I remember the loneliness well. Existing in the space between being too Haitian to be American and too American to be Haitian. The multiple tongues learned to maneuver the sacred spaces of adolescence. If They Come for Us is concerned with the collected histories of a family: blood and not. Girls following Auntie’s law because they knew better than to question it. Consciously avoiding the partitions in the asphalt as not to be the cause of mother’s fury. A new country and its broken promises. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar weaves together the history of her people through the stories told to her by her uncle and the resonances of the Partition on her subjects.
If They Come for Us features seven poems entitled “Partition.” Each poem explores various facets of the speaker’s identity and relationship to kin and country. Contextually, Partition is in reference to the division of British India in 1947:
At least 14 million people were forced into migration as they
fled the ethnic cleansing and retributive genocides that con-
summed South Asia during the India/Pakistan Partition, which
led to India’s and East and West Pakistan’s independence
from colonial Britain. An estimated 1 to 2 million people died
during the months encompassing Partition. An estimated
75,000 to 100,000 women were abducted and raped. Partition
remains one of the largest forced migrations in human his-
tory; its effects and divisions echo to this day.
We get ripples of that echo throughout these poems as the speaker grapples with the multigenerational trauma caused by Partition. In the first “Partition”, the speaker states “you’re kashmiri until they burn your home. take your orchards. stake a/different flag. until no one remembers the road that brings you back.” The speaker reaches for different identities until “its too dangerous.” Like the speaker, I struggled with my own identity. I went from identifying as American, to Haitian, to Black American, to African American of Haitian Descent, to Other, to Haitian American. When my parents migrated to America, they left their families, and a country only a few years removed from the repression of the Duvalier regime. Throughout the course of my life, I’ve been given bits of their life in Haiti, sparingly. It only recently dawned on me that my parents grew up in the thick of the Duvalier years, and I often wonder if I will ever get their full story.
Each of the “Partition” poems shows us the degrees of separation between kin and neighbors. “Allah makes a barrier between me & my mom. /Ullu makes a barrier between me & my aunt.” The speaker creates a family history that is filled with partitions. “what the neighbors look like in their differences/ “belonging, belonging, always, to each other.”” Asghar is capturing her experiences as a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America: “I pluck my ancestors eyes/from their faces/& fasten them to mine.” The absence of parents. Of family. Of home country. You begin to collect kin where you can find them. Blood and not. Asghar is in conversation with the part of herself that continues to search for this connection. A connection so many first- and second-generation immigrants like myself yearn for when separated from home country. In the second to last “Partition” to appear in the collection, Asghar writes:
I want to believe in rebirth
that what comes from death is life, but I have blood
from someone’s father’s father on my hands
& no memory of who died for me to be here.
One of the beautiful things Asghar explores and accomplishes in this collection is experimental forms. We get a film treatment, chart, floor plan, fill-in-the-blank, bingo, and cross word puzzle (among other poems that experiment with form within the same piece.) Each form use is purposeful and adds another layer of understanding to the piece. We see the power in Asghar’s form choice in the poem “Script for Child Services: A Floor Plan.” “Bedroom One” introduces us to a speaker that is deeply connected to two other people being “raised by wolves.” Within the box/room they are in, they protect each other: “No one could hurt us.” “Bedroom Two” gives us a speaker rehearsing a script. This speaker is slowly erasing the things they once held as truths. In “Hallway” the speaker is repenting for the lies they told: “I have always been/ wild. Still, I lie. My/ mistakes hang/ like a crescent bright/ in the sky.” Behind the floor plan we get a repeated script: “Repeat after me: he is not a monster. Nothing happened. She isn’t feeling well right now. That’s why/ she called.” In each room of the floorplan, Asghar’s speaker takes on a different tone which depends heavily on who else is in the room. As we move through the rooms, we get closer and closer to covering up what is happening inside.
Together these forms work well in bringing the reader into the mind of the speaker. “Microaggression Bingo” is an example of how Asghar connects other Brown and Black girls into her sphere of influence. Psychology Today defines microaggressions as “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.” I found myself marking the spots that I could personally identify with like “Someone misspells/ both your first & last/ name in an email.” I thought about all the Brown and Black girls that could get bingo in every direction. Microaggressions seem small and unimportant to the people that aren’t affected. People forget that once we leave our homes, we are subjected to comments that make us hyperaware of our marginalized status. “Don’t Leave/ Your House/ For a Day/ – / Safe.”
