Fatimah Asghar is an American-Pakistani author, poet and filmmaker. Their first poetry collection titled If They Come For Us explored themes of partition and memory. Their soon to be released poetry collection Daughter of the Mountains: takes these themes and adds a deeply personal perspective to them. This collection consists of seventy poems divided into five parts. It is subtitled poems of homecoming and heartbreak as the poems in this collection were all written by Fatimah as they visited Pakistan for the first time since their father died, and each poem is an intimate reflection on their time there.
Shanzeh Afzal: This is your second poetry collection after If They Come for Us. What drew you to write Daughter of the Mountains, and how was the process different from writing your first collection?
Fatimah Asghar: When I wrote Daughter of the Mountains, I was actually surprised by it because I had been working on a completely different book — a work of fiction. Then I went to Pakistan for the first time since my father died, when I was very young.
I wrote around forty poems in about thirty days. It felt like I’d tapped into a well that had suddenly appeared.
It was a very different process from If They Come for Us. That first book took years to write. Many of those poems had already been performed or published before the collection came out, so they had already been living in the world.
With Daughter of the Mountains, everything was much more private. The poems belonged only to me for a very long time. It was such an insular process, and that made the experience of writing feel completely different.
SA: Now that the book is about to be out in the world, how are you feeling about people reading it, since it felt so private?
FA: Every book has made me nervous for different reasons, but this one feels especially vulnerable because it was so private. It came out of this process of excavation while I was traveling and learning about Pakistan, South Asia, and spirituality.
I’ve written before about being Muslim, but I haven’t written as openly about my own spirituality and the way I approach it. This book feels like the most honest I’ve ever been about that part of myself.
So I definitely feel vulnerable. But I’m also excited to see how it resonates with people and what they take from it.
SA: What was it like returning to Pakistan after so many years? Was this your first visit since childhood?
FA: Yes. It was the first time I’d been back since my father died. I think the last time I had been there I was still a toddler.
I hadn’t seen my father’s family since then. We’d completely lost touch. So returning felt like a homecoming in so many ways. I was meeting my father’s family again, and I was finally able to spend time in the country he came from.
For a long time, I had lived inside a story of disconnection. Pakistan was simply the country my family came from, but I didn’t really feel connected to it because my father died when I was young. I accepted that story as it was the only one available to me at the time.
Going back completely changed my relationship to that idea. It was really humbling. It reminded me that we can choose a different story at any point in our lives, and when we do, our relationship to a place — or to ourselves — can change completely.
Writing this book and returning to Pakistan were deeply transformative experiences for me.
SA: Spirituality is such an important theme throughout the collection. How did your relationship with spirituality change through this experience of writing the book?
FA: I’ve always been a very spiritual person, but I’ve also been very private about what that actually means to me.
One thing I noticed, especially after If They Come for Us, was that people often struggled to understand how queerness and being Muslim could exist together. Sometimes when I spoke about my faith or my spirituality, people seemed to judge it or imply that I wasn’t really Muslim.
Living in the West, you’re often in a position where you feel like you’re constantly defending yourself because Islam isn’t the dominant religion.
Being in Pakistan was different. Because Islam is lived by so many people in so many different ways, there was much more space to see the possibilities of what being Muslim can actually look like.
I was especially struck by the ways regional and Indigenous practices become intertwined with Islam. Different places, different shrines, different traditions — all of these shape people’s spiritual lives in distinct ways. It reminded me that Islam is lived differently depending on where you are and the communities you’re part of.
That felt incredibly beautiful to me because these local traditions are so important. They deserve to continue rather than disappear or be erased.
Seeing people make Islam their own in these everyday ways was something that deeply affected me.
SA: Your work often explores diaspora, home, and belonging, but you also have a very large readership in Pakistan. How do you think Pakistani audiences receive your work?
FA: When I first came to Pakistan, I was honestly surprised by how large the audience was.
When I wrote If They Come for Us, I wondered whether people in Pakistan would connect with it because I write from a diasporic perspective. But I also knew I couldn’t write from anywhere else. That’s who I am. Trying to write from another perspective would feel dishonest.
