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WORK TITLE: If They Come for Us
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WEBSITE: https://www.fatimahasghar.com/
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PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer. Creator of REFLEKS, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2011.
MEMBER:Dark Noise Collective.
AWARDS:Fulbright scholar; Kundiman fellow; Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, the Poetry Foundation, 2017.
WRITINGS
Author of the chapbook After, Yes Yes Books, 2015. Contributor to journals, including Poetry Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, the Margins, the Offing, and Academy of American Poets. Writer and co-creator of Brown Girls web series.
SIDELIGHTS
Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, as well as a screenwriter, educator, and performer. A contributor to journals, she is also the author of the chapbook After. While on a Fulbright scholarship studying theater in post-genocidal countries, she created REFLEKS, a spoken word poetry group in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She also is a writer for and co-creator of the web series Brown Girls, which focuses on friendships among women of color. Profiled on various media outlets, including periodicals, websites, television, and radio, Asghar has appeared on Forbes magazine’s “30 under 30” list. “I … think that my art bends toward social justice, and there’s a lot that I care about in terms of my artwork, in terms of making a more just society,” Asghar told Publishers Weekly contributor Vanessa Willoughby.
In her debut book of poetry, If They Come for Us, Asghar, who was orphaned as child, discusses coming of age and issues of sexuality and race, especially in terms of having neither a mother or father to help guide her. Asghar draws from her experiences living in America and being a Pakistani Muslim as she examines the difficulty of fixing on a cohesive identity. “The speaker of these poems appears at once old and incredibly new, a dichotomy that is upheld as the narrative jumps from past to present and all over the last century,” noted Adroit Journal website contributor Raye Hendrix.
Asghar begins If They Come for Us with a brief prose explanation of the India/Pakistan Partition that took place in 1947 when British India was divided into India and Pakistan. Asghar writes that the partition forced at least fourteen million people to migrate to across borders as they sought to avoid ethnic cleansing and genocide. In addition to one to two million people dying, approximately 70,000-100,000 women were abducted and raped in the months following the partition. “Multiple poems, all titled “Partition,” navigate not only the literal and historical meaning of the Partition, but also the divisions of the home, of gender, family—and, at times, how those divisions might be reconciled, if possible,” noted Adroit Journal website contributor Hendrix. For example, in one of the poem’s titled “Partition,” Asghar writes about partitioning an apartment in two with the speaker’s family on one side and the Auntie on the other. Asghar writes: “Allah made a barrier between me & my mom / Ullu makes a barrier between me & my aunt.”
The collection’s opening poem, “For Peshawar,” lays the foundation for many of the themes addressed in the collection’s poems, especially the ideas of ongoing destruction and death. Written after the 2014 Pakistan school attack by the Taliban, the poem begins: “From the moment our babies are born / are we meant to lower them into the ground?” Asghar goes on to write: “Every year I manage to live on this earth / I collect more questions than answers.”
Asghar also writes about the experience of living in America while being a women of color and Middle-Eastern descent. “Microaggression Bingo” discusses the various small aggressions the speaker faces daily. Presented within the physical image of a bingo board, the poem features squares revaling both visual and verbal aggressions via “daily stereotyped soundbytes and interactions,” as noted by Aerogram website contributor Aditya Desai. In many poems Asghar explores her own feelings of not belonging in terms of race, heritage, gender identity, and sexuality. In the poem titled “Other Body” Asghar writes about her gender identity and a dream she has concerning sex and in which she has a penis. The poem also laments not having a mother figure to turn to for guidance and the feeling of not belonging even at home.
“Asghar’s collection reveals a sense of strength and hope found in identity and cultural history,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. Chicago Reader Online contributor Devlyn Camp remarked: “If They Come for Us explores what borders mean to humanity, not just what they represent to a nation’s leaders, but also how a family is influenced by the lines that have been drawn.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June 1, 2018, Janet St. John, review of If They Come for Us: Poems, p. 14.
