The Sky a Map, Identity and Time in Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us.

    The Sky a Map, Identity and Time in Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us.

Asghar’s collection is haunted by the questions of belonging in its many forms; what is it belong to family, country, land, and body.  Who belongs and how do familial and ancestral bonds write our sense of belonging and help carve our path?

 I am an architect./I permission everything/into something new./I build & build/and someone takes it away. (13)  Throughout the collection we are invited into the struggle to find a map and guiding forces in order to navigate dislocation, and and a sense of estrangement. We are asked to fill the cracks, architecting hope to stay alive and fighting despite the loss.

Throughout the book form is creatively explored with such bold strokes, from the upside down interior dialogue in the poem Oil in which the narrator searches for ways to fit in, to the fill in the blank format of Partition, the cross word of Map Home, Microaggression Bingo, or the complicated stanza patterns of A Starless Sky is a Joy Too.  We as readers are challenged to interact with Asgahrs words on the page in a way that has us grappling alongside her in the questions of identity and belonging.

What is the path to love? (75)

Do all survivors carry villain inside them? (92)

What to do then, when the only history/You have is collage? (91)   

What does it mean to partition earth? To cut the ocean? (66)

Leaders assure ? and the future of prosperity alongside cooperation with the military.(65)

How do you forget?/ how do you remember? (27)

Mother, where are you? How would/you have taught me to be a woman? (78)

What is land but land? (12)

These are just some of the questions that are raised in the words of these pages, introduced in the first poem with the line: Every year I manage to live on this earth/I collect more questions than answers. (3)

The juxtaposition of the poem Playroom and Shadi is particularly chilling, offering another question of what damage is done to children through the racist and completely unattainable standards of beauty that are instilled culturally, even in childhood toys alongside brutal questions of how women might maintain sense of self while their bodies become the site of violence in war. One day/ may our names come before our sex (37).  So many themes of how to understand gender and femininity are raised throughout, as the narrator battles with what it means to have grown up without a mother, an orphan in a land that treats her as a stranger/outsider.

Asghar grapples with ways of belonging to her own body, even her own blood seeks another home to remain innocent in the days after the twin towers fell: my skin full of sores/pussing & oozing as the blood fled my body/trying to find anything else to call home. (58). In a Land that mispronounces my grief (55) Asghar struggles to reclaim sense of self, embodiment and connection, succeeding at times; “Sometimes I let my grief go & my body is fully mine” (79) Later in the collection is the line Orphans make family of anyone & everyone, Universal/Blood. (94) coming back to the theme that the experiences of migration, dislocation and the loss of parents allow for a deeper understanding of family and of human connection.

Asghar turns to the ancestral sky for answers, searching through time and space  I follow you you like constellations...I see you map/my sky the light your lantern long/ ahead & I follow I follow (100), looking back in time to find guidance and into the future for an understanding of self, All the people I could be,/ the whole map, my mirror. (49)

Kal is one of the poems grappling with sense of time in the collection.  Bouncing in and out of yesterday and tomorrow the narrator questions the death of her mother and what the bending of time might do to the bringing continuity and connection between generations, and ancestral knowledge to her future.  The poem Partition (20) also weaves through time, moving back and forth between the years around the around the partitioning of nationstates after WWII (and the division specifically of the borders of India and Pakistan) to consider viscerally what unraveled when The Westerners end their war/& declare:never again as well as how that ancestral trauma reverberated into the present causing the vigilance of her aunt who teachers her how to distinguish a edible flower from a poisonous one just in case (23).  

My love/ for nature is like my love for most things:/ fickle & Theoretical.  Too many bugs/ & I want a divorce/ My love for the past is like my love/ for most things. I only feel it when I leave. (69)

How do we return to a sense of belonging?  Realign with ancestral knowledge to know what is edible and what is poisonous in our surroundings? How do we return to familiarity with our environment so that our love for nature and each other is not fickle and theoretical? How do we merge severed connections and weave them so that we may understand ourselves and our place in the present, see our legacies stretch out into the future and embody the knowledge that we are the ones we have been waiting for?