Milk and Honey Blog 3

In reading Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey, I have come to find that intertextual codes manifest themselves differently in a collection of poetry as opposed to more story-driven works of narrative fiction. That is, the dynamics that allow a writer to employ these intertextual codes in a typical work of fiction are altered when approaching a book of poetry. For this collection specifically, the “events” of the book are not concrete moments in time that the reader can observe. The poems in this book are separated into four sections, each featuring poems that have to do with that specific topic — namely, the hurting, the loving, the breaking, and the healing.

Kaur’s poems largely aim to portray or evaluate specific feelings, rather than focusing on individual events or moments. These poems have quite clearly been written as reactions to various events that have occurred in the author’s life, though the specifics surrounding these events are never discussed. This leaves the reader curious as to what has happened, forcing him or her to partially construct these events only from that which is specifically provided by Kaur within the poems. These instances are not compiled chronologically, thus the reader is incapable of using their juxtaposition to uncover the causal sequence therein. This means that someone attempting to read this book of poetry may find themselves incapable of evaluating the text through either the Hermeneutic or Proarietic codes, due to the nature of how the book is structured.

However, this collection of poetry from Kaur does still play heavily with codes, both symbolic and cultural. As mentioned in Blog 1, Melanie discusses controlling values, the concept of femininity, and the role that female empowerment plays in the book. Additionally, I believe that cultural codes play a vital role in framing the purpose for this collection of poetry. As we have read in chapter six of “The Subject of Semiotics” by Silverman, “[t]he cultural codes, which are extremely numerous and heterogenous, to a very large degree subsume all other categories. They speak the familiar “truths” of the existing cultural order…” (Silverman 242). One concept along these lines that I found to be both especially compelling and readily apparent in this book is the connection between females and the idea of being broken. This plays heavily into a cultural code we all must contend with, namely the idea that men are masculine and whole, while women are not only fragile, but incapable of being whole without a man. Though these gender roles may seem outdated, their impact becomes readily apparent in the section “the breaking” as Kaur reflects on her heartbreak and resulting mental state. Multiple times throughout this section, Kaur expands upon the concepts of falling apart, being empty, and being broken.

I had to leave

I was tired of

allowing you to

make me feel

anything less

than whole

These concepts of fragility and emptiness lend themselves again to our cultural understanding of femininity, and stem from the fact that we live in a society that impresses upon its young girls and women the idea that they are less than whole, and will not be happy until they have found a man. In terms of this book specifically, this cultural code exists as a sort of soil from which these poems manifest themselves. And as a result, much of the heartbreak and pain expressed in these poems stems directly from Kaur’s opposition to this cultural code, and its role in the network of controlling values at play.