Publishers Weekly, April 16, 2018, review of If They Come for Us, p. 68; May 21, 2018, Vanessa Willoughby, “Blood Ties: PW Talks with Fatimah Asghar,” p. 42.
ONLINE
Adroit Journal, http://www.theadroitjournal.org/ (July 27, 2018),Raye Hendrix, “Like a Knife: A rRview of Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us.”
Aerogram, http://theaerogram.com/ (August 7, 2018), Aditya Desai, “If They Come For Us: Fatimah Asghar’s Poetry Explores History & Intimacy of Partition.”
Chicago Reader Online, https://www.chicagoreader.com/ (August 7, 2018), Devlyn Camp, “Fatimah Asghar’s First Collection of Poetry, If They Come for Us, Is a Warning about the Consequences of Ignoring History.”
Fatimah Asghar website, https://www.fatimahasghar.com (August 28, 2018).
About
Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, screenwriter, educator and performer. Her work has appeared in many journals, including POETRY Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets and many others. Her work has been featured on new outlets like PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In 2011 she created a spoken word poetry group in Bosnia and Herzegovina called REFLEKS while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-genocidal countries. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook After came out on Yes Yes Books fall 2015. She is the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-Nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. In 2017 she was awarded the Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Her debut book of poems, Today We’re American, is forthcoming on One World/ Random House.
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Print Marked Items
Blood Ties: PW TALKS WITH
FATIMAH ASGHAR
Vanessa Willoughby
Publishers Weekly.
265.21 (May 21, 2018): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Asghar, a poet and the screenwriter of the web series Brown Girls, examines identity, trauma, and violence
in her debut, If They Come for Us (One World, Aug).
Being concerned with issues of justice, do you consider your art a form of activism?
I don't think I consider myself an activist, because I have a lot of respect for people whose lives are driven
by organization around political issues. But I do think that my art bends toward social justice, and there's a
lot that I care about in terms of my artwork, in terms of making a more just society. I think it is really
important for artists to consider the world that they want to live in when they're creating, to make their art
fit that world and be that world, rather than recreate the same power structures that they see around them.
How does being a woman of color affect your view of being an American? There are so many ways in
which people try to eliminate your humanity. In the book, I think about statehood, nationality, sexuality,
gender, race, and religion--the way we construct identities and then realize that those identities are not
enough to explain who we are. I think of identity as a way toward freedom, so when I think of the term
"woman of color," I feel a lot of joy, and that's something I have to be active about. In an America
dominated by white supremacy, it's really easy to internalize self-hate as a woman of color. But women of
color are making really amazing art and are really amazing activists; I feel a lot of pride and happiness
around being a woman of color in America, even though it can be really hard to deal with.
Do you think the generational trauma that many of your poems deal with is inescapable?
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I don't know a lot about generational trauma except for what I've observed and experienced, but I don't
think there's a lot of dialogue around it, so we end up repeating the same mistakes. There's no real way to
publicly rcckon with what it means to have generational trauma, about the ways that we could be publicly
having dialogues and actually healing versus being in a rush to get rid of something that we don't fully
understand. And not just deal with it on an individual basis but as a nation and as a society so that we're in a
better place to heal together.
Were there other concerns you had while constructing the book?
I was thinking a lot about what it means to be responsible to different people and to those people that I
know as family, and to my people as a whole. In dealing with a historical topic like partition [of India and
Pakistan], there's a lot of pain and trauma. It's complicated; I want to talk about partition and specific things
that happened in my family, but I also don't want to further divide South Asian people and different
religions. I also thought about what it meant to write about violence that I didn't experience but members of
my community and family had. It was important to end the book with an anthem of solidarity and
protection.
--Vanessa Willoughby
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Willoughby, Vanessa. "Blood Ties: PW TALKS WITH FATIMAH ASGHAR." Publishers Weekly, 21 May
2018, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541012569/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4eea144c. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541012569
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If They Come for Us
Publishers Weekly.
