Chicago Sun-Times

Brown girls make it

A mostly female cast and crew come together to tell the story of the friendship between Fatimah Asghar and Jamila Woods in the Chicago- based webseries Brown Girls.

- BY BRIANNA WELLEN

A mostly female cast and crew come together to tell the story of the friendship between Fatimah Asghar and Jamila Woods in the Chicago- based webseries Brown Girls.

When the trailer for Brown Girls, a new Chicago- based webseries, was released this past November, more than 20,000 people watched it over the course of a month. Writers at sites like Autostradd­le, Black Nerd Problems, and Vibe were calling it their new favorite webseries of 2017 before the first full episode was even completed. A short preview of the show shared on NowThis’s Facebook page in December currently has more than two million views. So what is it about the story, written by Fatimah Asghar, that’s causing such a stir?

For one, it’s not a common narrative. The series focuses on the friendship between Leila ( Nabila Hossain), a queer South Asian writer, and Patricia ( Sonia Denis), a black musician— it’s partially based on the real- life relationsh­ip between Asghar, 27, and her best friend, musician Jamila Woods, also 27. During the past year Woods’s career as a singer- songwriter has blown up, thanks to the release of her acclaimed debut album, Heavn, and her collaborat­ion with Chance the Rapper on Coloring

Book’s “Blessings.” Asghar has had her work published in journals like Poetry magazine and Academy of American Poets, and released the chapbook After ( Yes Yes Books) in 2015. But before all that, they were just two twentysome­thing artists in Chicago struggling with relationsh­ips, finances, family expectatio­ns, and identity issues.

“There’s not a lot of stories that put two women of color at the forefront that are of different races,” Asghar says. “Usually when women of color of different racial background­s are put in media they’re at odds with each other like, ‘ Oh, that person took my man,’ or ‘ Oh, that person took my job.’ And I don’t like that, because that’s just not true to my experience in my communitie­s.”

To accurately depict the story, director Sam Bailey assembled a crew of people of color, queer people, and women, some with direct personal connection­s to Asghar and Woods— for example, Hossain was childhood friends with Asghar and her sisters. With a crowdfunde­d budget of $ 20,000, the team shot the series entirely in Pilsen, highlighti­ng the real places where Asghar and Woods spent their time while living in the neighborho­od together. The result is an authentic and funny look at a meaningful friendship between two women. The excitement surroundin­g the seven- episode season’s debut has generated release parties in at least a dozen cities around the world, including London, New York, and Asghar’s family’s hometown of Lahore, Pakistan.

“That’s such an important city to my family,” Asghar says. “To see them reach out [ like that], I was bawling, because that’s incredible— these places that kind of mean something to you, in a family lineage of immigratio­n, are responding.”

ASGHAR’S PARENTS MOVED from Lahore to Cambridge, Massachuse­tts, in the mid- 80s, but her father died of a heart attack and her mother died from cancer when she was five. She and her sisters were brought up by a collection of aunts, uncles, and neighbors in Cambridge, then a vibrant community f ull of i mmigrants. While growing up Asghar struggled with her Muslim culture, both as it related to how others saw her post- 9/ 11 and how it affected her own thoughts about her ethnicity, sexuality, and burgeoning queerness. It wasn’t until college— the same time she met Woods— when she pursued writing and the arts seriously, that she started coming to terms with her identity.

“Poetry helped me understand my race,” Asghar says. “It helped me understand things about being an orphan. It helped me understand these things that have been deep wells of pain that I had bottled up and then was like, ‘ I don’t want to tell people that, I don’t want people to know this about me because then they’re going to pity me or think badly of me.’ Being able to say, ‘ No, there’s a lot of strength in these things, this is who I am,’ that would not have happened for me without poetry or without art.”

Asghar and Woods met as freshmen at Brown University in 2007 after connecting on Facebook through a shared interest in poetry. They instantly hit it off, attending on- campus events together, studying together, and eventually moving in together. While living with two other college friends in Providence, they built a meaningful support system. After grad-

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 ?? MEGAN LEE MILLER; GREG STEPHEN REIGH ?? Key grip Mawie Talion, cinematogr­apher Hannah Welever, assistant director Sarah Coakley, and director/ producer Sam Bailey
MEGAN LEE MILLER; GREG STEPHEN REIGH Key grip Mawie Talion, cinematogr­apher Hannah Welever, assistant director Sarah Coakley, and director/ producer Sam Bailey

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