(July 31, 9:30 am)
“i want to apologize to all 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.”
That’s 28-year-old Rupi Kaur for you. A poet who speaks of love, loss, pain, empowerment, womanhood, abuse, trauma and sexuality like no one else. She encapsulates a tide of emotions in her bite-sized prose and makes people fall in love with every word.
Poetry is an art form that truly embodies the ‘less is more’ philosophy. Just a couple of lines are enough to make you wince in pain or fall in love or feel empowered in union. That’s the power of poems, and the Indian Canadian Kaur is a master of it all.
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From being someone who couldn’t speak English till the age of 10 to becoming a bestselling poet and author, the Indian-Canadian has come a long way.
From warm India to lonely Canada
Born in Punjab in 1992, Kaur migrated to Canada at the age of three with her parents who had witnessed the 1984 anti-Sikh riots from close quarters. The family settled in Brampton. But adjusting to the new life in the West was hard for a young Kaur as she moved from a “warm place in India” that was full of love to a “place that was cold, rigid and where you couldn’t understand anything.”
In her words, she felt like an alien in this new country, where she didn’t understand the language or the culture. This alienation sort of pushed her into loneliness at a young age. It was her mom who came to her rescue by encouraging her to draw and write as a means of expressing herself fully. With that Kaur started pouring her feelings and emotions on pieces of paper, and poetry almost became a cathartic experience for her.
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The love for poetry
As spirituality and faith form a large part of Sikh culture, Kaur was introduced to poetry in the form of Gurbani and verses of Bulle Shah (a Sufi poet) at a very young age.
“Sikh scripture written in poetic verse is sung when a child is born, it is recited when someone gets married, or when they pass. And so poetry was a part of my everyday life. I learned early on that poetry is how we can explain big ideas in simple ways. There were evenings when my dad would sit around for hours, analyzing a single verse for hours. I was fascinated by how 5 words could have so much meaning. How we could dig deeper and deeper and deeper, and still there were elements left to explore,” she told Vogue.
But it wasn’t until her seventh grade – when an introverted and bullied Kaur won an essay competition – that she found the courage to stand tall in front of her class. She saw this award as her first step in becoming the person she always wanted to be. It gave her the confidence to write poems, and by the time she was in high school, Kaur had started blogging anonymously. These were baby steps towards her big dream.
At Waterloo University, she chose to major in rhetoric and professional writing. It was here that her writing became more reflective than before and she began performing poetry. However, her poems received a lukewarm response for being too raw or for making people uncomfortable.
Coming out to the world
By 2013, Kaur was ready to put her work out for the world, and that too, under her name, and that’s exactly what she did when she made an account on Tumblr, and many of her posts got over 10,000 notes. A year later, she decided to weave art into poetry and moved to Instagram where she began illustrating poems.
The prose that had love, heartbreak, pain, trauma and abuse at their core resonated with millions of people. Kaur gave voice to feelings that many couldn’t put into words. It was in her poems that many found solace, and these very words made Kaur an Insta poet at 22.
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In a conversation with HT Brunch, she said,
“The pain that all people experience in life and the light that helps them champion through it all – it’s their lives and their stories and their love and will to keep living that moves me to write.”
Her debut book
While she was a star on social media, thanks to her poems, her work was largely being snubbed by publishing houses. In a world where fiction and non-fiction rule the roost, poetry often finds itself in the dusty corners of a bookstore, or so she was told. But Kaur was adamant to put her work out to a larger audience beyond her social media following. And she did that with her self-published debut book Milk and Honey.
In a 2013 poem about the 1984 Sikh genocide, she referred to those who lost their husbands and families to violence as ‘milk and honey,’ and had dreams of using this phrase for her future projects. A year in, she accomplished this with her first book.
As a child growing up in Canada, Kaur never came across a book that reflected the torment and experiences of her community or South Asian diaspora.
“The trauma of South Asian people escapes the confines of our own times. We’re not just healing from what’s been inflicted onto us as children… it is generations of pain embedded into our souls,” she added.
It was the yearning to have access to words written by people who looked liked her that made her realize the importance of representation.
Finished both ‘With the Fire on High’ and ‘Clap When You Land’ by Elizabeth Acevedo and now on to ‘Milk and Honey’ from Rupi Kaur. This just hit me. I love the simplicity of her writing. pic.twitter.com/YlDRoCJkHN
— Laura Webb (@LauraLolder) July 26, 2021
A social-media star
While her words had intrigued many, it was the removal of an Instagram photo posted showing menstrual blood – part of a university project on taboo – that catapulted her to fame. The artist slammed Instagram for being misogynistic and fought against censorship.
It was this photo and Kaur’s harsh critique of the photo-blogging site that went viral. This made her an overnight Instagram celebrity and her book Milk and Honey was bought by US publisher Andrews McKeel and reissued in October. In no time, over a million copies were sold and it made its way to the New York Times Bestsellers list
2017 was yet another exciting year for Kaur as she released her second book The Sun and Her Flowers, which made her one of BBC‘s 100 most influential women of 2017.
In the last few years, Kaur’s bite-sized poems and affirmations have promoted self-love and personal growth like nothing else. The universal themes of love and loss delivered in its rawness make Kaur stand out among many contemporaries. Undoubtedly, she is the original Insta Poet who made poetry accessible to millions in the easiest way possible.
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Editor’s Take
Even the most legendary poets have found it difficult to make a career purely out of their craft, but Indian-Canadian Rupi Kaur is a textbook example of doing it right, and that too, with elan. Known as one of the original Insta poets, she has revolutionized modern-day poetry and prose and made it appealing to millennials like no one else. Her play-it-straight approach to women empowerment, love and pain has helped her garner a cult following in recent times.