265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p68.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* If They Come for Us
Fatimah Asghar. One World, $16 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-525-50978-3
In this awe-inspiring debut, Asghar, writer of the Emmy-nominated web series "Brown Girls," explores the
painful, sometimes psychologically debilitating journey of establishing her identity as a queer brown
woman within the confines of white America. For Asghar, home is to be found in a people's collective
memory, and throughout she looks at otherness through the lens of generational trauma. The collection's
opening images reflect legacies of destruction and death. In "For Peshawar," Asghar writes, "My uncle gifts
me his earliest memory:/ a parking lot full of corpses." Her background in the cinematic arts shows in the
form of such poems as "How We Left: Film Treatment." There, while grappling with an identity formed by
personal and cultural divisions, the speaker confesses, "I love a man who saved my family by stealing our
home./1 want a land that doesn't want me." Gendered violence also undergoes scrutiny, with Asghar's
speaker asking, "what do I do with the boy/ who snuck his way inside/ me on my childhood playground?"
Honest, personal, and intimate without being insular or myopic, Asghar's collection reveals a sense of
strength and hope found in identity and cultural history: "our names this country's wood/ for the fire my
people my people/ the long years we've survived the long/ years yet to come." (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"If They Come for Us." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 68. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532693/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0c64edad.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532693
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If They Come for Us
Janet St. John
Booklist.
114.19-20 (June 1, 2018): p14.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
If They Come for Us. By Fatimah Asghar. June 2018. 128p. Random/One World, paper, $16
(9780525509783); e-book (9780525509790). 811.
Performer, educator, and writer for the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls, Asghar presents a debut
poetry collection showcasing both a fierce and tender new voice. The poems, largely based on the
experience of living in America as a Pakistani Muslim, reflect Asghar's keen perceptions about the search
for, and inability to firmly fix upon, one true identity. In several powerful poems titled "Partition," after the
division of independent India and Pakistan along religious lines, Asghar explores family and cultural
histories; how this split uprooted more than 14 million people and led to bloodshed; and patterns of
discrimination, political failing, and violence. As Asghar traces the threads of her experiences, she slowly
unfurls the larger fabric of her heritage and, in doing so, honors all who have been pushed aside, divided
from country and culture, misrepresented, and misunderstood. Through simultaneously lyrical and frank
poems like "Kai," "Ghareeb," and "Halal," Asghar allows poignant contradictions to rise to the surface, like
a lotus reaching through mud and murky water to beautifully bloom. --Janet St. John
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
St. John, Janet. "If They Come for Us." Booklist, 1 June 2018, p. 14. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546287408/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=40165434.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A546287408
LIKE A KNIFE: A REVIEW OF FATIMAH ASGHAR'S IF THEY COME FOR US /JULY 27, 2018
BY RAYE HENDRIX
If They Come For Us , by Fatimah Asghar (One World/Penguin Random House, 2018).
If They Come For Us, by Fatimah Asghar (One World/Penguin Random House, 2018).
The experience of reading Fatimah Asghar’s debut book of poems, If They Come For Us, is one of being gripped by the shoulders and shaken awake; of having your eyelids pinned open and unable to blink. If They Come For Us is a navigation of home and family, religion and sexuality, history and love. The speaker of these poems appears at once old and incredibly new, a dichotomy that is upheld as the narrative jumps from past to present and all over the last century. And yet, even when we’re told some of these memories and experiences are not the the speaker’s, they still are, somehow. A homeland, even one never seen, sticks in her blood; the trauma endured by her ancestors lives within her DNA. The cultural memory is lodged in the speaker like a knife—one that she may not be able to remove, but one that she could choose not to twist. But twist she does, and by doing so, opens herself to everything, from painful truths to the kindness of strangers. The cultural memory that lives in the speaker’s body is inescapable, but rather than run from it, she faces it boldly, writes it down, and shares it. In these poems, Asghar invites us to stare into the wound and—hopefully—learn from it.
