Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry by Rupi Kaur that is split into four different sections, each dealing with a different aspect of her life, femininity, sexuality, and her relationship with pain on varying levels. I went into this book mostly blind since I am typically a reader that is easily swayed by outside influences. With that being said, I enjoy reading poetry, but I would not consider myself to be the most avid consumer of poetry. Kaur’s poetry is mostly very short which makes it quite easy to breeze through the collection in only a few sittings. What little words that she use in her writing carry a great deal of meaning which engaged me as a reader.
What I am “reading for” is what makes this poetry so effective as opposed to poetry collections containing much longer works.
The first section of the book, “The Hurting” deals with Kaur’s experiences while growing up in an extremely patriarchal household. She documents the relationship between her mother and her father as well as, her father and herself. Kaur writes a lot about what it means to be a woman and what it means to have authority.
That idea can be seen in the the following poem.
You pinned
my legs to
the ground
With your feet
and demanded that
i stand up (25).
The “you” I assume (based on previous text) is some male figure from the narrator’s life. The male figure has authority in this case and is using it to suppress the narrator. A result the narrator tries to reject this preexisting societal expectations, but fails. Women are not the people who are given authority in the household and as a result are not given power.
Now that the narrator is under the rule of the male character, she tries to fight back. Having a lack of power leads to a lack of importance.
You were so afraid
Of my voice
i decided to be
afraid of it too (17).
The overall theme of this section is female empowerment but what are the steps that must be taken in order to get there? The poem above, the narrator rejects her own personal idea of what it means to be a powerful individual. In the end she submits to the societal expectation of women in fear of rejection.
Overall, I am interested in seeing how the controlling and opposing controlling values come into place during the duration of the the rest of the book.
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I am very intrigued by your reading of the book. As I was reading these poems, I was extremely submissive and failed to look deeper into the meaning of the poems. However, now that you pose the idea that these poems, in particular, (which, by the way, are two of my favorite) are about the oppression of women, I’m not quite sure how I missed it before. As they say, hindsight is 20/20. I think you did a great job with the value graph, but of course, nothing is truly complete. As Drew said in class, how can this graph be related more to this book? The narrator was oppressed by men her entire life– her father, by two separate lovers. From what we see in this book, it looks like she never really stood on her own two feet. And then, in “The Healing,” when she started to love herself and was alone, only then was she able to actually be free and empowered.
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Great post! Reading your blog post was my first time gaining a female perspective on this collection of poetry, and I found that you illuminated some areas that I had overlooked in my first reading. Consuming this text as a male, I did find some slight difficulties connecting to certain messages or poems in the book. However, the simplified nature and emotional weight behind many of these poems was more than enough to sweep me away with them, rather than causing me to be a resistant reader. However, I did feel a noticeable disconnect when it came to certain poems that dealt with the female perspective. I think it could be helpful to discuss the concept of gender not only in its relation to the themes of the book, but how those gender differences may impact readers differently.
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