They wrote the novel out of a place of pain and isolation, but the finished work pays homage to makeshift families and alternative communities. When We Were Sisters is their first novel, but they know orphanhood intimately, having lost both parents before they turned 5 (their mother fled Jammu and Kashmir following Partition violence). Under the inconsistent guardianship of their frequently cruel but occasionally warm uncle, the siblings raise each other as painful and imperfect “sister-mothers.”Īsghar is a poet and screenwriter best known for their poetry collection If They Come for Us (about the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan), co-creating Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls, and recently serving as a writer and co-producer for Ms. He steals their father’s inheritance and their government checks, funneling it all to his two half-white sons in a wealthy suburb. The three are taken in by an uncle so terrifying that his name is redacted. His “coven” of children - the eldest, Noreen, followed by Kausar and Aisha - is plummeted into orphanhood and watches his funeral on VHS. In the opening pages of Fatimah Asghar’s When We Were Sisters, an immigrant father leaves home to get bunk beds for his three children and is murdered in the street. When We Were Sisters tenderly examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, names the perils of being three Muslim American girls alone against the world, and ultimately illustrates how those who’ve lost everything might still make homes in each other.Photo-Illustration: The Cut Photos: Mercedes Zapata, One World at Penguin Random House
The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of her parents as she also charts out her own understanding of gender Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her ‘crybaby’ younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself, on her own terms.Īs Kausar grows up, she must contend with the collision of her private and public worlds, and choose whether to remain in the life of love, sorrow and codependency she’s known or carve out a new path for herself. In this heartrending, lyrical debut work of fiction, Fatimah Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. WINNER OF THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023 LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2022
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