Raw Honey | Pain, Sweetness & Feminism from Rupi Kaur
Rupi Kaur’s poetry is simple, yet vibrant with truth. Her first collection of poems, Milk and Honey, is rich with pain, ardor, and fierce survival. Kaur’s poetry is like the modern embodiment of ancient sage and poet Sappho, with fragment-like thoughts and what poet Olga Broumas terms “lumens”: short, aphoristic, poignant glimpses of an action or an emotion. Here’s an example:He guts her with his fingerslike he’s scraping the inside of a cantaloupe clean.And another:I know I should crumble for better reasonsbut have you seen that boy he bringsthe sun to its knees every nightThese are complete poems, often accompanied by Kaur’s drawings. They are unrepentant in their feminism, in their celebration of the female body even as they cower under threatened violence or defy that violence with a laudable sass.
Divided in four sections – the Hurting, the Loving, the Breaking, the Healing – the book changes in mood as she progresses through these stages.She looks to our collective fathers for this:He was supposed to be the first male love of your life.You still search for him everywhere.But also this:Every time you tell your daughteryou yell at her out of loveyou teach her to confuse anger with kindnesswhich seems like a good idea until she grows upto trust men who hurt her cause the look so much like you.Kaur’s cry for independence and agency, for an end to patriarchal dominance, is not new territory for her. She came to some Internet fame a few months ago for being repeatedly censored on Instagram. She had posted a series of photos about menstrual blood, showing (gasp) bloodstains and the like. The fact that women have periods was apparently too much for the universe, so her photos were taken down, put back up, and taken down again.
In her accompanying artist statement, Kaur states (sic lowercase):i bleed each month to help make humankind a possibility. my womb is home to the divine. a source of life for our species. whether i choose to create or not. but very few times it is seen that way. in older civilizations this blood was considered holy. in some it still is. but a majority of people. societies. and communities shun this natural process. some are more comfortable with the pornification of women. the sexualization of women. the violence and degradation of women than this. they cannot be bothered to express their disgust about all that. but will be angered and bothered by this. we menstruate and they see it as dirty. attention seeking. sick. a burden. as if this process is less natural than breathing. as if it is not a bridge between this universe and the last. as if this process is not love. labour. life. selfless and strikingly beautiful.Their patriarchy is leaking.Their misogyny is leaking.We will not be censored.
Kaur, a writer based in Toronto, travels globally to speak and teach workshops on topics such as trauma and healing while also performing her spoken word poetry. She speaks for the brown woman as well as for all women. Many of her poems address the extra burden that women of color bear:our backstell storiesno books havethe spine tocarry--Women of colourYou can follow Rupi Kaur on Twitter, Instagram and at her website. Milk and Honey is available via her website and at Amazon.All images in post © Rupi Kaur. Cover image via Pixabay.