Tuesday, February 12, 2019
If They Come For Us
If They Come For Us by Fatima Asghar is a collection of poems that stretch across identities, borders, time, and traditional form to give us a peak into the lived experience of Fatimah Asghar as a Pakistani Muslim woman in the U.S. The collection broken up between partitions truly embodies the way intersections in identities/cultures interact within a country that is so focused on separation. The first poem For Peshawar opens us up to the fear of the existence of children and young folks in the city of Peshawar. She writes, "From the moment our babies our born / are we meant to lower them into the ground? / To dress them in white? They send flowers / before guns, thorns plucked from stem." The poem goes on to wish that the children still get to live "mundane lives" where they are alive and playing, arguing and getting grounded by their parents, walking home in the sun. This made me reflect upon the ways in which many children of color are robbed of their childhoods and are put in danger for merely existing, and how scary that is because a lot of the time they aren't completely aware of how to deal with the circumstances that put them in danger. The first partition also stuck out to me heavily; it spoke towards partitions in identity and other folks misidentifying a person culturally. We also see Fatimah trying to identify her own placement between these partitions and the ways people misidentify her. As a young queer child of immigrants, this resonated with me a lot because I also feel myself being forced into the ways other folks (mis)identify me and still being present in my own identity when I'm surrounded by a culture that refuses to acknowledge all parts of me. The poem that directly follows the first partition, Kal, moved me in many different ways as it exists as an act of bending time to be with our fallen, our ancestors. This book moved me to tears, made my heart fall out of my body, made me smile, and made me shrug my eyebrows. I love the way Fatimah challenged forms as well by using crossword puzzles, bingo, and charts.
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"when I'm surrounded by a culture that refuses to acknowledge all parts of me"
ReplyDeleteYes! Thank you for this beautiful line and your overall response. I too saw parts of myself in Asghar's work. As a brown queer femme I felt pain and joy throughout this body of work, to be seen and heard within her words. Kal, was also a piece that resonated with me as I often anchor my being and existence in words and their meanings in ways that at times seem abstract, but it is this abstraction that allows me to find comfort in their form and their function for me and my human experience.
with love,jesi
Thank you for commenting on the misidentification Fatimah writes about in her poetry. I was really struck by these lines in, "How We Left: Film Treatment"
Delete"[Narrative Device: Flash Forward]
In America they slaughtered a temple of seeks because they thought
them us. Here we all become towelheads, amorphous fears praying
to a brown god. Others that become others that look like others."
Powerful lines about the physical and fatal danger of misidentification for brown people not only in America, but in the world.
There's also a sort of misidentification she talks about in "Ghareeb" that leaves her suspended between two worlds when her family misidentifies her as stranger when she visits because she is American as in these lines,
"on visits back your english sticks to everything.
your own auntie calls you ghareeb. stranger
in your family's house, you: runaway dog turned wild...
when'd the west settle in your bones?
...stranger
to everything that tries to bring you home."
She is still Fatimah that they knew and loved but they have misidentified her as stranger because she is all at once both and neither, not completely one or the other, an internal mixture of boy/girl, pakistani-american, etc these constructs that each have such powerful pulls to belong to one or the other but never both, we don't allow for both in this world.
Good stuff Luna, so evocative and it seems personal in many ways. I appreciate how you honor her different ideas about form and how that manifests.
ReplyDeleteE
mis-identification is so violent in the ways it strips people of their languages, culture, sexuality and belonging. Your response made me wonder about the ways that binaries placed on folks to carry out displacement of communities. Asghar speaks about the displacement of these children in this poem and she specifically identifies it as a "robbing" of identities and life. I wonder if the rhetoric we currently have around displacement is insensitive. Usually when I associate displacement I think of physical bodies that are being taken out of their norm or their home. After reading Asghar's text I started to think about displacement in the way it affects the spirit and memoralization of the dispossessed. An issue that I realized through Asghar's text that is often overlooked as just a shift of peoples belonging. But in reality it is a violent robbery of peoples spiritual and physical understanding of self.
ReplyDelete