Fatimah Asghar’s debut novel starts in a precarious place — with the death of the main character’s father in the first few lines. The death impacts a trio of siblings at the center of “When We Were Sisters” in vastly different ways, becoming a force that will either bring them together or tear them apart.
Asghar, who uses they/them pronouns, draws from their own life: Their parents died when the writer was 6. “When We Were Sisters” weaves the themes of grief and community, along with queerness and love, into prose that is compulsively readable and heart-wrenching at the same time.
Already nominated for a National Book Award, “When We Were Sisters” caps a succession of acclaimed projects from the 32-year-old artist, poet and filmmaker, who splits time between Los Angeles and Chicago. Asghar describes a connection to Chicago, consistently referring to it as a “chosen home” and affectionately telling stories about working as a teaching artist in Chicago public schools.
With Sam Bailey, Asghar created the Emmy-nominated web series “Brown Girls” in 2017, about two young women of color finding their way in the world. Asghar followed that with the poetry collection “If They Come For Us,” providing an insightful look into the collective violence of partition, the bloody period following India’s independence from Great Britain.
Where Asghar’s sweeping poetry collection tackled a major period of history, “When We Were Sisters” focuses on the intimate and everyday. This shift was on purpose, she said.
“I felt like for me as an artist, it was important to kind of, in some ways get through some of the big wave stuff so that I could dive into the smaller, more immediate stories that I wanted to tell,” Asghar said.
Compounded by grief, the trio at the heart of the story — Noreen, Aisha and Kausar — experience violent interactions with their uncle-turned-caregiver, and sometimes with each other, as they navigate their new reality.
Asghar’s book lives in the minutiae of day-to-day activities. Despite the excavation of painful realities for the siblings, Asghar also fills it with scenes of playful teasing, caring and attempts to claw back childhood after the death of a parent.
Orphans have a unique experience in this world, especially within the confines of a tight-knit community to which Ashgar also belongs. Immigrant communities often rely on other people that they know through faith. Cultural or ethnic communities often form vast “kinship networks,” which help ease the transition to a new country and help build a support system outside nuclear families.
Asghar’s own experience as an orphan has changed over time from shame to empowerment, noting that living outside the nuclear family structure is something that has given them a unique view of the world.
“There’s a way that orphaning is such a thing that you become marked by. It becomes a deep, looming shadow that’s all around you, until you stop making it a shadow, until you befriend it, until you’re, like, ‘This is what I am,’” Asghar said. “And I have a different experience of the world.”
Another striking element of the novel is its portrayal of queerness and desire. The main character, Kausar, wrestles with gender in an intimate way and comes to terms with it by defining what they are not, rather than what they are.
This describes an experience in the LGBTQ community where someone does not have a clear label, but instead participates in what Asghar calls, “the slow listening of gender.”
“As a person who is queer and has a lot of the same feelings as Kausar around gender and around sexuality, that’s why I feel freest is like, truly when things are not labeled like and when things are not defined in that way,” they said.
Asghar’s journey writing the novel was nearly as messy and beautiful as their main character’s journey. When writing previous works, Asghar said they often felt a pull to represent a larger group of people, but this project ended up extremely personal — an opportunity “to remove pain from my body and yoke into this book.”
“You follow what you follow,” they said, “because it’s begging to be explored.”
Fatimah Asghar will be in conversation with poet and singer-songwriter Jamila Woods on Oct. 25 at 6 p.m. at the Harold Washington Library Center (400 S. State St.).
Siri Chilukuri is a freelance journalist in Chicago who covers culture, cities and climate. Follow her @schilukuri1.
