Intro 2
Rupi Kaur is a contemporary poet
- Kaur’s work and how she came about – “instapoets”, also mention some statistics about the amount of poetry that’s out there (popular) that is related to sexual assault
- rupi has performed her poetry across the world. her photography and art direction are warmly embraced and she hopes to continue this expression for years to come.
Her response: “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.”
“what prompted you to write about sexuality and abuse?”
Response: “by the time i am born i have already survived the first battle of my life. against female feticide. i am one of the lucky ones who has been allowed to live while millions of other girls are killed at or before birth. simply for being born girls.
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.”
Question of culture… Rupi’s south Asian heritage and how oppressed they are
https://rupikaur.com/faq/
poets were like, damn let's talk about this shit
~feminist theory~poetry~
Rupi Kaur is one of these poets - relate to feminist activism and what not
talk about perceptions of her work, maybe some critiques, and relate it to today's culture
"thesis" - poetry is a means of talking about issues of rape culture