Milk & Honey by Rupi Kaur is a poem book mostly dealing with love, loss, pain, strength, self love and female empowerment. I believe the audience this book was targeted towards was largely female which is why it was difficult to be a submissive reader while reading the poems. I recently had the same difficultly when it came to the hit Netflix Marvel series that have been coming out. Daredevil, a show about a white Catholic man who fights crime. I am 100% that target audience and could not stop watching it. The next two shows were Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. A show about a white women who was a rape victim and a black man living in Harlem. I was resistant to these two just like Milk & Honey. Did I think they were bad, of course not, I just was not interested. But in order to enjoy those two shows and Kaur’s poem book as an author I had to take on the authorial audience role. I had to create a new role that yearns for experience and make a commitment to actively appreciate what Kaur was communicating to her readers. I had to realize where the author is directing towards a specific audience (not one I am part of) and that the actual audience must assume the role of authorial audience.
If Kaur is not simply writing for a female audience, she is trying to attract men to look at this and response from their point of view. Can feel the same way? No. I’m a man. Can I try to be in those shoes and understand. Of course. And I can also give my viewpoint as a male audience member and say how it made me feel. From what I could tell there was a lot of times when the poems would talk of “herself” and bring on multiple roles for herself. She would tell herself to get stronger, thus creating a victim out of herself. Herself. Herself. Herself! It can go on in circles how many roles she creates and then accidentally creates in trying to “help”. This can create multiple readers as well. One could see this self help as encouraging and hopefully. Then the cynical person would see this as self pity. If the pity card is all you are ever going to draw then shuffle the deck.
I want to think that it is the purpose of the book to be vague and give you a poem to make your own interpretation of the meaning behind the hurt and the love and the comeback from it all. I do not feel a preaching voice from the authorial audience.
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I really like how you brought in your experiences with Marvel’s tv shows into this blog, great job. (However, I don’t necessarily agree that you need to fit every single detail of the character to fit the readerly role that that narrator calls you into.) Nonetheless, I think Milk and Honey calls for a specific kind of person and I can see why you’d be resistant. I thought that I was the type of person who would submit to this book– writer/reader/feminist/advocate for feelings, and I was still resistant to this book. So I think I found a new readerly role in trying that awareness of my resistance while knowing I was the perfect candidate for submission. I think my point is that we don’t need to be the same person as our character narrator. It’s something deeper that draws us in, that allows us to submit.
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I also agree with the fact that one does not necessarily need to be 100% able to relate to the narrator of a text to fully understand the meaning of it. For example, I am pretty much the opposite of a white, crime-fighting catholic man who , but I am still able to take on the role of addressee while watching Daredevil. With that being said, I still had some difficulty submitting to Milk and Honey, while still fitting into the “target audience” as you mentioned in your blog post. I do believe that it less to do with how relatable the reader might find the content, but more of the reader’s ability to take on different readerly roles.
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