The world may be theirs, but they feel stripped of a sense of belonging.Īsghar’s melodic and melancholy work is reminiscent of other novels written by poets – Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Safia Elhillo’s Home Is Not a Country – but perhaps sits closest to Akhil Sharma’s 2014 novel, Family Life, in its distilled and lucid rendering of loss. “We’re mothered by everything because we know how to look for the mothering, because we know a mother might leave us and we’ll need another mother to step in and take its place.” The sisters search for parental figures but are often left grasping. “What no one will understand is that the world belongs to orphans, everything becomes our mother,” writes Asghar. The duties of father, mother, sister, sibling are blurred. “A word is a word is a word,” she writes, but “is a sister still a sister when a mother dies?” Time is warped. Narrated by Kausar in vignettes, often in staccato sentences, and interspersed with poetic flashbacks from the perspective of the father and mother, this fragmentary form has the effect of ephemerality – much like life. Everywhere they go, they carry the fog of familial grief.Ī poet first, Asghar picks up on the themes of her debut collection If They Come for Us – partition and fragmentation, borders and bodies – and plays with space and silence on the page. ![]() They play games of “once-upon-a-time”, nostalgic for the good old days. Their father is gradually becoming make-believe too. ![]() The girls don’t remember their “phantom mother” – she’s a myth, a make-believe, who died when they were still babies. They form makeshift families, forging bonds with the immigrants their money-minded uncle rents rooms to. In the years that follow, they come of age and fall apart each attempts to confront their changing selves and the system as Muslim American women. He transports them to a new city, a new house. Uncle, whose name is replaced throughout with a black box, becomes the sisters’ guardian, but mostly to serve his own interests (the redaction speaks to his dereliction of familial duty – he takes their inheritance and the government-issue cheques). Asghar places these sentences on the verso and recto pages of this section: “A bunk bed in exchange for a father” and “What idiots. The sisters had innocently wished for new bunk beds – and lost their father while he was out buying them. The sisters search for parental figures, but are often left grasping – they feel stripped of a sense of belonging A VHS tape of his burial is sent to their house – the girls watch it on repeat surrounded by aunties. His body is sent from Pennsylvania to Lahore and buried in soil they can’t touch, in a “place he is from, and so we are from, but we know nothing about”. ![]() The day their father dies, murdered on the streets of America at the opening of the novel, their home turns into a “House of Sadness”. ![]() She was “born this way, belonging to them, trying to follow their breath”. Kausar “put her heart inside hearts” long ago, long before they became orphans. Her two sisters are all she has – even if the distance between them is growing. Adrift in the world without a mother or father, her heart is a little bit Noreen’s, a little bit Aisha’s. She stares and stares into the mirror, but alas “can’t find another heart to give”. When she walks past Bobby and his friends in the school cafeteria, she overhears him say: “ That’s my heart right there.” With flushed cheeks, she races to the bathroom. K ausar is the youngest of the three orphaned sisters in Fatimah Asghar’s grief-soaked and gorgeous debut novel.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |