Poet as Architect

Poet as Architect

by Hannah Jane

Asghar’s If They Come For Us is a collection of poems with many on-ramps for the reader in form, subject matter, and themes. The forms she uses are unlike any I have ever seen -- especially “Script for Child Services: A Floor Plan.” Within this poem, I heard a chant of denial in the background (repeat after me: he is not a monster. Nothing happened. She isn’t feeling well right now. That’s why she called…). Asghar is the creator of new forms, engineering new ways to articulate emotional truths that simply cannot exist in a standard format.

Asghar makes me think about how “stanza” in Italian means “room.” There could not be a more perfect way of thinking about these units within a poem, because like rooms in a house, stanzas are small parts of a greater whole. Each room of “Script for Child Services: A Floor Plan” is partitioned off, and bound by the infinite repetition in lighter gray. The effect is a crazed whisper that grows louder and louder at the bottom of the poem/house… all that is left when we reach the bottom is the voice of denial, which bleeds past the walls of the home.

I was interested in the way Asghar sets up the partitions in her own collection. In addition to referring to the brutal displacement and genocide of millions of people, partitions also refer to the separation of spaces. “Partition” functions as both a noun and a verb. I have been playing with the idea that each poem is a division in and of itself (but not a wall -- those are something else). Every poem we read is built of history and emotions, and the moment the poem is written, it becomes a division of its own, standing apart from the sea of life’s countless moments. The events and emotional truths that live between the partitions are in some ways unknowable.

These “divisions” have so much life to separate. There are seven “Partitions,” and for some reason I thought breaking each of them down would help me gain new understanding:

1. Partition (page 9) - Asghar’s identity as being Kashmiri, Seraiki, Muslim, virgin, Pakistani, American and a daughter are questioned.
2. Partition (page 20) - Time weaves in and out, the past in present tense. Pain is recursive and trauma is inherited.
3. Partition (page 28) - Divisions in the home between Asghar and her Auntie… they are separated by a barrier made by Ullu. Still they are not kept apart.
4. Partition (page 43) - In the aftermath of the Partition, two families find joy in each other and a sense of community.
5. Partition (page 65) - Mad-libs version of what the government was feeding its citizens on August 15, 1957, the day of India’s separation from the UK. It is haunting how “stock” this message feels, that how even with the gaps it feels the same: reassuring, false, and not at all comforting.
6. Partition (page 77) - Each utterance of the word “partition” highlights a different degree of separation:
1. The driver rolls down a window, his partition from the world.
2. Red lipstick in the sand after a night out becomes the partition.
3. The flag rolls over a “naked nation”
4. God (not just anyone’s god, but the speaker’s god) “partitions the sunlight into many rays,” “partitions asphalt from asphalt”
5. The ground divides itself based on what grows and what doesn’t -- notice that God doesn’t do this to the earth… the world seems to just take this over, and Asghar writes, “even nature is fractured, partitioned.”
7. Partition (page 89) - This feels overwhelming with sorrow and loss. Asghar begins the poem by putting on the lens of her ancestors (plucking their eyes and fastening them to her own). She sees a scene of them fleeing, grabbing all belongings quickly. My reading of this poem is that while Asghar and her uncle are moving -- fleeing, perhaps -- and she’s hurriedly packing her toys, she sees this violent “ghost train” in her mind from the past. Asghar is reliving/re-experiencing history’s trauma.

The sense I get is that partitions are continuous and inflicted by forces that are great and cyclic. I left this collection feeling hopeless and stung with an awareness of embodied trauma. I think this feeling is important. This is multi-generational, multi-national pain, and it persists in ways that Asghar describes as taking over nature itself.