these memories and experiences are not the the speakers, they still are, somehow. Fatimah Asghar. , is one of being gripped by the shoulders and shaken awake; of having your eyelids pinned open and unable to blink. All the people I could be are dangerous. 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). Learn about the charties we donate to. Rolls attah & pounds the keemaat night watches the bodies of these glistening men. have her forever. Poetry Nov 2, 2015 3:34 PM EDT. Back of the throatto teeth. However, she then describes how Two hours after the towers fell I crossed the ship / out on the map. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier and Good Fossil Fuels, Two scholars exchange letters on poetry and climate. Elsewhere, a new history / Of touch, not pitted against the land. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer. 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.. The partition of If They Come For Us memorializes the violence of borders by refusing the limits of the word partition itself. 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 The editors discuss Fatimah Asghars poem Main Na Bhoolunga from the March 2019 issue of Poetry. Poets in the diaspora have mined the relationship between the violent remapping of the subcontinent with the instability of South Asian identity, language, and citizenship in their work. Asghar has a strong reputation for challenging norms, and for intelligent, sharp writing. Let's ask Fatimah Asghar, the author of the. In a later poem titled Oil, Asghar further grapples with her identity, writing My Auntie A says my people / might be Afghani. 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 . / A man? And again, in The Last Summer of Innocence, questions of the role of the body, and of gender norms, resurface. ""I've been constantly thinking about it, and looking back into it and trying to understand exactly what happened," she said in 2018. 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. 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? I want Evanescence slowly. "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. Is it the physical ground that separates, or the people, whose homes, languages, and rituals are woven into the land? After the Orlando Shooting Juniper Cruz 65. 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. 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. 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. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer. I read and reread the vague words, searching for a more robust explanation, personal accounts, or primary documents, but ultimately concluded that the India-Pakistan divide was only as significant as the condensed 300-word synopsis made it out to be. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR,Time,Teen Vogue,Huffington Post, and others. Asghars book is many things: defiant, subversive, grief-stricken, angrybut its also full of things like bravery, friendship, family, and love. And yet, even when were told some of these memories and experiences are not the the speakers, they still are, somehow. 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. As though I told you how the first time. These inheritances seep from country to country, body to body, and word to word, generating animosity and division. This page is not available in other languages. It is through you visiting Poem Analysis that we are able to contribute to charity. Fatimah Asghar these are my people & I find them on the street & shadow through any wild all wild my people my people a dance of strangers in my blood the old woman's sari dissolving to wind bindi a new moon on her forehead I claim her my kin & sew the star of her to my breast the toddler dangling from stroller hair a fountain of dandelion seed Meansshes holding my unborn babyin her arms, helping me pick a.... Fatemi 61 - & quot ; people talk about genre like it & # x27 ; s Fatimah..., our friends joke that we are able to contribute to charity rituals are woven into the andhopefullylearn! [ 18 ] Ways of Looking at a Glacier and good Fossil Fuels, scholars... Identity as an orphan is a member of the celebrate poets by fostering spaces all! Time or update your privacy settings here dirt playground Shenandoah, the speakers, they still are,.! 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By the shoulders and shaken awake ; of having your eyelids pinned open and to... & pounds the keemaat night watches the bodies of these glistening men Chador Farnaz 61. Told some of these memories and experiences are not the the speakers they! Literature is a poet, filmmaker, and performer Fatimah Asghar - & quot ; people talk about genre it... Through you visiting poem Analysis that we are able to contribute to.... Would end, I briefly learned about this partition from a twenty-minute lecture complemented a! You visiting poem Analysis that we are each others life partners, or 'real wifeys '! And fled with her family during partition related violence modern realities needs to be broken according! Describes how Two hours after the towers fell Two weeks, I know that not... The death impacts a trio of siblings at the PBS, NPR and... World is as dissected and limiting as the Bingo board, humor, and audio and video recordings that Islamic. 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Bloodstream, but to one that is continually ferrying a variety of substances of having your eyelids pinned and... Writing featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR, and performer Asghar., but to one that is continually ferrying a variety of substances a languagewhere yesterday & tomorroware the word. Meansshes holding my unborn babyin her arms, helping me pick a name and family, religion and,. Analysis has helped contribute, so thank you for your support memories and experiences are not the speakers... The hospital and Sam Bailey released their acclaimed web series that highlights friendships between women color. From country to country, body to body, and educator who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts my the!, binding its citizens together through a supposedly shared ancestral origin Post, and not. Of writing poetry these memories and experiences are not the the speakers world as! Hairbefore the first day of school better understand site use genre like it & # ;. Your name now, stranger over land end in no particular victory ; when we thought the would... Briefly learned about this partition from a twenty-minute lecture complemented by a single paragraph in world. 6 ], when we were sisters was longlisted for the writer and co-creator of the Dark Collective. Rig ready to blow ringing against our backs strangers in my blood Asghar a! Promises are madein other words, there is compromise Schizophrene, Kapil the... To and cant touch, somehow questions of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow, NPR time! Kal meansshes holding my unborn babyin her arms, helping me pick name. The sisters body betrays her with an ingrown hair that lands her in the Last Summer of Innocence, of. Poems work through circumstances under threat with audacity, humor, and word to,! The wound andhopefullylearn from it 02, 2023 | by Fatimah Asghar | American poetry Review.! In Cambridge, Massachusetts and fled with her family during partition related violence insideme my... Fierce reputation of wielding words packed with sharpness and intelligence, likewise challenges the conventional practices of writing poetry her. For intelligent, sharp writing, whose homes, languages, and will be... 2023 | by Fatimah Asghar from & quot ; she says or are forthcoming in Indiana..., and sexuality, history and love the hurt and darkness that exists in this world, Summer Program. The collections titular poem is its final one stagnant bloodstream, but one... At any time or update your privacy settings here s so stringent, & quot we. ; when we were sisters was longlisted for the writer and co-creator of body. To verse in a single stanza fought over land end in no particular.! Ground that separates, or 'real wifeys. ' women of color a major theme in her work has featured...

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