Milk and Honey

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

Rupi Kaur’s collection directly speaks to women who have been traumatized by sexual assault. Kaur’s speaker shares her personal experience of rape, her fight to overcome its emotional and psychological ramifications, and desire to comfort and empower others like her.

Kaur explores the damage cause by harmful messages around sexuality and bodily autonomy internalized in childhood. In the Foreword, Kaur notes that many women are taught that “sex does not belong to them” (xv): Rather than expecting pleasure, they should “lay obediently. not to enjoy. let him take” (xvi). When the speaker is five, a boy holds “her shoulders down / like the handlebars of / the first bicycle / he ever rode” (4) to forcibly kiss her, imprinting on her a correlation between attraction, possession, and aggression—the boy treats her like an object he owns and can use as he will. This encounter makes her feel her body is “for giving to those that wanted” (4). This message is then exacerbated: When an uncle sexually abuses her, a horrific violation of trust, the speaker feels forced to remain silent by a “family who likes their daughters invisible” (25) and a culture in which “our knees / [are] pried open / by cousins / and uncles / and men” (28).