Poetry As Discourse
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.”
Also asked 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.”
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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?
