If They Should Come for Us

Very shortly after assuming the presidential office, on January 27, 2017, President Trump signed an Executive Order that came to be known colloquially as “the Muslim ban.” The executive order “banned foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from visiting the country for 90 days, suspended entry to the country of all Syrian refugees indefinitely, and prohibited any other refugees from coming into the country for 120 days” (ACLU). Several federal courts took immediate action to block the deportation of people stranded in United States airports as a result of the ban. Many saw the ban as an attempt to vilify Muslims and stir animosity against Muslim communities.

“If They Should Come for Us,” written in 2017, challenges the notion of Muslims as a homogeneous, faceless group of foreigners. The Muslim and non-Muslim people that comprise “my people” (Line1) throughout the poem are a collection of diverse human beings. The poem utilizes characterizations of people from multiple cultures, from the women with the “sari dissolving to wind / bindi a new moon on her forehead” (Lines 6-7), to “the sikh uncle at the airport” (Line 13) and the “lone khala at the park” (Line 20). These individuals are not only not all Muslim, but from different parts of the world. What they share are histories of diaspora and relocation.

In Line 9, the speaker refers to a star sewn on her own breast, alluding to the yellow star badge that identified Jewish people in Nazi Europe. As well, the speaker refers to the Night of Broken Glass, or, Kristallnacht—the Nazi Party’s pogrom of Jewish people in Nazi Germany in 1938—when “we hear the glass smashing the street” (Line 39). The title of the poem, as well as the lines “if they come for you they / come for me too” (Lines 31-32) is an allusion to the confessional post-war prose of German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. At one time an anti-Semite, Niemöller became a vocal opponent to Adolf Hitler and Nazism and spent the last seven years of Nazi control in concentration camps. His prose states, “Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— / Because I was not a Jew. // Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” All of these allusions to the Holocaust, an act of genocide, are echoes of violence that the speaker of the poem feels can easily be repeated as well as historicized.