There’s often this debate about authenticity — about who is “really” from somewhere and who isn’t. Personally, I find those debates a little beside the point.
What it means to be South Asian is incredibly vast. It includes different regions, religions, languages, ethnicities, and histories. It also includes diasporic communities who left for countless different reasons. All of that belongs within what it means to be South Asian today.
As an artist, my responsibility is simply to be honest about what’s in my heart. I have to write from the questions I’m genuinely grappling with and trust that the work will find the people it needs to find.
I’ve been fortunate that readers who aren’t South Asian or Muslim also connect deeply with my work. They’re responding to something human rather than something purely cultural.
When I came to Pakistan, I was genuinely surprised that so many people had been reading my work for years. I had similar experiences in London. I couldn’t have imagined these poems reaching so many different kinds of readers.
I’m incredibly grateful for that.
When I’m writing, though, I’m almost never thinking about an audience. I’m thinking about the truth of a feeling or a poem. Often I’m writing to one particular person or one specific experience. The process is actually very intimate.
SA: So when you sat down to write this book, it wasn’t exactly a conscious decision to write Daughter of the Mountains. It sounds more like the poems arrived, and you eventually realized they belonged together. Is that right?
FA: Yes, absolutely. More than any of my previous books, this collection emerged out of a journey. It was really about a journey of homecoming — returning to my ancestral land and asking what it actually means to be from somewhere.
I’ve always been fascinated by that question because, to me, it isn’t simple. I really envy people who seem completely certain about where they’re from. For me, it’s always been much more complicated.
Even within my own family history, there are so many layers. Someone may have been born on one side of a border, but their parents or grandparents came from somewhere else, and before that there was another place. At some point, a border was drawn and a story was interrupted.
I’m really interested in that complexity. What does it actually mean to belong somewhere when history, migration, and displacement are all part of your inheritance?
The more I think about it, the more I realize that almost everyone carries a version of that story. Sometimes I’ll be sitting in a room full of strangers and think about how every single person there has a history of movement behind them. Whether through migration, colonialism, displacement, or simply generations of family movement, everyone comes from somewhere before where they are now.
I’m continually fascinated by those histories.
I don’t often see South Asian writers fully grappling with those questions — at least not in English-language writing. That doesn’t mean it isn’t happening in Urdu or Punjabi or Bengali or other South Asian languages that I can’t access. But in English, I don’t often see writers moving beyond a surface understanding of what home or belonging might mean.
That’s something I wanted this book to explore more deeply.
SA: When did these poems begin? How long had you been writing them before the collection came together?
FA: The earliest poem in the collection was probably written in 2018 or 2019, so some of the ideas began not long after If They Come for Us. But the majority of the poems were written after I started traveling to Pakistan regularly.
Most of the book really came together during 2023 and 2024.
SA: What made you decide that this was the moment to publish the collection?
FA: I don’t know that it was really a decision. It felt more like the book arrived when it was ready.
Like I said, I was supposed to be working on an entirely different project. The poems completely overtook everything else. They became the only thing I could think about.
When something like that happens, I don’t try to fight it. As an artist, I think you have to trust those moments. You let the work move through you instead of trying to force it into another shape.
I think I’d actually been carrying these ideas for years. I’d been thinking about them since If They Come for Us, but I didn’t yet have the language for them.
When the language finally arrived, it felt incredibly accurate. It finally gave me a way of expressing something I’d been experiencing for a long time but hadn’t yet been able to articulate.
SA: You’ve said before that you care less about genre than about finding the right form for the story you want to tell. Why did poetry become the right form for this particular project?
FA: During those trips to Pakistan, I found myself writing poems that felt almost memoiristic. They were documenting what I was seeing, learning, and feeling.
For me, writing poetry often feels like taking a magnifying glass to a single moment or experience. It requires a particular kind of stillness and attention.
That’s what these poems wanted. They wanted to pause. They wanted to stay with moments rather than move quickly through them.
It felt completely natural.
With If They Come for Us and When We Were Sisters, I was much more interested in experimenting with form. There was a lot more formal play in those books. I was constantly asking how form itself could carry meaning.