Asghar’s book opens with invocations of history. Epigraphs from Korean-American poet Suji Kwock Kim and Rajinder Singh, a survivor of the India/Pakistan Partition, and an explanation of the Partition prepare us for the painful, but necessary, poems to come. (The Partition was the division of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947, which, Asghar writes, resulted in the forced migration of at least 14 million people as they fled genocide and ethnic cleansing. It’s estimated that 1-2 million people died and 75-100,000 women were abducted and raped in the ensuing months.) Multiple poems, all titled “Partition,” navigate not only the literal and historical meaning of the Partition, but also the divisions of the home, of gender, family—and, at times, how those divisions might be reconciled, if possible.
The book’s opening poem, “For Peshawar,” immediately draws the reader into the lasting conflict and fear with an epigraph that reads, “December 16, 2014 / Before attacking schools in Pakistan, the Taliban sends kafan, / a white cloth that marks Muslim burials, as a form of psychological trauma.” Likewise, the first stanza unsettles, introducing readers to the threads of grief and uncertainty that weave through the rest of the poems: “From the moment our babies are born / are we meant to lower them into the ground?” More than grief, though, this poem, and the poems that follow, drive the narrative into questions of home: Can a place be home if the people who live there, as “For Peshawar” questions, are meant to bury their children? What is home if it’s a place you’ve never been to and can’t touch? And what is home if the place where you are—both in public and in private—rejects critical pieces of who you are?
In America, the place that is ostensibly “home,” the speaker faces that rejection both in her family life and in society at large. In the poem “Microaggression Bingo,” Asghar uses the physical image of a bingo board to highlight the frequency of those microaggressions the speaker faces on a daily basis. Examples include both visual and verbal instances, like the first square, which reads, “White girl wearing a bindi at music festival,” and another on the bottom row where an unnamed speaker says, “I love hanging out with your family. It always feels so authentic!” Readers are also given a glimpse into the frequency of these occurrences via the text of the middle square, which reads: “Don’t Leave Your House For A Day – Safe.” In the same vein, the poem “Oil” walks the reader through the speaker’s experience as a young Pakistani Muslim woman in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. She writes of her heritage, “All the people I could be are dangerous.” The speaker, whose parents have passed away, learns of her heritage from her relatives, who are “not-blood but could be,” further muddying notions of home, or where she truly belongs—often, this results in the idea that she doesn’t truly belong anywhere.
The speaker’s feeling of un-belonging continues even at home, as she comes of age without the guidance of a mother and father. This is true not only of race and heritage, but also of gender identity and sexuality, and many poems attempt to navigate those complexities—in terms of a relationship with the self and a relationship with religion. In “Other Body,” Asghar writes, “In my sex dreams a penis / swings between my legs,” and mentions how her moustache grew longer than anyone else’s in her class at school. She refers to herself, not unlovingly, as a “boy-girl.” Towards the center of the poem, that desire for a guiding maternal figure enters with the lines, “Mother, where are you? How would / you have taught me to be a woman? / A man?” And again, in “The Last Summer of Innocence,” questions of the role of the body, and of gender norms, resurface. In the same poem, the speaker’s sister defies Islamic law by shaving her arms, and Asghar writes in response, “Haram, I hissed, but too wanted to be bare / armed & smooth, skin gentle & worthy / of touch.” That is, until the sister’s body betrays her with an ingrown hair that lands her in the hospital. These poems return to the question of what “home” means, asking what it is to be in a body that doesn’t always feel like a safe place.
If They Come For Us gives readers lyrically beautiful but painfully true glimpses into a world we may not be familiar with and asks us to reckon with our place in it—whether that’s a place of commiseration, understanding, or of recognizing our own hand in upholding power structures that thrive off racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. But as important as those revelations and experiences are, the feeling I’m left with after reading through these difficult but necessary poems is one of optimism. If the speaker, who comes from a lineage of heartache and violence, and who lives through her own kinds of violence, can still look at this country that “has failed every immigrant to enter its harbor” and find kindness in the cracks, how can we not too have hope for a better, more inclusive, kinder future? Asghar’s book is many things: defiant, subversive, grief-stricken, angry—but it’s also full of things like bravery, friendship, family, and love. Amid the hurt and darkness that exists in this world, Asghar’s poems prove that hope is out there, if only we have the courage to look for it.
