Transit and If They Come For Us

The first time I read If They Come For Us I was waiting for a late train at the Stockton train station on my way back from taking the GRE. An electronic voice pounded through the loudspeaker every few minutes to notify passengers that an incident had caused the delay. I found that I would read a piece and then look up and begin to listen to what was happening in my surroundings. A family sat next to me. There were three mixed children, a grandfather with a deep foreign accent, and a white mother. I could feel the tension between the mother and the grandfather who was chastising her for how she was raising his grandchildren in the absence of their father. I came to realize later the father had passed. I can still remember the eldest son attempting to defend his mother and how the mother quietly received the insults.

I can’t help but wonder if those children at the train station ever felt like they had to fabricate stories for their friends? Like the speaker in “White Lie” (47)? “I was so much of a lie I rewrote my family for anyone who listened...”

The second time I read If They Come For Us I was at the airport. On my way back to Mills from Phoenix, Arizona. At my gate I sat next to an older white couple who did not reciprocate my smile — a familiar, annoying, yet wholly unsurprising gesture. Rather than let it bother me too much I opened my book and began to read. All of a sudden the husband stood up, turned around, looked at the TV and said something along the lines of “Why are they playing CNN? All that fake news.” And Fatimah's words filled my head "I whisper my country my country my country / & my hands stay empty. / what is land but land? a camp / but a camp? sanctuary but another grave? I am an architect. I permission everything / into something new. / I build & build / & someone takes it away" (12-13). There is this sense of creation and destruction filtered throughout this book, of home, of family, of safety. The moments when our boarders and modes of transport are cut off to specific groups and I can walk through security checkpoints unquestioned, freely, I forget that is not the case for all. We forget in when rushing to the gate, and America wants to keep it that way.

I wanted to share these stories because I found it interesting that both times I read this book I was in transit. Moving from one place to another, by choice. The people I saw along the way were traveling as well and there was no way for me to see if it was by choice or by force. In those spaces there are so many people. They are going through the motions and they all seem "normal." At the beginning of the book Fatimah Asghar makes a wish for the children she "dreams still play" (3). She writes, "I wish them a mundane life. / Arguments with parents. Groundings. Chasing a budding love around the playground" (4).

Fatimah Asghar challenges readers to conceptualize what’s inside, behind, entwined in the everyday, the mundane, the barbie dolls, the words between school children, what’s happening behind all those closed doors. One effective way Asghar does this is through the use of “unconventional” poems. Asghar uses the crossword, a bingo sheet, charts, a floor plan, and more tweaking the inner workings of a readers mind. We don’t expect the quick transition our brains do when we pause to change how we read a page.

“Microaggression Bingo” (68) for me, it resonates with my airport story — as well as my entire life as a Black woman in America. The word microaggression is one that we’ve become accustomed to these days, they are “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.” Bingo is a game of chance. A game notoriously played in homes for senior citizen, known for generally being low stakes and low energy. Just imagine putting a red ink blot on anything but the middle square, “Don’t Leave Your House For a Day - Safe” anything else would feel like a violation — inherently violent. This is both intelligent and insidious in the way it creeps under the skin, like microaggressions themselves. It takes the seemly mundane and flips it upside down spilling hidden painful truths from its pockets. Simple acts of violence, tiny cuts on the surface of the skin, become a breeding ground for infection.

The other poems that I would consider unique to or unconventional in this work are “From” (27), “Script for Child Services: A Floor Plan” (59),“Partition August 15th, 1947” (65), and “Map Home” (75-76). What did you see?

Xoxo,
Rai