Rupi Kaur and her voice for women's emancipation through poetry.

Rupi Kaur

Rupi Kaur is a Canadian poet, Illustrator, and Photographer. She was born in Punjab, India, on the 4th of October 1992. Rupi emigrated to Canada with her parents when she was four years old.

Kaur studied Rhetoric and professional writing at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She has also taught creative writing to high School and College students.

Kaur began performing her poetry in 2009 after leaving an abusive relationship, sharing her poems on social media platforms, and began to gain readers and followers. She was also referred to as an ‘‘instapoet, a term for poets who publish work on social media, especially Instagram.

She self-published her first poetry collection, Milk and Honey, on CreateSpace in 2014.  After its mass success, Andrew McMeel Publishing reprinted it in October 2015. Milk and Honey has been translated into 43 languages and has sold over 11 million copies.

Kaur’s second poetry collection, The Sun and Her Flowers, was published in 2017. Her third, Home Body, followed in 2020, and her fourth, Healing Through Words, in 2022.

Milk and Honey is divided into 4 parts: The hurting, The loving, The breaking, and The healing. Below is a poem from Milk and Honey.

i want to apologize to all the women i have called beautiful

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 all you have to be proud of

when you have broken mountains with your wit

from now on i will say things like

you are resilient, or you are extraordinary

not because i don’t think you’re beautiful

but because i need you to know

you are more than that

Kaur’s poems are straightforward. She tells you exactly what she means and sometimes uses figurative words. Her writing centres on themes such as feminism, sexual violence, love, self-love, and culture.

The poem above discusses how women are praised for their outward beauty, while qualities such as bravery, intelligence, and strength are ignored. The poem may be influenced by Kaur’s South Asian heritage, where patriarchy is dominant.

This writing can be themed as a poem of appreciation. Appreciation of women who are ignored or discriminated against by society. We get a sense of this in the last four lines.

you are resilient, or you are extraordinary

not because i don’t think you’re beautiful

but because i need you to know

you are more than that

See a version of my poem below: We are not Afraid.

We are not Afraid                                                                          

We are in a golden age

A few women chirp freely like birds

And some are merely given the privilege to watch.

No more, watch it, woman!

Or I’ll cut you off

I will not feed you

And then, you’ll go hungry

I will make you BEG.

Aha, I see women dancing freely

The ladies have become more vocal

God made man, he took man’s rib

And he made Eve

So, all the Eves have become one,

WOMAN is here to stay.

Although Eve ate the forbidden fruit,

We are not fools

We rebuild Earth with protruding tummies and have babies,

We give gold to everyone with our smiles, and we have

The courage to say

We are not Afraid.