The Blue Shift Journal Interviews Fatimah Asghar

As a Fulbright Scholar in 2011, Fatimah Asghar studied poetry and performance in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, she formed the country's first spoken word collective called Refleks. Her honors (besides the Fulbright) include a Kundiman Fellowship. Get to know Asghar's poetics at Blue Shift Journal:

You went to Bosnia-Herzegovina as a Fulbright scholar and ended up forming the first spoken word collective there, REFLEKS. Can you speak to us a little bit about the process?
When I went to Bosnia I felt as though everyone I met was a storyteller. The whole country was bursting with stories. However, a lot of people that I spoke to felt like ‘art’ or ‘poetry’ was not something that they could do, due to the elitist connotations around those words. So, I partnered with a Bosnian-American poet and we created the first bi-lingual spoken word poetry group there. We saw a need and tried to create a safe space for people to express themselves.

You were also studying theater at the time. What’s the intersection of poetry and theater for you?
I’m a performer and a poet, so there are a lot of natural intersections for me in thinking about language and performance. Language is very much alive to me, in the same way that theater to me is broader than just a stage, but something we see and do every day, in all of our interactions. I love the flexibility with poetry and the way that the page can be a kind of performance as well.

How was the Dark Noise collective formed? What would you like to see it become?
Dark Noise was another thing that was born out of a need. When I was in Bosnia, my friend, Aaron Samuels, and I g-chatted every day. We talked about how it was difficult and demoralizing to negotiate the professional writer world as a poet of color. Dark Noise was (and is) and experiment. We wanted to assemble a bunch of amazing emerging writers of color together and fellowship. We wanted to create a group that operated like a family, with love at it its center, and see what happened.

As cheesy as it sounds, I just want us to always be there for each other. I can’t imagine my life without Aaron, Franny, Jamila, Nate and Danez. I want us to survive this racist ass world. I want us to grow old together. I want us to be in the same nursing home when we are all in our 90s, eating jello, talking shit, reminiscing on our freakier days and writing poems. That’s what I want. [...]

Onward to Blue Shift Journal.