I woke up annoyed at how much the world seems to enjoy hating Rupi Kaur (I discovered both people raving about this piece of scholarly criticism and this genre of parody yesterday). Well, not exactly. I woke up perfectly happy and excited to finish the book that I’m reading, and then went downstairs to brew coffee and also, somehow, annoyance.
It took a second or two to realise that the explanation for my annoyance was simple. One of my roommates has this poem by Kaur up on our fridge:
I don’t care what you think of this “as poetry.” I’ve done my share of poetry analysis, and those aren’t the tools I want to deploy here. I also recognize that there are lots of interesting lenses—of race, of ethnicity and religion, of globalization—through which Kaur’s work can be viewed, and you may choose to do so. But those lenses do not then impose upon Kaur a standard that she, personally, needs to meet.
This imposition of a “higher” standard is what Giovanni seems to suggest in her piece in Buzzfeed. She writes, “It is only by eschewing complacency and holding such artists to account that mainstream media and culture will become more diverse: the kind of representation that, without compromise, accurately tells the stories of people of color around the world, and not just the stories that are the easiest to sell.” This makes a certain kind of sense, but isn’t the whole point of building diversity in the arts that people, regardless of their identity, feel free to make the art they want to make? Given that Kaur self-published her book (pretty much an antonym for “easy to sell,” I’d imagine), I don’t doubt that she’s making art that she wants to make. With time, maybe what Kaur wants to write will change, become more specific, become more explicitly political (consider Beyoncé’s trajectory from Destiny’s Child to Lemonade), or maybe it won’t. But holding a particular woman of colour to some different standard that she needs to meet for the sake of someone else’s notion of authentic representation? That seems antithetical to the whole point of fighting for diversity.
What I care about, when I read Kaur’s poem every morning nowadays, or even just notice it peripherally, is what she says, clearly, simply, and powerfully. It reads just as well without the formatting that is the butt of so many jokes:
“I want to apologize to all the women I have called pretty before I’ve called them intelligent or brave. I am sorry I made it sound as though something as simple as what you’re born with is the most you have to be proud of, when your spirit has crushed mountains. From now on I will say things like, you are resilient, or, you are extraordinary. Not because I don’t think you’re pretty. But because you are so much more than that.”
Had I thought these thoughts of empowerment before reading Kaur’s words? Of course I had. But did I expect to see the words of a young South Asian woman in this home I live in temporarily, a home built by two young white women? No, I didn’t. As someone who has struggled with my body image in a uniquely racialized and culturally specific way for the last fifteen years, and who is emerging, because of a lot of hard work, from the fog that such a struggle builds in one’s mind, it matters to me that such a simple expression of everything I’ve struggled with has become so popular. That it can be a silent moment of connection between me and these once-strangers in whose home I now live.
Giovanni also writes,
“Kaur indeed seems to note little difference between her educated, Western, Indian-Canadian self and her ancestors, or even modern South Asian women of a similar age in rural Punjab. She suggests that the way all South Asian women move through life is universal, uniting herself with them by insistently returning focus to the South Asian female body as a locus of “shame and oppression” in her collection.”
Speaking as someone squarely in the middle of those two extremes that Giovanni paints, these words seem counter-productive. Are there differences among the experiences of millions of South Asian women across the last century? Duh. The extreme shame I felt about my body hair, growing up in the 1990s and 2000s in north India was alien to my grandmother and her sisters who grew up in south India more than a half century before, for example. Should there be work that examines all the ways in which country, class, and caste influence women’s body image? Absolutely. Could some of that work be poetry? Sure. But why must Kaur write that poetry and why on earth should we dismiss what she does write? Do those differences across time and place and culture mean that the South Asian female body isn’t a locus of shame and oppression? No. Kaur talks about that locus in a way that seems real to her, and her words matter to a lot of people. Surely that is enough to expect from a 24 year old’s first book of poetry.
Ambika Kamath 