While reading If They Come for Us, I thought a lot about my mother and the things I have yet to learn about her. When my parents migrated to America from Haiti, they left everyone they knew behind. Parents, siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews, friends and childhood enemies. They left their lives and came to this country to build new ones. For them, the going back is always hardest. Funerals, weddings, business, etc. Every time they go, there’s a purpose. The life they have in America doesn’t offer the awards of leisure that their younger selves thought they would have at their age.
I thought about my mother a lot while reading these pages because Asghar is also in conversation with and thinking about her own. My mother’s known loss her entire life, losing her older sister at a young age. But coming to America took away my mother’s ability to bury her mother. It took away her ability to bury her father. It took away the possibility for my siblings and I to know her parents as intimately as she did. Most of my life was spent understanding my mother with the words she didn’t use. I think about the things she expected her mother to teach me as a young girl. The oil she would soak my hair with for it grow. The same oil she would rub into my skin, so it was soft. Always.
I understand my mother’s lose every time I imagine making rice without her there to tell me there’s too much water. Too much salt. “Kal” is the poem that I kept going back to. Asghar is in deep conversation with Allah on the passing of her mother. “If yesterday & tomorrow are the same/ pluck the flower of my mother’s body//from the soil. Kal means I’m in the crib, /eyelashes wet as she looks over me.” I’ve always wondered if given the chance, would my mother have ever left Haiti. I wonder if she would have taken a trip to Haiti after I was born so her mother could see my face. See my brother’s face. Even if only once. I wonder if she would have asked her mother to help her pick my name.
On the inner sleeve of Asghar’s debut collection, it states:
These poems at once bear anguish, joy,
vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring
the many facets of violence: how it persists within
us, how it is inherited across generations, and how
it manifests itself in our relationships.
Some of the defining pieces of this collection for me are pieces like “When the Orders Came”: “I build safety inside you/ & wake in cuffs. /I’m all mouth. every morning// I whisper my country my country my country/ & my hands stay empty.” I felt those words. Younger me would have repeated those words over and over again. Wanting to belong in a “land that makes my other language strange on my tongue,” like Asghar writes in “Land Where My Father Died.” “How We Left: Film Treatment”, is a love letter of sorts to the man that Asghar’s speaker holds responsible for her family’s safety during Partition. The entire poem encircles the events leading up to the family’s migration and looks in on the history from different angles. “Haram” shows the sacred ritual among sisters at the demand of their Auntie. We see who the speaker is, in relation to the women surrounding her. In contrast, “National Geographic” is an imaginative exploration of who the speaker could have been. Possibly a speaker still living in her mother and father’s home land. Or as the woman she once thought she was supposed to be. In “Oil”, “The kids at school ask me where I’m from & I have no answer. // I’m a silent girl, a rig ready to blow.” The speaker grapples about where home is, or where it’s supposed to be. There’s a disconnect between home land and mother land. The speaker in “Ghareeb” is struggling with the disconnect between kin: “on visits back your english sticks to everything. /your own auntie calls you ghareeb. stranger//to your family’s house, you: runaway dog turned wild.”; “how many poems must you write to convince yourself/you have a family? everyone leaves & you end up the stranger.” Once our parents leave their home and migrate to America, we are estranged from the land that is most ours. We are estranged from the customs our kin hold dear, and we are always fighting to keep up.
If They Come for Us quickly became a necessary part of my survival. Asghar’s debut collection is intimate, soulful, imaginative, and invites other lonely artists into its arms, and I needed that. Although Asghar and I are women with differing complex identities, we are both still searching for family: blood and not. We are creating our own history through the bits gathered from the mouths of uncles and aunties. Kin that knew our parents before they knew themselves. We are connected to a land where we are strangers. To the kin our parents left behind that see us as strangers. Experiencing this collection intensified my own yearning for belonging. My need to be grounded in a country that wants me.
