Milk and Honey

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, sexual violence, and child sexual abuse.

Kaur positions herself as a writer of South Asian and Indian background who was brought up in the West. Her parents were a part of a diaspora community of Punjabi immigrants that settled in Ontario. Kaur found being a woman in this conservative community personally and culturally difficult; she identified with women who endured sexual violence and survived “years of shame and oppression. From the community and from colonizer after colonizer” (xv). To Kaur, standards in this community reinforce ideas that “a good Indian 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” (xv-xvi). In an article for Poetry Foundation, American poet Kazim Ali, who is also of Indian descent, talks about Kaur’s bravery in addressing the female body, given its perception in certain cultures: 

[M]enstrual blood [is] considered in South Asian (and Middle Eastern) culture to be an actual state of spiritual as well as physical uncleanliness: women who are menstruating are not allowed in mosques and temples, or even to participate in religious rituals and prayers in their own homes, in many religions of the region (Ali, Kazim. “On Instafame & Reading Rupi Kaur.” Poetry Foundation, 23 Oct. 2017).

Kaur’s claim to be a spokeswoman for South Asian women’s experience has been widely criticized, however. In an article in Buzzfeed, Chiara Giovanni doubts that Kaur is expressing the “generations of pain embedded into our souls” because “there is something deeply uncomfortable about the self-appointed spokesperson of South Asian womanhood being a privileged young woman from the West who unproblematically claims the experience of the colonized subject as her own, and profits from her invocation of generational trauma” (xvi) (See: Further Reading & Resources). Ali defends Kaur’s decision to adopt “veils or whatever it is that an American audience reads as ‘exotic’” as “cultural syncretism [...] in the West for those of us raised in South Asian cultures.”