Of Poems and Identity: Fatimah Asghar's 'If They Come for Us' is worth reading

It's highly unfair of me to attempt to review poetry, because poetry is not my domain. I do not read enough of it to be able to make a proper judgement call, and most of my response to poetry is a very superficial, surface-level interaction that doesn't seem to do the art form justice, given how passionately other people feel about it.

A short review will, thus, have to suffice. I liked most of the poems. I loved the book cover. I also loved the fact that important life-changing events like the APS terrorist attack on school children, a shocking and deeply traumatic moment in the life of Pakistanis everywhere, made an appearance here. It felt like being seen, a young artist talking about moments taken from my own life, moments that aren't far in the past but are part of my recent present.

From the moment our babies are born
are we meant to lower them into the ground?
To dress them in white? They send flowers
before guns, thorns plucked from stem.
Every year I manage to live on this earth
I collect more questions than answers.

Even when the distant past hit, the feeling of being relevant carried through. I loved how partition was threaded through the entire volume, just the way it is omnipresent in our lives today. One page of text, titled 'Partition', no line breaks and no paragraphs, was probably my favourite part of the whole collection.

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. you’re indian until they draw a border through punjab. until the british captains spit paki as they sip your chai, add so much foam you can’t taste home. you’re seraiki until your mouth fills with english. you’re pakistani until your classmates ask what that is. then you’re indian again. or some kind of spanish. you speak a language until you don’t. until you only recognize it between your auntie’s lips. your father was fluent in four languages. you’re illiterate in the tongues of your father. your grandfather wrote persian poetry on glasses. maybe. you can’t remember. you made it up. someone lied. you’re a daughter until they bury your mother. until you’re not invited to your father’s funeral. you’re a virgin until you get too drunk. you’re muslim until you’re not a virgin. you’re pakistani until they start throwing acid. you’re muslim until it’s too dangerous. you’re safe until you’re alone. you’re american until the towers fall. until there’s a border on your back.

Even though I could not relate to a significant portion of the issues that Fatimah explores, given that it talks of a very specific immigrant experience of having brown skin among white people, it still felt raw and powerful in the way only certain lived experiences can. Not only the racism, but the poems on sexuality, or on loss of homelands, on losing languages and cultures, on history and memory and all the things that tie in to the experience of leaving one piece of land behind to move to another, they all feature in one way or another.

I whisper my country my country my country
& my hands stay empty.
what is land but land? a camp
but a camp? sanctuary
but another grave? I am an architect.
I permission everything
into something new.
I build & build
& someone takes it away.

Of course, there were some parts where I got bored and wanted it to end, but that was inevitable. As always, whatever I say about any poetry collection should be taken with a grain of salt. If some things are subjective, there is no greater proof of it than in my response to this act of story telling, which clearly moves some to tears while evoking in me no more than an appreciation of the odd sentence or paragraph here and there.

It was good. You should read it. That's all I can say.