When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar review – a poetic tale of familial grief | Fiction

Kausar is the youngest of the three orphaned sisters in Fatimah Asghar’s grief-soaked and gorgeous debut novel. When she walks past Bobby and his friends in the school cafeteria, she overhears him say: “That’s my heart right there.” With flushed cheeks, she races to the bathroom. She stares and stares into the mirror, but alas “can’t find another heart to give”. Adrift in the world without a mother or father, her heart is a little bit Noreen’s, a little bit Aisha’s. Her two sisters are all she has – even if the distance between them is growing. Kausar “put her heart inside [her sisters’] hearts” long ago, long before they became orphans. She was “born this way, belonging to them, trying to follow their breath”.

The day their father dies, murdered on the streets of America at the opening of the novel, their home turns into a “House of Sadness”. His body is sent from Pennsylvania to Lahore and buried in soil they can’t touch, in a “place he is from, and so we are from, but we know nothing about”. A VHS tape of his burial is sent to their house – the girls watch it on repeat surrounded by aunties.

The sisters had innocently wished for new bunk beds – and lost their father while he was out buying them. Asghar places these sentences on the verso and recto pages of this section: “A bunk bed in exchange for a father” and “What idiots. He was our father. We should have asked for more.”

Uncle, whose name is replaced throughout with a black box, becomes the sisters’ guardian, but mostly to serve his own interests (the redaction speaks to his dereliction of familial duty – he takes their inheritance and the government-issue cheques). He transports them to a new city, a new house. In the years that follow, they come of age and fall apart; each attempts to confront their changing selves and the system as Muslim American women. They form makeshift families, forging bonds with the immigrants their money-minded uncle rents rooms to. The girls don’t remember their “phantom mother” – she’s a myth, a make-believe, who died when they were still babies. Their father is gradually becoming make-believe too. They play games of “once-upon-a-time”, nostalgic for the good old days. Everywhere they go, they carry the fog of familial grief.

A poet first, Asghar picks up on the themes of her debut collection If They Come for Us – partition and fragmentation, borders and bodies – and plays with space and silence on the page. Narrated by Kausar in vignettes, often in staccato sentences, and interspersed with poetic flashbacks from the perspective of the father and mother, this fragmentary form has the effect of ephemerality – much like life. “A word is a word is a word,” she writes, but “is a sister still a sister when a mother dies?” Time is warped. The duties of father, mother, sister, sibling are blurred. “What no one will understand is that the world belongs to orphans, everything becomes our mother,” writes Asghar. “We’re mothered by everything because we know how to look for the mothering, because we know a mother might leave us and we’ll need another mother to step in and take its place.” The sisters search for parental figures but are often left grasping. The world may be theirs, but they feel stripped of a sense of belonging.

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Asghar’s melodic and melancholy work is reminiscent of other novels written by poets – Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Safia Elhillo’s Home Is Not a Country – but perhaps sits closest to Akhil Sharma’s 2014 novel, Family Life, in its distilled and lucid rendering of loss. She is not afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve – there is no stripping back of emotion.

When We Were Sisters is not easy reading. Grief is not an easy feeling; it is lonely, slippery, elusive. But Kausar can look to Noreen and Aisha, to her sister-mothers, and know: that’s my heart right there. For a few moments the fog lifts, the heart is no longer heavy. That knowledge will do.

When We Were Sisters is published by Corsair (£8.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.