This collection didn’t ask that of me.
I wasn’t trying to invent new structures or push against the boundaries of poetry. Instead, the poems wanted simplicity. Once I recognized that, I trusted it rather than trying to force the work into something more formally experimental.
Sometimes the right artistic decision is simply to follow what the work itself is asking for.
SA: One of the things that stood out to me while reading the collection is how much attention it gives to landscape. The mountains, rivers, shrines, and physical spaces don’t simply function as settings — they seem to become participants in the poems. How did you think about landscape while writing the book?
FA: I think one of the biggest things that happened to me while I was in Pakistan was realizing how much place itself carries memory.
There were moments when I would be standing somewhere and thinking, My family stood somewhere near here. My ancestors knew landscapes like this. Even if it wasn’t the exact place, there was something about being physically present that created a relationship I hadn’t experienced before.
I became really interested in what landscapes remember and what they hold. Places continue to exist even after generations of people have passed through them. They witness history in ways that we can’t.
Because of that, the land almost became another character in the book.
I wasn’t simply describing beautiful scenery. I was trying to understand what happens when you enter a landscape that has always existed in your imagination but that you’ve never actually experienced with your own body.
That experience changes something.
SA: There seems to be a tension throughout the collection between inherited memory and lived memory. You’re discovering places that you’ve heard about all your life, but you’re also creating entirely new memories of them. Was that something you were consciously thinking about?
FA: Yes, definitely.
I think inherited memory is really interesting because we often receive stories before we receive experiences. We inherit photographs, family histories, fragments of conversations, recipes, names, languages.
Then, when you finally encounter the place yourself, you realize that the place is completely alive outside those stories.
That doesn’t erase the inherited memories. Instead, the two things begin talking to each other.
I think that’s what happened for me.
There was the Pakistan I had imagined for years, and then there was the Pakistan I actually encountered. Those weren’t always the same place, and I became really interested in what happened in the space between those two versions.
SA: The title of the book, Daughter of the Mountains, repeatedly returns to the landscape of mountains. They seem to become both a symbolic and a physical space for self-reflection. Because you’re Kashmiri, I was wondering how you think about your own Kashmiri identity. Were you able to visit Kashmir during your travels to Pakistan?
FA: One of the difficult things for me is that, because of my family’s history, I actually can’t go to Kashmir.
My mother’s family is from Jammu and Kashmir, and when you apply for an Indian visa, you’re asked whether your parents or grandparents were born or lived there. Because that’s true for my family, I’m effectively unable to visit. Historically, it’s already difficult for people with connections to Pakistan to obtain visas, but it’s particularly difficult for people with ties to Jammu and Kashmir.
So there’s always been this really painful experience of belonging to a place that I can’t physically access.
A lot of the poems in the book contend with that — with the idea of the right to return, and with the possibility that it may never happen in my lifetime. That’s a painful thing to hold. You watch people travel there on holiday, to experience the mountains and the beauty of that landscape, while the people with ancestral connections to that land often can’t go. And for those who remain there, life continues under extraordinary political pressure and state violence.
I traveled to many different places in Pakistan, but Kashmir wasn’t somewhere I could visit.
There’s a poem in the collection, “Apus,” that speaks to this feeling. Being in other mountain ranges — even though they aren’t the mountains of my ancestors—still gave me a profound sense of home. I realized that the mountains still recognized me, even if I couldn’t return to the ones my family came from. I’m still their child.
If, for now, I’m their child from a distance because of borders and state violence, then that’s what this moment requires. But that doesn’t mean the relationship has disappeared.
I think that’s something the book returns to again and again: what it means to lose access to something without losing your connection to it. Distance isn’t necessarily the end of a relationship. Sometimes it simply means holding that relationship until it can be reunited.
Even with Pakistan, I spent years believing I would never return because my father died when I was young. I carried that story for so long, until it changed.
Holding on to hope — that something you believed impossible might one day become possible—is incredibly difficult. It’s a fragile thing to hold, but I think it’s also essential.
So while I’m very aware that I can’t return to Kashmir right now, I still carry hope that one day I will.
