fatimah asghar oil

Please choose below to continue. I have a boy inside me & I dont knowhow to tell people. Their dirge, my every-mornings minaret. 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. Im a silent girl, a rig ready to blow. & my boy, my lovely boyhe clawed & bit & cried just likewe were back on the dirt playground. 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. Fatimah Asghar. I think we are at war! 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. By Fatimah Asghar. 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? 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?" Mercedes Zapata. The Woman in the White Chador Farnaz Fatemi 61. Her parents immigrated to the United States. Blood versus oil, the girl she knows herself to be versus the political self, victimized by the state. 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). he was there toothe day on Bens couch, wearingmy skirt, ranking the girls, in class. Oftentimes, wars fought over land end in no particular victory. Shes seen me at my worst, at my best, at my most insecure everything. In a later poem titled "Oil," Asghar further grapples with her identity, writing "My Auntie A says my people / might be Afghani. 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. . She is a touring poet and performer. If They Come For Us leaves readers with fear and uncertainty of a nation that has become arduous and burdensome for immigrants. She smiles as guilty as a bride without blood, her loveof this new country, cold snow & naked american men. The Poetry Foundation recognizes the power of words to transform lives. How would / you have taught me to be a woman? She edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and her Collected Poems: 1974-2004 was published in 2016. Her work has been featured on news outlets such as PBS, NPR,Time,Teen Vogue,Huffington Post, and others. 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. Asghar described . Learn about the charties we donate to. 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.. Zhang pointed to the lose-lose situation writers of color face: Pander to the white literary establishment by exploiting trauma for publication, or risk being ignored and silenced. 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. 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. Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the pen.Her eyes kajaled & wide, glued to sweaty american men. Can't blame me for taking a good idea. This data is anonymized, and will not be used for marketing purposes. 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. Does it matter how? 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. If They Come For Us 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. They both died by the time she was five, leaving her an orphan. 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. I went to India once, to find myself.. 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. 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. Her father was from Pakistan. 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. As a poet, Asghars work is deeply tied to collectivity and community. 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. Theres noplace to see them again. In her poem "Super Orphan," Asghar once again explores the impact of their absence. just in case, I hear her say. 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. Asghars approach is similarly multimodal. "People talk about genre like it's so stringent," she says. His "coven" of children the eldest, Noreen, followed by Kausar and Aisha is plummeted into orphanhood and watches his funeral on VHS. Asghar lost her parents young; with family roots in Pakistan and in divided Kashmir, she grew up in the United States, a queer Muslim teenager and an orphan in the confusing, unfair months and. Poetry Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and elsewhere. The experience of reading Fatimah Asghars 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. Written by Asghar and directed by Bailey, the series is based on Asghar's friendship with the artist Jamila Woods and their experiences as two women of color navigating their twenties. In America, the place that is ostensibly home, the speaker faces that rejection both in her family life and in society at large. 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). 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. We work to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry. 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. In high school, I briefly learned about this partition from a twenty-minute lecture complemented by a single paragraph in my World History textbook. Kal means shesdancing at my wedding not-yet come. 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. Tomorrow means I might. 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. In For Peshawar, Asghar introduces readers to the seemingly comfortable rhetoric around death and the regularity of losing loved ones amidst injustice. I collect words where I find them. "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. 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? Again? "When your people have gone through such historical violence, you cannot shake it. 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. 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. I want Evanescence slowly. Play is critical in the development of their work, as is intentionally building relationship and . The body isnt home to an uncontaminated stagnant bloodstream, but to one that is continually ferrying a variety of substances. VS returns with a special bonus episode to tide you over until Season 3 drops in February. Learning about her family's firsthand experience during partition had a profound effect on Asghar and her work. It is through you visiting Poem Analysis that we are able to contribute to charity. Blood is an unwieldy metaphor. And what is home if the place where you areboth in public and in privaterejects critical pieces of who you are? The poem begins with the 2014 terrorist attack on The Army Public School in Peshawar, forcing Ashghar to question whether we are meant to lower [our babies] into the ground / from the moment they are born. Asghars tone is pensive as she grapples with the notion of something as brutal and wrongful as death proximate to young individuals who have yet to understand what it means to be threatened. Rather, a series of hasty terms and temporary promises are madein other words, there is compromise. from a poisonous one. black grass swaying in the field, glint of gold in her nose. I have no blood. Snake Oil, Snake Bite Dilruba Ahmed 73 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. 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. Asghar in a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim-American author, creator, poet, screenwriter and educator who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The poem is composed of free unrhymed verse in a single stanza. [6], Asghar's mother was from Jammu and Kashmir and fled with her family during Partition related violence. From "Oil" by Fatimah Asghar | Poetry Magazine From "Oil" By Fatimah Asghar We got sent home early & no one knew why. Likewe were back on the dirt playground and profit and community worst, at most. By the Time she was five, leaving her an orphan Asghar and her Collected Poems: was! A special bonus episode to tide you over until Season 3 drops in February isnt home to an stagnant... And what is home if the place where you areboth in public and in privaterejects critical pieces who... 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Had a profound effect on Asghar and her Collected Poems: 1974-2004 was published in 2016 stanza! The state human skin and community in February and will not be for! Main characters are a queer Pakistani-American writer and an African-American musician and are played by Nabila Hossain and Denis.

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