Milk and Honey

One of the reasons milk and honey is has been challenged so much in US high school libraries is because of its sexual frankness. Groups that demand the collection be banned point to Kaur’s description of sexual assault and her discussion of sexual acts of pleasure. The narrative of milk and honey follows the speaker’s growth into a person in control of her body, with a healthy understanding of her sexuality—a specific kind of coming of age.

Kaur’s speaker details sexual experience in two ways. First, she discusses sexual violation and its detrimental effects. At the end of the first section, the speaker’s assault has left a lasting fear: “i flinch when you touch me / i fear it is him” (33). Then, she considers the connection between pain and pleasure in a consensual adult relationship. After analyzing the effects of a violent act, Kaur shows how one might navigate pleasurable sexual activity after this violence. 

Kaur’s speaker makes a distinction between the violation of rape, the physical coupling of intercourse, and the emotional connection of “making love” (12). Thus, she does not count her childhood assault as sexual experience. Rather, her “first time” occurs when she is “ready” (50), after the would-be lover “places his hands / on [her] mind / before reaching / for [her] waist” (46). In other words, emotional trust allows the speaker to explore sexuality in safety and with pleasure. 

Kaur alternates between simply suggestive and more graphic depiction of sexual acts. Ruminations like “it’s your voice / that undresses me” (61) pull a gauzy film over the actual physical reality of sex. In contrast, Kaur’s illustrations often add to the work’s explicit nature. For example, the relative vagueness of the lines “I am learning / how to love him / by loving myself” (47) is clarified by the accompanying drawing, which confirms that we are to read the image as masturbation. 

Kaur wants to convey to readers that sexual encounters can be both pleasurable and fraught. Intimacy is not always easy. People have previous experiences that shape interactions. Childhood rape made the speaker feel sexually damaged; sexual exploration made her feel at first empowered, but later became harmful and possessive. Kaur’s decision to describe both the bodily autonomy and vulnerability of sexuality channels honesty; although the narrative of overcoming the emotional lows of a breakup is not original to this collection, Kaur wants readers to see her experiences as a mirror to their own. This, she claims, will allow them to leave harmful relationships like “snakeskin” so that “the letting go has / become the forgetting” (111). Kaur wants readers to draw on her depictions to articulate their own feelings about their own experiences.

In milk and honey, the speaker’s parents shape her understanding of relationships. Deeply affected by the way her mother and father treat her and each other, the speaker must learn to stop their negative influence while thriving from their positive one. 

The speaker’s relationship with her father is tenuous and damaging. The speaker’s “father is absent” (24); this makes her angry—she does not want to “beg [him] / for a relationship” (20). She resents that “he was supposed to be / the first male love,” but she must “search for him everywhere” instead (8). When he is around, he is a frightening and punitive presence: He “yell[ed] at her” (11) but claimed to be expressing affection, leading the speaker to conflate love and anger. This results in her sense that she is not “allowed / to take up space” (21) and that she does not deserve respect.

The speaker’s mother, meanwhile, models unhealthy submission. When her parents argue, the speaker’s mother makes herself small for her father, who accepts his wife’s self-abnegation and silences her: He “shoves the word hush / between [my mother’s] lips” (27). The speaker learns that this “shrinking is hereditary” (21). Underscoring the dysfunctional connection between aggression and affection, the speaker cannot tell “if [her] mother is / terrified or in love with / [her] father / it all / looks the same” (32). The speaker learns negative habits from their interactions: She falls in love with distant people like her father, and acquiesces to being silenced like her mother. 

However, the speaker’s parents are also often sources of joy. Her father calls his wife’s pregnancy an element of the divine: “the closest thing to god on this earth / is a woman’s body. It’s where life comes from” (37). His enthusiasm normalizes a woman’s bodily functions and natural processes. Her mother urges the speaker to ignore her example and instead to make good choices: “[S]he tells me to marry the type / of man I’d want to raise my son to be like” (39). Although this advice supports a traditional framework with the assumption that the speaker will marry and have children with a male partner, her mother promotes self-advocacy. When the speaker is later in a bad relationship, her mother reminds her she “deserve[s] better” (74). 

These positive lessons eventually help the speaker move forward toward healthy relationships. She projects her mother’s voice when she gives advice to others just as her mother did. Her father’s recognition of women’s bodily power is echoed in her respect for natural beauty, menstruation, and childbirth, which the speaker also links to her ability to write poetry: “[M]y heartbeat quickens at / the thought of birthing poems / which is why I will never stop / opening myself up to conceive them” (192).