"If They Come For Us" puzzles and multiple bodies

Fatimah Asghar’s use of a mad lib, a crossword, and a bingo game as places for poetry engages the reader differently in the reading of it. There are seven poems in this collection titled Partition, and they all are stylistically different, though all deal with partition. The one written in a mad lib style (pg. 65) intrigued me. One, because I’ve always liked mad-libs, two, because it’s a deceptively playful way to address a serious subject. That partitions happen over and over, following the same script each time, is a little…mad.

I actually called my sister and had her do the mad-lib (we used to do a lot of mad-libs), though I didn’t tell her that it was actually a poem until I read the ‘finished product’ to her. And it’s not that I think it even needed to be filled in: the crossword didn’t need to be solved and the bingo board didn’t need to be played in order to have a complete work. All her poems are complete and stand firmly on their own without audience participation, I was just compelled to interact with Partition in this way, because it’s possible to do so and I was curious what it’d sound like filled in. For the record: it sounds eerie. Childish humor (provided by my sister in the spirit of a mad-lib) combined with a narrative of political violence is unsettling.  

There’s something about the unsolved crossword puzzle, that encapsulates Asghar’s subject matter. This collection reads like a memoir, although it’s fragmented. Like a crossword, she only has bits and clues to create a fully connected puzzle:

“13. here’s how to get rid of the dust. / your home so far away. the fog / high around your head. you can / write the spell, you can redraw / the map, you can fight your way / back.”

This puzzle is unsolvable, because the answers are not tangible. There is no eight-letter word to bring back the past, to bring back her country, her parents, her sister, her childhood. There is deep frustration in this unsolvable puzzle.

Ghareeb, Other Body, and Super Orphan all made me feel a certain way, especially the line’s in Other Body: “Mother, where are you? How would / you have taught me to be a woman? // A man? Can you help me? Each day / without you I pile questions // & whisper to your new body, / the earth & the grass laughs // in my face. Sometimes I laugh / alone & for a moment forget // I was talking to you. Sometimes / I let my grief go & my body is fully mine. // Fully alive, dancing, boy-girl / feet pounding the ground.” Being inhabited by multiple bodies comes up often in Asghar’s work, whether it’s the boy inside her wearing her skirt and slapping her when she waxes her moustache, or the scooped-out eyeballs of her ancestors. 

In this instance, her mother is a nebulous everywhere. She is the earth and grass that can be both whispered to and danced on. Her memory, her DNA, lives in Asghar, and her pain lives in Asghar as well. To let grief go is hard, because it can feel too much like forgetting, and forgetting can feel too much like losing someone all over again. To end this poem with feet pounding on the ground, on her mother’s new body, is beautiful to me. No one is lost, no one is forgotten, there is life to be celebrated.