If They Come For Us by Fatimah Asghar
“We’ve had our worth told to us since always: two goats & maybe a nose ring or bracelet.”
Fatimah Asghar’s poetry collection, If They Come for Us, looks discrimination in the face and takes no prisoners. The historically bloody Partition of India serves as the tether to the collection as each individual poem confronts racism, sexism, identity politics, and need for belonging.
The collection muddies the notion of identity and home through its conflicting styles of verse. The play on traditionally accepted poetic forms with untested contemporary verse, parallels the conversation Asghar’s work inspires on traditional definitions of family and home. Not only does she experiment with poetic form, but she also draws from other works and refashions them to her own voice and message.
The seven anchor poems titled “Partition” reveal something about the collection as a whole. Asghar begins this series with a straightforward style- a simple paragraph with no capitalization and short, staccato sentences. There are nods to colonialism, cultural memory and generational memory, or lack thereof. The struggles of an immigrant orphan are on full display, “your father was fluent in four languages. you’re illiterate in the tongues of your father...you’re pakistani until they start throwing acid. you’re muslim until it’s too dangerous. You’re american until the towers fall” (9). The lack of capitalization lends a feeling of instability. I felt the despair of never being accepted. The next “Partition” poem is set up in more traditional stanzas. Each one moves back and forth in chronological date, back and forth between historical information and personal experience. The image of “Bodies spoon[ing] like commas, waiting, linking, waiting, linking”(22) mirrors the interconnected people of the great migration and the overarching idea of partition creating something that was once whole, and even separated, still being linked tangentially.
The next two feel even more personal as they explore the barriers between family members and neighbors. Asghar reveals the fractures existent in the immigrant experience, but also reinforces the belief that even separate, we are still together, ”...all our food, shared & somewhat the same. A different spice here & there, maybe a different name, maybe their bread thicker or our daal more red...belonging, always, to each other.” (43)
There is a turn in the last one. Asghar laid out all the ways of partition leading up to this one, and then gave us what I would consider hope for new life from the cracks. “I bury the stories of my dead at the tree’s base/ to dig up when winter ends” (89). Eventually winter will end, and she will break the soil of her past to allow her future to be born. The motif of division threading through the poems pulled me in and felt like Asghar was partitioning herself for her readers, exposing the wounds, the cracks, revealing the trauma, whether her own or in the blood of her ancestors to give voice to cultural memory and allow a space for healing.
The collection ends with the title poem which again eschews form. No end punctuation, no commas. Each line enjambs to the next, referencing the poet’s plurality, “...a dance of strangers in my blood...I can’t be lost when I see you my compass is brown, gold & blood” (99). The speaker also repeats the clarion call, “I claim my people,” then lists different versions of South Asian people, visions of what they may be doing, from taking the subway to dropping to knees in prayer on the street. She then asserts “my country is made in my people’s image if they come for you they come for me too...I see you map my sky…& I follow” (100). The speaker recognizes even though she was raised an orphan, she has a family.
In this final poem, she also answers the question she posed to herself in an earlier poem. The word “Ghareeb” is defined underneath the title, “Meaning: stranger, one without a home and thus, deserving of pity. Also: westerner.” At the end of the poem, Asghar asks, “how many poems must you write to convince yourself you have a family?” (71) and the answer, at least for this collection is (44.)
In the end I was brought back to the beginning. Asghar dedicated her collection to, “my family, blood and not.” The orphan found her family.
If They Come For Us
by Fatimah Asghar
2018. 130 pages
About Carrie Honaker
Carrie Honaker is a writer currently based in Panama City Beach, Florida. She studied Literature at Florida State University, but has worn many hats including restaurateur and teacher. Carrie is a voracious reader and kitchen sorcery addict who found her inner writer at the Blue Ridge Writing Project in 2010. Most days you can find her plowing through a book, writing or dabbling with a new recipe.
Carrie’s work has appeared in ALCA Lines, Virginia English Journal, and Digital Is. She also regularly writes about experiences in the classroom, moments in the kitchen, and all things travel & restaurants on her site, StrawbabiesandChocolateBeer.com. Currently, she is revising her foodoir about life growing up on a farm in Vermont interspersed with family recipes. You can find her on Twitter: @writeonhonaker, Instagram: @corkdorkva, on Goodreads & Trip Advisor.
