“If They Should Come For Us” by Fatimah Asghar is an astounding celebration of culture and an emotional piece of resistance. Listening to this poem be performed at Poetry Out Loud earlier this year nearly moved me to tears. I personally identified with the poem because the narrator is a young Muslim teenager, like me. She dictates the sights that she sees around her of her people and the troubles that they face, simply for being different.

The poem encapsulates the hardships that Muslims deal with in our society, while also expressing the deep kinship the poet feels to other people in her community. This poem particularly hits hard emotionally because it tells the story of being Muslim in America. Asghar shares depictions of people and events that may seem strange to western society, but that are truly just signs of South Asian culture prevailing. 

The use of repetition of the phrase “my people” throughout the poem emphasizes the love she has for her community and carries a string of loyalty and emotion through each use. She describes the different situations that she sees her people in, and that the one familiarity that links them all is their identity as Muslim or South Asian. Despite the differences these people have–being men, women, Sikh, Muslim, aunties, uncles–Asghar feels as though they are her family. She says, “I claim her my kin,” stating that these people are hers; she will love them and help them always. 

Americans may think it is odd to see a gaggle of aunties at the beach wearing “dupattas” (scarf like fabric) or a woman wearing crocs with a traditional Indian outfit. However, that is simply the reality of being a person of color in America; we incorporate our culture into everyday life, mixing western modernity and tradition, creating our own type of normal.

The lack of punctuation provides a melodic fluidity, almost painting the poem as a stream of consciousness thought. There are no separate stanzas and each line runs into the next. The poem says, “My people my people I can’t be lost/when I see you my compass.” By breaking the line after “I can’t be lost,” the reader is able to read these two lines in two different ways. Asghar may be emphasizing how she is not alone, while also saying that her people are a way for her to find herself, like how a compass points north. The last line of the poem is “ahead & I follow I follow.” There is no period or punctuation, contributing to the effect that this poem is an ongoing, living thought. Asghar’s loyalty is endless. She will never stop following her community, and by extension, her heart.