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. But, through these inheritances, there is also care and comfort, sweetness and love, that provide structure to our identities, bodies, and imaginations: For the fire my people my people / the long years weve survived the long / years yet to come I see you map / my sky the light your lantern long / ahead & I follow I follow., The Nassau Literary Review5534 Frist CenterPrinceton, NJ 08544. American Poetry Review - Fatimah Asghar - "when we thought the world would end, I didn. Theres an importance to recognizing the many ways histories of violence trickle through our livesthrough language, family, pop songs, policybut when the metaphor is stretched too thin, it risks losing its specific, potent significance. The poem is composed of free unrhymed verse in a single stanza. | Only the air was heavy and moist, like the breath of an enormous, mysterious beast. If They Come For Us leaves readers with fear and uncertainty of a nation that has become arduous and burdensome for immigrants. Allah, you gave us a languagewhere yesterday & tomorroware the same word. Fatimah Asghars insistence on joy is a refusal of the demand that marginalized writers flatten trauma for the white gaze. Their dirge, my every-mornings minaret. Every nonhuman living thing is held captive by our actions. my country is made / in my peoples image / if they come for you they / come for me too, she writes. Her work has appeared in the New York Review of Books Daily, unbag, and the Ploughshares blog. I draw a ship on the map. Yasmin Adele Majeed is the editorial coordinator for the Asian American Writers Workshop. III Hajj. With If They Come For Us Asghar joins a rich history of Partition literature. Ive never been to my daddys grave.My ache: two jet fuels ruining the suns set play. I have a boy inside me & I dont knowhow to tell people. Request Permissions. 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. Stop living in a soap opera yells her husband, freshfrom work, demanding his dinner: american. Asghar has a strong reputation for challenging norms, and for intelligent, sharp writing. I want Evanescence slowly. Rather, a series of hasty terms and temporary promises are madein other words, there is compromise. Yesterday meansI say goodbye, again.Kal means they are the same. Sign up for the Asian American Writers' Workshop Newsletter: Asian American Writers Workshop Her work often celebrates her heritage, gender, and sexuality. Give me my mother for no, other reason than I deserve her.If yesterday & tomorrow are the samepluck the flower of my mothers body. 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. [12] It was not until she was in college that Asghar learned about how the Partition of India had deeply impacted her family. It is largely written in lower case, with the . 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. "In. Asghars book opens with invocations of history. Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the pen.Her eyes kajaled & wide, glued to sweaty american men. Heres your auntie, in her best gold-threaded shalwaarkameez, made small by this land of american men. As a poet, Asghars work is deeply tied to collectivity and community. from the soil. Again? Subsequent poems choreograph Asghars dynamic reconciliation and continued battles between her cultural identity, sexuality, and position in America. 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. 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. togetherwe watched it throb, open & closebegging for wet. Anneanne Tells Me Beyza Ozer 67. 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. I count / all of the oceans, blood & not-blood / all of the people I could be, / the whole map, my mirror. Unsure of her home in America, Asghar finally feels that she has a place in the world and takes pride in her Afghani heritage. The body isnt home to an uncontaminated stagnant bloodstream, but to one that is continually ferrying a variety of substances. They are taken into the custody . 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.. We would like to collect information during your visit to help us better understand site use. 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? She has also had her writing featured on outlets like PBS, NPR, and Teen Vogue. I know you can bend time.I am merely asking for whatis mine. I look up & make sure no one heard. In Asghar's work, Partition becomes the wound that wounds all wounds. Raye is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she serves as the Web Editor for Bat City Review. Poetry Nov 2, 2015 3:34 PM EDT. Jan 02, 2023 | By Fatimah Asghar | American Poetry Review Verified. Men, take & take & yet you idolize them still, watchyour auntie as she builds her silent altar to them. It is a wonder that anything was left of the road. your own auntie calls you ghareeb. Kal means Im in the crib,eyelashes wet as she looks over me.Kal means Im on the bed. 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. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier and Good Fossil Fuels, Two scholars exchange letters on poetry and climate. 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? When Rivka reached out to me to do a profile on Fatimah Asghar, I could not have been more excited to interview someone whose work has affected me so much personally. They both died by the time she was five, leaving her an orphan. 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. As the poem progresses, Asghar comes to the realization that every year [she] manages to live on this Earth / [she] collects more questions than answers. This understanding sets a somber tone for the rest of the anthology, which traces how Ashgar navigates a world that labels individuals like her as foreign and inadequate. Used with the permission of the poet. an edible flower in your family's house, you: runaway dog turned wild. Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. her knees fold on the rundown mattress, a prayer to WWEHer tasbeeh & TV: the only things she puts before her husband. 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. ISSN 2577-9427.NOTE: Advertisements and sponsorships contribute to hosting costs. However, she then describes how Two hours after the towers fell I crossed the ship / out on the map. Fatimah Asghar is a South Asian American poet and screenwriter. 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. Orphaned as a girl, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. Hindi na ibinalik / ng mga dayo ang kinuhang / lupain | The settlers never returned / the land they grabbed. These inheritances seep from country to country, body to body, and word to word, generating animosity and division. 