When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar
Review of When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar
“In this world we were born into nothing but everything is ours: the sidewalk, the yellow markers in the road. The rain falls through the leaves and kisses us just so. What no one will ever understand is that the world belongs to orphans, everything becomes our mother.”
When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar (2022). Published by One World.
This book has been my radar for a long time now, especially because I’m such a big fan of Fatimah Asghar’s work.
As soon as it was announced that this book was making its way into the world, I shelved it onto my to read list and bided my time. I put a request into my library to order the book, added my name to the wait list, and had the book not too long after its official publication date.
And oh man I’m glad I read this novel. It reaffirmed to me that poets could be great novelists and incorporate that medium, something I began to become more convinced of when I originally read Ocean Vuong’s novel.
Fatimah Asghar comes into this novel with the unique perspective that she is an orphan herself. The three sisters mentioned in the title are all orphans after the murder of their father. It’s very much a perspective that comes from the heart, and it shows in the writing and care that comes with the story. It’s a well done novel, I’ll admit that before the review.
Let’s begin the review.
Three orphaned sisters find solace in each after a being taken in by their neglectful uncle.
When We Were Sisters is largely told from the perspective of the youngest of three sisters, Kausar. Their mother died years before the events of the novel, and the catalyst for this story is that their father has been murdered recently.
It opens with the local aunties sobbing over them, calling them orphans and debating what to do with the three sisters. Their mother’s estranged brother, whose name is blacked out and erased from the physical page, decides to take the children, with Kausar making the decision for the sisters.
Despite being very young when this happens, and having to make the decision, she is lured in by him by saying they can live in his zoo. She agrees, and the sisters pack their bags.
However, he only wants the money that comes with taking care of them, and the good vibes it gives to the community that he’s such a charitable man. They move into the zoo, which is a dingy spare apartment he has. He occasionally gives them money for groceries, but they live in one bedroom while Meemo and his wife, a couple from Lahore trying to get their green card, takes care of the sisters.
They see the girls like their own kids, but after going out in public with them too many times, their uncle threatens Kausar by saying Meemo is sexually taking advantage of them (he is not) and reporting it to the police.
Kausar makes another decision, despite her age, and Meemo and his wife are cast out of their lives forever. A revolving cast of characters appear in the other room, including a missing woman who is cast out after the uncle finds out about her, and they are eventually taken out of that apartment and put into a basement.
The girls grow up throughout the course of the novel. Their uncle, collecting the money from taking care of them, refuses to actually adopt them or bring them into their household, as his wife and kids don’t anything to do with the three sisters. He uses the money to buy his family nice things, but the girls survive on moldy bread and peanut butter jars.
Noreen ends up getting a full scholarship to a school in New York City, marking the beginning of the end of the sisters’ close nature. Aisha ends up getting a full scholarship and leaving at some point towards the end, while Kausar goes off a very different path.
When Kausar enters high school, she is getting played by a boy who acts like he wants to date her, but goes back and forth between her and another girl. She ends up losing her virginity to him, although there is a scene that mildly feels like sexual assault because he corners her against a locker, and her uncle makes her take a pregnancy test.
He is very conservative and won’t even let them talk to men and boys, so this is a whole new level. It estranges her from her sisters even more in the process, and is a stark juxtaposition to the beginning when Kausar was the only one of her sisters to really pay attention during Qur’an studies.
This is such a beautiful book. Kausar’s path ends up making her a lost girl, and while her sisters are quote on quote the perfect example of orphan girls who made it, as seen in the uncle funeral scene, they each have their own trajectories sparked by the death of their parents.
This is stunning, lyrical prose that links together their lives in a way where they really need each other in order to survive, and when that bond is finally fractured, it leaves an empty hole in each of them. Also as brown Muslim girls in the United States, they go through an entirely different experience considering the era the book is set in.
Overall Thoughts
I enjoyed When We Were Sisters very much. The heavier sections of prose are broken up by poems in the perspective of “Him,” who I tend to presume is the father telling a small portion of his story.
That feels kind of unnecessary, but just fits in a way where it isn’t too much—these sections are brief and break up the monotony of the main text. I think this is a great form of representation for the experiences that I’m sure Asghar herself experienced, as well as being a Pakistani-American girl growing up in the United States.
There’s a push of modernity alongside the conservative culture their uncle forces upon them, proclaiming it to be his faith. In the end, I devoured this novel—it reads quickly—and thought it to be quite tasteful. Give it a shot, check it out at your local library.
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