Where's the new vocabulary for the political-as-personal? Reflections on "If They Come For Us"

Re-reading Fatimah Asghar’s “If They Come For Us,” I found myself thinking about how much the first three poems, “For Peshawar,” resound throughout the rest of the collection, introducing the main themes and styles for what is to follow. For this blog post, I’ll dive deeply into “For Peshawar” and point out the moments that echo in the larger collection:

“For Peshawar” is not only the opening to the book, but it’s the only poem that stands on its own – unpartitioned, and yet strangely partitioned in its singularity. The title and epitaph of the poem provide context for what is to follow: we learn that this poem is written in response to a particular incident from 2014 and we learn that the Taliban makes a regular practice of sending out kafan before attacking schools. So, as specific as this date may be, it by no means refers to a particular incident.

The regularity of incidence is invoked again by the poem’s opening lines: “From the moment our babies are born / are we meant to lower them into the ground? / To dress them in white?” These are questions, these are laments, these are inquiries. Later in the poem Asghar writes: “Every year I manage to live on this earth / I collect more questions than answers.” I read these lines as a response to Asghar’s bafflement about the cruelty of this world – after all, the opening questions could be read as sardonic – but I also see them as a conscious choice on Asghar’s part to be the kind of person/poet who asks questions, instead of striving for answers/ forced assertions.

Page 4 completely broke my heart:

I wish them a mundane life.

Arguments with parents. Groundings.  

Chasing a budding life around the playground.

Iced mango slices in the hot summer.

Lassi dripping from lips.

Fear of being unmarried. Hatred of the family

next door. Kheer at graduation. Fingers licked

with mehndi. Blisters on the back of a heel.

These quotidian moments in South Asia ring so poignantly, introduced to the reader once we know they have already been lost. And I feel like the first stanza, “I wish them a mundane life. Arguments with parents. Groundings,” resounds throughout so much of the collection, particularly “Kal,” in which Asghar mourns the loss of her mother at a very young age: “Kal means she’s / dancing at my wedding not-yet come. Kal means she’s oiling my air / before the first day of school.” And then, the most devastating line: “Give me my mother for no / other reason than I deserve her.”

These tender descriptions of every-day family life make so many of the other politically-driven poems all the more wrenching. For example, “Partition” on page 9: “you’re kashmiri until they burn your home. take your orchards. stake a different flag. until no one remembers the road that brings you back.... you’re a daughter until they bury your mother. until you’re not invited to your father’s funeral. you’re a virgin until you get too drunk. you’re muslim until you’re not a virgin.” This particular version of “Partition” is so much about nomenclature, about false categories and divides, and because we are still holding onto those moments from “For Peshwar” about what has been lost, “Partition” becomes even more potent & charged.

I feel like it’s a cliche to talk about how the personal is political at this point, so I’d love to find a new language to express what Asghar is doing here. In these poems, there is such a sense of specificity – the “you” of Partition aligns with many details we later learn to be true about Asghar’s life, such as not being invited to her father’s funeral –and yet it opens up such huge and complex questions about the history & particularities & patterns of partitions. She does this so deftly throughout this collection, using second-person to great effect, writing about the White House as a chipped porcelain bathtub, creating a web of “not-me’s” (“National Geographic), and writing to her own estrangement as one of the consequences of violence and Partition: “how many poems must you write to convince yourself / you have a family? everyone leaves & you end up the stranger.”