If They Come For Us: Partitions/Blockages of What Could Be, But Never Is

I am enthralled with this book of poetry, and most importantly, I am fascinated with Fatimah Asghar's running theme/title of "Partition." The most obvious moments of partition is the partition of India in 1947, referring to splitting of the country into India and Pakistan. This historical partition acts as the spine of this collection of works, but partition plays out in several moments. The partition of the living and the dead. The partition of America and India. The partition of her from her adopted family, her gender identity (being female but feeling male), but I most interested in the partition of her from her mother and father.

I think its most interesting how Asghar elicits feelings of isolation and longing through describing her orphanage throughout the poems, often employing a series of ethereal and pastoral imagery to reference to her parents, while she remains in the mundane of living a complex life. In "Land Where My Father Died" she writes "[...] says mine land that plants mines & says go back land that poisoned my mother & devoured her body land that makes my other languages strange on my tongue land [...] & the last land that killed my father & then sent back his body land that made me orphan of thee I sing" (55). Here, she appropriates the song "America the Beautiful" to examine the ways in which this country has displaced her connection to her home, to her family, and essentially herself. The "partition" or alienation that she experiences in America is initiated in her separation from her parents. I love the description of the land poisoning her mother and killing her father (and sending him car to his home land), because the repetition of land elicits how ownership of land (through borders, through claiming nature) results in the land itself turning on humanity.

Another poem that I think best describes the partition between her and her parents is the poem called "White Lie" I love how Asghar characterizers herself in her childhood as seemingly innocent throughout the poem, being someone who is unassuming and well-mannered enough to be believed by the adults. The poem hits a grave ending when we realize the lie that she tells about her parents being alive is much more harmful to the construction of her identity. she writes "yes of course they love me. But Boston/has better public schools & I get to se them/every holiday & we go on long drives [...]" (48). I see the revealing of this lie at the end as Asghar's childhood's self coping and mourning they loss of her parents. Her friend tell very atypical lies to their family members, but Asghar's lie is a fantasy of what could be, but never is as a result of her orphanage. This separation from her parents, through their deaths, allows her to creates an entire fantasy about an unimagined reality.