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Raye Hendrix is a poet from Alabama who loves cats, crystals, and classic rock. Raye is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she serves as the Web Editor for Bat City Review. Raye was a finalist for the 2018 Keene Prize for Literature and received honorable mentions for poetry from both Southern Humanities Review’s Witness Poetry Prize (2014) and AWP’s Intro Journals Project (2015). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and elsewhere.
‘If They Come For Us’: Fatimah Asghar’s Poetry Explores History & Intimacy of Partition
by Aditya Desai August 7, 2018
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(One World/ Random House)
The dedication to Fatimah Asghar’s much-awaited poetry collection If They Come For Us reads, “my family, blood or not.” Over the course of the book, which spans the years since the Partition of Pakistan and India through our current age of Islamophobia and cultural hybridity, we revisit that very simple premise — who is the eponymous “Us”? Who is the “They”? Why must those delineations, those partitions, be made at all?
The speaker of these poems straddles separated spheres, identifying with one but claimed by another. That might come off as just this reviewer’s fancy way of an East versus West cliché, but this is a work less interested in political peacocking than it is in reclaiming the intimate, amidst the wash of history.
“This is a work less interested in political peacocking than it is in reclaiming the intimate, amidst the wash of history.”
The very first poem, “For Peshawar” after the 2014 Pakistan school attack, lays out many of the recurring themes that weave through the collection: the use of gold and red, the focus on the simple delights, the line breaks that fracture their enjoyment. “I wish them a mundane life,” Asghar reflects, imagining what could have been instead of what was:
Loneliness in a bookstore. Gold chapals.
Red kurtas. Walking home, sun
at their backs. Searching the street
for a missing glove. Nothing glorious.
A life. Alive. I Promise.
These external traumas are rendered personal through Asghar’s being, “not an over there but a memory lurking/in our blood, waiting to rise.” Her poems lace a vicious thread across times and places to show that the violence is not just cyclical, but often redundant, as continued in the following poem “Kal”, an ode to “where yesterday & tomorrow/are the same word. Kal.”
When reconnecting with the land, the fracture is made bare, such as the opening lines from “Ghareeb”:
on visits back your english sticks to everything.
your own aunties calls you ghareeb. stranger
in your family’s house, you: runaway dog turned wild.
your little cousin pops gum & wears bras now: a stranger.
black grass swaying in the field, glint of gold in her nose.
they say it so often, it must be your name, stranger.
Throughout the book are seven poems titled “Partition,” which signify the various borders: not only of time and place but also between the speaker’s self and body, her identity and the world that refuses to know it; between the blood kin she’s lost, and the family that has filled their gap.
“Throughout the book are seven poems titled ‘Partition,’ which signify the various borders…”
Asghar’s poetry is a space for these to live out in simultaneity, so that the present is given meaning and the past is given purpose, as shown in the second “Partition”:
freedom spat between every paan
-stained mouth as the colonizers leave
1947: summer, in a Bihari marketplace
there’s nothing but sag & edible flowers.
lines of people crowd the center
their hands: empty
—
1993: summer, in New York City
I am four, sitting in a patch of grass
by Pathmark
an aunt teaches me how to tell
an edible flower
from a poisonous one
We see, the immigrant family trying to find ways to adapt their sense of home into the resources that America offers, like the sauce-less, cheese-less pizza crust used as naan in “Portrait of my Father, Alive,” (the loss of Asghar’s parents are a haunting spectre over the work) or a night out for an American dinner in “Old Country,” eerily echoing 1947:
& dyed his hair black every two weeks
so we couldn’t tell how old he was. We marched
single file towards the gigantic red lettering
across the gravel parking lot to announce
our arrival…
The image of red trickles throughout, pooling in moments of celebration or commemoration, but always a stark reminder of how colonization shaped the poet’s life, like the fake rose petals that adorn Ullu’s eponymous “Gazebo”: “Always red. Always bright. Never in need of water.”
