Sadiqa de Meijer’s newest poetry collection Qaf’s People is a gathering place for those who are both and between. In the poem “Hourly,” the mixed-race narrator meets “another of Qaf’s own” and asks, “So how is it you’re from Qaf? / Oh, it was empire, right, and same” (61). We are the children of love stories; we are also the children of migration shaped by geopolitics. Always both at the same time.
It’s an ambitious project, to storytell her own childhood and speak for a collective that is mixed by definition. It is most successful when de Meijer leans into personal specifics. In one poem, “The Trouble With Customs,” her family fills out forms at the US-Canada border. The “stern officers” treat the mixed-race family with varying degrees of politeness: “neighbourly towards” her white mother, “with some reserve because she’s made her bed” (… now lie in it) (36-37). Throughout the book, de Meijer documents racist rhetoric without completely spelling it out.
As a mixed-race reader, I felt confronted by this at first. It’s disturbing to read about a white pregnant mother awaiting “a child … whom her country has no word for, / except street dog” (10). Later, I recognized these fill-in-the-blank moments as de Meijer’s signature move. They grow into an invitation, an “I see you” between writer and reader. De Meijer’s writing is expansive enough to hold multiple truths about being mixed race: the pushback, the uncertainty, and the growth into self-knowledge of being “mutable … brushing past the multitudes / who seem asleep in being from somewhere” (61).
Unwaveringly authentic and confident, de Meijer’s poems speak from various life stages: child, teenager, adult. In the poem “Where I Am Never More Than Six Years Old,” the child narrator visits her father’s country and gives a few coins to disabled beggars. Raised in Canada, she “thought they were waiting for their wheelchairs,” then “suddenly knew, that this was / not coming for them / that the roadside and the bleeding fists would be their life” (25-26). This realization of privilege, and how it shifts relative to our context, is also part of our mixed-race inheritance.
De Meijer could have only written about white people’s comments on her skin (“rooibos tea with too much milk” (49); “one forgivable brushstroke / over the paleness his people define themselves by” [60]) but she never shies away from addressing her own privilege. Bravo. We need more white and white-adjacent poets to speak about whiteness, instead of only the oppressed identities we carry, because it also shapes our lives.
Parts of the book are more unsatisfyingly vague, like the first section, “i. there is no place as far.” Here, the origin story of Qaf relies on animal and mountain imagery to define Qaf, an invented non-place loosely inspired by a mysterious Arabic letter/Quran chapter. It’s hard to find the human in the sea of metaphors, even if the phrasing is undeniably gorgeous: “Slow-blinking bovine, turns her head languidly / … sighs whole summers / from her nostrils. One stray eyelash / dropped on the O’s ridge” makes the ‘Q’ of ‘Qaf’ (14). Likewise, the second-to-last section plays with italics and jumbled syntax to emphasis the both-and-neither of being mixed race (“kind of undefined and fluid” [70]; “Living forever in a halfway house” [75]). Both offer mountains of metaphors, but lack the thoughtfulness based on lived experience of the middle sections.
The book’s closing poems are untitled anthems for a placeless people: “In Qaf we love where we are from without a flag … anybody’s funeral is one of ours” (84-85). The very last poem is three lines long, offering “Qaf!” as the plop! of a raindrop landing somewhere “after its boundless inward plummet,” bringing the collection literally down-to-earth, echoing de Meijer’s groundedness after exploring her identity (86).
Yes, the book seems to confirm: we are born from individual parents, we are born from nations with conflicted histories, we emerge (as all humans do) into life at somewhat random time-space openings. It’s a pragmatic view of mixed-race identity, grounded in the confidence of a poet who knows herself.