The Precarity of Hope in Fatimah Asghar’s “I Don’t Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We’ve Done to the Earth”

Abstract

Fatimah Asghar’s poem titled “I Don’t Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We’ve Done to the Earth”(2019)offers a sombre reflection on negotiating with hope at a time of grave environmental precarity as well as cultural insecurity in an increasingly volatile society fraught with racial tension and violence. Asghar, a contemporary American poet of Muslim Indo-Pakidtani origin, highlights how the individual subject has to encounter multiple facets of vulnerability at the same time through the poem. This brief critical analysis of“I Don’t Know...” examines how the poem, garbed in language alluding to nature’s beauty and bounty, hints at the possibility of a dark, uncertain, and uninhabitable future. This essay also explores how the poem brings the focus back on the individual--his/her lives, memories, and experiences--to move away from the impersonality and objectivity in the familiar rhetoric around climate change and instead foreground an intimate and personal perception of the looming threat.

DOI - https://doi.org/10.65525/SVUP.9788199392090.2025.53-56.