Or at a community cook out in the fourth “Partition”; the various diasporic foods at the same table — “A different spice here & there, maybe // a different name, maybe their bread thicker or our daal more red…”
Red is a signifier of “Us” — bound by the streams of blood shed over crossed borders, in those moments nudging dangerously close to a “melting pot” identity. It’s a conduit for who is welcome, and despite centering on several strong traumas, remains hopeful, tender, loving.
“Woven throughout are poems that peer inward, as Asghar explores another ‘Us,’ — the queer, the non-binary, genders who have no clear border.”
Woven throughout are poems that peer inward, as Asghar explores another “Us,” — the queer, the non-binary, genders who have no clear border. In “Boy,” the speaker literalizes the masculine inside her “…who grows my beard/& slaps my face when I wax” and then in “Other Body,” “with the boys in the park/& my mustache grew longer,” are strong images calling to the writer’s visible identities as a Muslim and woman, but continuing to queer the lines between the political to the personal. Amidst the confusion about what to think about these various kin, Asghar gives us a vibrant way of how to think about them.
So who is “They”? The domineering Western gaze, ever categorizing the hybridity, is explored in some experimental forms, such as “How We Left: Film Treatment,” written as a play-by-play process diary in making a television show or film; or “Microagression Bingo” show in the image of the classic gameboard, populated by daily stereotyped soundbytes and interactions; or the fifth “Partition,” in the form of an incomplete Mad-Libs. Re-mediating that gaze back through such inventive and playful ways is what makes this a success, giving power back to the oppressed.
In the end, the final poem “If They Come For Us” becomes an affirmation, a promise to stand by and follow those who are kin, through whatever lens, sung by a voice that’s at once woman, queer, brown, immigrant, American, youthful, and modern, weighted by history and bracing against the current Trump era, finding solace in between, even if, at the moment, it feels an arms reach too far.
* * *
Aditya Desai lives in Baltimore, currently teaching writing and revising a couple novels that he keeps threatening to finish someday. He received his MFA in Fiction from the University of Maryland, College Park. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in B O D Y, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Margins, District Lit, The Kartika Review, CultureStrike, and others, which you can find most of at adityadesaiwriter.com. Find him on Twitter @atwittya.
Fatimah Asghar’s first collection of poetry, If They Come for Us, is a warning about the consequences of ignoring history
The Brown Girls cocreator examines the effects of her own family’s trauma.
By Devlyn Camp
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Fatimah Asghar
Fatimah Asghar
CASSIDY KRISTIANSEN
R If They Come for Us: Poems
By Fatimah Asghar (One World). Reading Sun 8/12, 6 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark,773-769-9299, womenandchildrenfirst.com. F
The Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 is rarely spoken about in American history classes, much less in poetry books. The forced migration of 14 million people—Muslims to Pakistan, Hindus to India—left divisions that families still grieve over today. Writer Fatimah Asghar, 28, spent most of her life not knowing how partition affected her family, until the history was passed down to her when she was in college. Now, in the wake of the Trump administration's many crackdowns on immigration and border control, and its separation of families, Asghar's collection of poems reflecting on her family's history, titled If They Come for Us, reads like a warning. Her poetry examines the recurring nature of borders. When an invisible line is drawn, people are divided by varying ideologies, faiths, and politics.
She first learned about her family's history in the India-Pakistan partition from her uncle. He told her the story of how the family was forced to leave Kashmir for Lahore, which sparked her obsession with researching the history. "I've been constantly thinking about it, and looking back into it," she says, "and trying to understand exactly what happened." Her uncle's story isn't explained in any detail in the book, perhaps intentionally, but the emotional weight of his forced migration is felt in every poem. Though the countries and other specific details differ, the impact of forced migration has caused similar trauma for many families. Asghar didn't intend to write anything about her family's history or broadcast a politically relevant message under a controversial administration, but she has done just that. "I spent a lot of years writing the book before Trump really was a prominent political figure" she says. "I've been writing about this stuff for a really long time."