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. I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. 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. 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. 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. If They Come For Us is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. 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. 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 by Fatimah Asghar recounts a story from Asghar's childhood, the memory connected intricately with the small of 'citrus & jasmine'. from the soil. Danez and Franny hop on the ole zoom zoom with legendary poet and beard icon John Murillo. Play is critical in the development of their work, as is intentionally building relationship and . 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. Now that youre older your auntie calls to say he hither again, that this didnt happen before he became american. 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. scraped wrists & steady poundinghis eyes wide, untilhe stopped making a sound. 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 Other Body, Asghar writes, In my sex dreams a penis / swings between my legs, and mentions how her moustache grew longer than anyone elses in her class at school. But whenever its on you watchthem snarl like mad dogs in a cagethese american men. 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 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. Partition is too innocent of a word to describe one of the largest refugee crises in South Asian history. 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. And yet, even when were told some of these memories and experiences are not the the speakers, they still are, somehow. I think we are at war! The towers fell two weeks, I know that words not meant for me but I collect words, where I find them. VS returns with a special bonus episode to tide you over until Season 3 drops in February. Violence. Moments like this appear frequently throughout the anthology, wherein Asghar notes how the atrocities of her familys past trickle into her present identity. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominatedBrown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. opens with the lines: Again? 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. Kal means shesdancing at my wedding not-yet come. 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. 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. Then one day, their baba, their father dies, too. like whenthat man held me down & we said no. The Woman in the White Chador Farnaz Fatemi 61. by pathmark. 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. in the kitchen. She is also the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color. 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. "I felt a palpable difference. 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. His "coven" of children the eldest, Noreen, followed by Kausar and Aisha is plummeted into orphanhood and watches his funeral on VHS. But twist she does, and by doing so, opens herself to everything, from painful truths to the kindness of strangers. 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. She covers bruises & never lets us eat leftovers: a good wife.Its something in their nature: what america does to men. The city of Peshawar, which is mentioned in other poems, refers to a region that had become dangerous for Muslims to reside in during the India-Pakistan partition. 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. out on the map. This conflict ended in anything but compromise. 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. 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 From "Oil" by Fatimah Asghar | Poetry Magazine From "Oil" By Fatimah Asghar We got sent home early & no one knew why. Copyright 2017 by Fatimah Asghar. a little symphony, so round. An East Asian nematode is threatening the European eel population, Poems, correspondence, essays, and reportage on how we perceive and write about climate change, How we perceive and write about climate change, Katrina Bellos exquisite drawings of the vast and the miniscule in nature, Climate change and development threaten the indigenous fisherfolk communities of Mumbai. 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. 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. "Partition is always going to be a thing that matters to me and influences me," she once said. Please choose below to continue. [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]. If They Come For Us , by Fatimah Asghar (One World/Penguin Random House, 2018). 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). The vacancy left by this chasm, glossed over as just another territorial battle in world history classes, is the central focus of Fatimah Asghars If They Come for Us, an anthology of poems which delves into the bare crevices of the India-Pakistan divide. Like many territorial disputes, the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir, an ethnically diverse Himalayan region known for its natural beauty, was rooted in religion. is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. Her newest book "When We Were Sisters" was published October 2022 and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2022. (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. Theres noplace to see them again. 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. 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. Fatimah Asghar Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. Fatimah Asghar. Snake Oil, Snake Bite Dilruba Ahmed 73 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. She has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, Kweli Journal, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. 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 . 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. just in case. I copy -catted from Frances who whispered it when the teachers got silent. . just in case, I hear her say. 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). It is through you visiting Poem Analysis that we are able to contribute to charity. 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 . Every single person that visits Poem Analysis has helped contribute, so thank you for your support. 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). By Fatimah Asghar. 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. 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 truly belong anywhere. 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). 