Rupi Kaur
She began posting poetry on social media, most notably Instagram, and self-published her work milk and honey in 2014, which has sold over one million print copies since. This past October (2017), her second collection was released: the sun and her flowers. Themes among her poems include sexism, trauma, sexual violence, heartbreak, femininity, healing, and love.
Her poetry has received criticism for being simple, short, and straightforward; supposedly lacking the "poetic" touch that is encompassed in the notion of poetry. However, her simplistic style makes the content she writes of easy to comprehend, and provides a healthy format to introduce these heavy topics to her audience, mainly consisting of young women.
On Kaur’s website, a question she answers is “why did you start writing?” Her response is as follows:
“our trauma escapes the confines of our own times. we’re not just healing from what’s been inflicted onto us as children. my experiences have happened to my mother and her mother and her mother before that. it is generations of pain embedded into our souls.
i read hundreds of books growing up. but none can explain this torment to me. i need access to words written by people who look like me writing about the things i am going through. at that moment i realize the importance of representation and know this must be different for my children. they must have access to their own literature. i write to document we were here.”
Kaur is also an influential figure in the #MeToo movement. Her cultural background of south Asia has given her much to write about in terms of oppression and sexual violence. Her work has been scattered across the world, providing a place for victims and women to resonate with and relate to.
Also asked on her site is, “what prompted you to write about sexuality and abuse?” Kaur says:
“…our bodies are not our property. we are told we must be conservative. a good south asian girl is quiet. does as she is told. sex does not belong to her. it is something that happens to her on her wedding night. it is for him.
we know sexual violence intimately. we experience alarming rates of rape. from thousands of years of shame and oppression. from the community and from colonizer after colonizer.
but we also challenge that narrative every single day. and this poetry is just one route for doing that.”
This project will be looking into three poems by Kaur that revolve around sexual violence and sexism. Through these analyses, broader issues that play into rape culture will be discussed, such as the effects sexual assault leaves on victims and the overarching ways women are oppressed through patriarchal ideology. The question at hand with this project is: what is poetry’s role (specifically through popular contemporary poets, like Rupi Kaur) in the ways society is now treating and speaking about rape culture?
