BELONGING UNDER SIEGE: XENOPHOBIA, CULTURAL TRAUMA, AND TESTIMONY IN FATIMAH ASGHAR'S POETRY

This article examines how xenophobia is represented in four poems by the South Asian American Muslim poet Fatimah Asghar: “If They Come for Us,” “Oil,” “Smell Is the Last Memory to Go,” and “america.” It reads racism, marginalization, violence, cultural erasure, and identity conflict as interlocking forms of exclusion and asks how the poems turn the lived experience of immigrant and Muslim communities in the United States into testimony. The analysis draws on trauma theory: Sigmund Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion, Jeffrey C. Alexander’s account of cultural trauma, and Cathy Caruth’s work on narrative and testimony, supported by recent postcolonial revisions of trauma studies. Using a qualitative method of close textual analysis, the article argues that Asghar presents xenophobia not as an isolated act of hostility but as a recurring structure that disrupts memory, language, and belonging across generations. At the same time, her poems claim a collective “we” that resists silence and assimilation. The study adds to scholarship on contemporary diasporic poetry by connecting literary analysis with current evidence on displacement, discrimination, and anti-Muslim bias. Keywords: Xenophobia; cultural trauma; Fatimah Asghar; Muslim diaspora; contemporary poetry; belonging