Her poetry criticizes a president who stokes fear in "a country whose sun is war / we keep rotating around its warmth" and reminds the reader that communities of color are often displaced by a nation's battles. She describes on a personal level what it's like to feel at war with one's own skin color when under the watchful eye of kids at school. She writes about her siblings elbowing each other to get into the bathroom to get a moment of peace. She describes an aunt teaching her what a poisonous flower looks like. Asghar's poetry collection ultimately does the same thing: it educates her audience about what poison looks like in this world, no matter how it's presented.
If They Come for Us explores what borders mean to humanity, not just what they represent to a nation's leaders, but also how a family is influenced by the lines that have been drawn. Relatives are separated by them, and their children, like Asghar, are raised in a world that accepts the past separations as ordinary.
Asghar's parents moved to the United States from Lahore in the mid-80s, before she was born. They died when she and her siblings were still very young; they were raised by other immigrants in their family and community. Asghar writes about finding a family that transcends blood because its members bond over a shared history. She makes the case that family transcends borders too.
In writing this collection, Asghar rebels against the habit of historical ignorance that marginalizes people of color. "Politicians try to do that," Asghar says. "[They] can continue these really terrible systems of racism. There are not really a lot of public conversations about partition, and it's this way in which people fall back into that violence."
She's not just concerned about the India-Pakistan partition. Her book quotes pre-presidency Donald Trump directly in his call for an American ban on Muslim immigrants. That promise, which Trump has tried to uphold since he was elected, echoes a long tradition of politicians not learning from past leaders' mistakes. History has repeated itself consistently and has shown many leaders to be apathetic about the effects of enforcing a border or a ban or attempting to erase a group of marginalized people. These borders and bans lead to generations of trauma for the victims' descendants to grapple with.
"There is a lot of historical amnesia in the world, and we just don't know a lot of our own history," Asghar says. "If there was a way that was more commemorative and memorialized, I think we would be better people. America rarely grapples with its history of slavery and indigenous genocide. We're on this land that has witnessed really painful things, and yet there's no real public places of memorializing this trauma. Therefore, everybody is able to not look at it and sweep it under the rug."
If They Come for Us is Asghar's way of grieving her family's own overlooked history. The stories of her family's forced migration are still relatively new to her, and her poems are often a painful examination of that trauma. But while the book analyzes the larger politics of migration, it also explores Asghar's relationships with friends and her queerness. The webseries Brown Girls, which she created with her friend Sam Bailey and which has recently been picked up by HBO, has presented similar story lines. Queer people and people of color, Asghar says, "should be able to write the work that they want, whether that's hard, whether that's joyful. And if that turns away from politics or leans into it, ultimately that's up to every individual artist." She finds that each of her creative projects fulfills a different need in her life. "Brown Girls was about a friendship and love that exists there, and this book is meant to be about history and borders, and therefore the tone is darker."
Asghar does think the webseries' themes surrounding sexuality and what it means to be an adult are contemplated in the book too. Some of the poems—those about friendship and body exploration and playing with Barbies—do shift from the political toward the intimate and personal. But while those poems are a relief from the weight of more serious topics, they are still reminders that her particular point of view—that of a queer woman of color who was once a brown girl who played with white-skinned Barbies—has often been marginalized or overlooked.
Mostly, though, her poems are the memorial for the trauma she still dwells on. She hopes that people who read them will be reminded of the history that's been so often ignored, particularly during this recent resurgence of immigration issues. "We fall back into these divides that were stoked by these nationalistic rhetorics," Asghar says. "We need to have more conversations about our history. If there's a warning, that's it: What does it mean to sit with the complications of history, and can that help us be better in the future?" v