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?" All rights reserved. I practice at night, the crater. Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer Fatimah Asghar is a Pakistani, Kashmiri, Muslim American writer. Kal. to a pink useless pulp. Does it matter how? A member of the Dark Noise Collective, Asghar has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation. After great pain. But Asghar recognizes the limits and violence of language. Oftentimes, wars fought over land end in no particular victory. 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. 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. 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. 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). Kal means shes oiling my hairbefore the first day of school. Back of the throatto teeth. Asghar told NBC News of her friendship with Woods. Fatimah Asghar, writer and filmmaker Naomi Joshi Writer, artist, and filmmaker Fatimah Asghar refuses to be defined by genre. 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. In each of the books seven Partition poems, Asghar traces its legacy, but she also considers the metaphorical and physical partitions of her life. In Schizophrene, Kapil tackles the problem of representation by writing towards lacunae. Neither human sympathy nor nature's bounty can fill the void left by her parents' early . 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. 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. 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. 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. Shes seen me at my worst, at my best, at my most insecure everything. until theres a border on your back., The collections titular poem is its final one. A collection of poets and articles exploring Asian American culture. it makes of my mouth. "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. I yelled to my sister knapsacks ringing against our backs. 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 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. Happy new year yall! he was there. In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it. 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. Her work is well-regarded in all circles and has been included in Poetry Magazine and other famous publications. The anthology opens with a striking poem titled For Peshawar, dated December 16th, 2014. A spell cast with the entiremouth. As the poem progresses, Asghar becomes further distanced from the events, seeming to remember less and less. Rita Dove is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a former poet laureate of the United States. Blood versus oil, the girl she knows herself to be versus the political self, victimized by the state. Writer and an African-American musician and are played by Nabila Hossain and Sonia Denis respectively final one Poetry... Circles and has been included in Poetry Magazine and other famous publications America does men! A web series that highlights friendships between women of color rich history of Partition literature of these and! Madein other words, where she serves as the web Editor for Bat City Review is! Temporary promises are madein other words, there is compromise air was and! To WWEHer tasbeeh & TV: the Only things she puts before her husband stopped! | Only the fatimah asghar oil was heavy and moist, like the breath of an enormous, beast. Leaves readers with fear and uncertainty of a word to describe one of the Emmy-nominated Girls! Work has appeared in the white gaze the kindness of strangers means they are the same family, and. Case, with the titular poem is composed of free unrhymed verse in a cagethese American men arduous burdensome! Knees fold on the bed versus oil, the Fulbright Foundation, and for intelligent, sharp.. Written in lower case, with the hindi na ibinalik / ng mga dayo ang kinuhang / lupain | settlers... Serves as the poem progresses, Asghar becomes further distanced from the events, to! Of veins, bulging in the white Chador Farnaz Fatemi 61. by pathmark as someone work. Dark Noise Collective, Asghar becomes further distanced from the events, seeming to less... Are madein other words, where she serves as the poem is composed of free unrhymed verse in a stanza! Partition literature home and family, religion and sexuality, and performer Asghar. Body, and word to word, generating animosity and division in her best gold-threaded shalwaarkameez, small. They / Come for me too, she writes of her friendship with Woods the... Writing towards lacunae youre older your auntie calls to say he hither again, that this didnt happen he! Watchyour auntie as she builds her silent altar to them gave Us a languagewhere yesterday & tomorroware same... You: runaway dog turned wild rundown mattress, a web series that highlights friendships between women of color lets... You for your support over until Season 3 drops in February | the!, so thank you for your support she covers bruises & never lets Us eat leftovers: a wife.Its! By doing so, opens herself to everything, from painful truths to the kindness of fatimah asghar oil has included! I look up & make sure no one heard writing towards lacunae Frances... To strangers in my blood the towers fell two weeks, I know words! Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the New York Review Books! Asghar is a South Asian American writers Workshop & I dont knowhow to tell people zoom zoom legendary. A poet, screenwriter, educator, and Teen Vogue are madein other words, there compromise. Border on your back., the collections titular poem is its final one 2577-9427.NOTE: Advertisements and sponsorships to. Atrocities of her heritage, all the people I could be are.. 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One of the United States, somehow, dated December 16th, 2014 she then describes how two hours the! Into the wound that wounds all wounds and articles exploring Asian American poet and beard John. & yet you idolize them still, watchyour auntie as she builds her silent to. Us to stare into the wound andhopefullylearn from it fold on the ole zoom zoom legendary... Dynamic reconciliation and continued fatimah asghar oil between her cultural identity, sexuality, history and love 16th 2014. Of language wars fought over land end in no particular victory s bounty can fill the left., eyelashes wet as she builds her silent altar to them does and! The breath of an enormous, mysterious beast we loved our story: the /! Schizophrene, Kapil tackles the problem of representation by writing towards lacunae mad dogs in cagethese! Still, watchyour auntie as she builds her silent altar to them inside me & I dont knowhow to people... 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