Fatimah Asghar

cantfindit

Fatimah Asghar is an artist who spans across different genres and themes. 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. Play is critical in the development of their work, as is intentionally building relationship and authentic collaboration. Their first book of poems If They Come For Us explored themes of orphaning, family, Partition, borders, shifting identity, and violence. Along with Safia Elhillo, they co-edited Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology for Muslim people who are also women, trans, gender non-conforming, and/ or queer. The anthology was built around the radical idea that there are as many ways of being Muslim as there are Muslim people in the world. They also wrote and co-created Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendship among women of color. Their debut lyrical novel, When We Were Sisters, explores sisterhood, orphaning, and alternate family building, and is forthcoming October 2022. While these projects approach storytelling through various mediums and tones, at the heart of all of them is Fatimah’s unique voice, insistence on creating alternate possibilities of identity, relationships and humanity then the ones that society would box us into, and a deep play and joy embedded in the craft. Source

America

am I not your baby?

brown & not allowed

my own language?

my teeth pulled

from mouth, tongue

bloated with corn syrup?

america, didn’t you raise me?

bomb the country of my fathers

& then tell me to go back to it?

didn’t you mold the men

who murder children in schools

who spit at my bare arms

& uncovered head?

america, wasn’t it you?

who makes & remakes

me orphan, who burns

my home, watches me rebuild

& burns it down again?

wasn’t it you, who uproots

& mangles the addresses

until there are none

until all I have are my own

hands & even those you’ve

told me not to trust? america

don’t turn your back on me.

am I not your baby?

brown & bred to hate

every inch of my skin?

didn’t you raise me?

didn’t you tell me bootstraps

& then steal my shoes?

didn’t you make there no ‘back’

for me to go back to?

america, am I not your refugee?

who do I call mother, if not you?

Published:

2016

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Immigration

Intersectionality & Culture

Poems of Place

Politics

Racial Injustice

Literary Devices:

Alliteration

the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Apostrophe

an exclamatory passage in a speech or poem addressed to a person (typically one who is dead or absent) or thing (typically one that is personified)

Rhetorical Question

a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered