the sun and her flowers - "home"
Rather than focusing on the evilness of the power-hungry abuser, Kaur makes this poem about her experience with herself. When this perpetrator began taking advantage of her, she says, “all different parts of me / turned the lights off / shut the blinds / locked the doors / while i hid at the back of some upstairs closet of my mind as / someone broke the windows – you” (69). Creating this metaphor between Kaur’s body and the structure of a physical home is effectively moving. Invading someone’s home is an extreme violation of privacy, and Kaur is conveying that the body is the most constant home each individual has. She expands on her views of home in a recent TedTalk in which she combines spoken word with personal narratives. She identifies her sense of self as “home.”
Readers can sense the momentum Kaur must have felt as she was writing this poem – her anger towards her perpetrator builds as she graphically explains the actions done to her through analogies related to food and eating. She ends the stanza with, “turned my breasts into bruised fruit” (69). Then she picks up the analogy of home again and carries it through the rest of the poem. This creates a feeling that all readers can relate to whether or not they have been assaulted. The words Kaur uses to describe the invasion of her home – the removal of her mental self from her physical one – are powerful and evoke a strong sense of anger, disappointment, vulnerability, guilt, and eventually a feeling of empowered acceptance. After listing the trauma she now struggles with – the scars the perpetrator has left on her physically and emotionally – she writes, “and i am so tired / of doing things your way / -- it isn’t working” (70).
Following that statement, she expresses how she has thought about the assault and contemplated ways she could have avoided it, as well as how to separate her own trauma from the shame that aligns with the perpetrator’s actions:
“i can’t blame myself for having a whole / the size of your manhood in my chest anymore… i’m tired of decorating this place with your shame / as if it belongs to me / it’s too much to walk around with / what your hands have done / if it’s not my hands that have done it” (71). This section has a few different layers, the main one being a victim’s struggle to overcome their assault while also attempting to understand why it happened. Also, the use of “manhood” gives the reader something to think about; the concept of masculinity and all that it entails both physically and in persona.
Kaur turns to a more poetic tone in the next stanza, but still incorporates direct statements within the structure of her “home” metaphor. The poetic style is represented through the mentions of pouring sunlight and rain. Simple and straightforward words are used in the evident context of sexual assault, while leading the content to an empowering state. For example, she writes, “it takes a broken person to come searching / for meaning between my legs / it takes a complete. whole. perfectly designed / person to survive it” (71). Starting the stanza with phrases like, “the truth comes like sunlight / pouring through an open window”, confronting the realities of sexual assault in the middle, and ending with the reclaiming of Kaur’s home (“there is no space for you / no welcome mat”) encompasses themes that show Kaur’s strength in her personal experiences, and in evoking powerful feelings through her writing.
The last bit of “home” winds down to a calm presence. Kaur has let everything out – the confusion, anger, guilt, shame, trauma – and is now at a point of forgiveness and acceptance with herself. It also comes full circle, ending with “put my feet up / and enjoy / this typical thursday afternoon” (72). Through Kaur’s use of many styles (poetic, blunt, reflective…), all the feelings that come with sexual assault are present. She explains the before – a typical Thursday and no expectations of an event like this happening, and then is able to display the intensity of the assault itself through writing of those actions and their traumatic effects. To conclude the poem, Kaur is grasping a sense of peace and emphasizing that she is the one in complete control now. She is not defined by her experiences; her home has been rebuilt through healing herself.
Concluding thing: Kaur uses many styles here – you can sense the anger, the impulsiveness, the no bullshit attitude, the self-reflection, and the poetic style of realization and acceptance – it really is a trip representing the stages of an assault: before, during, after – and all the factors and emotions that go with each.
