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.