Milk and honey was published by Andrews McMeal Publishing in 2015 and consists of 206 pages of poetry, divided into four chapters: the hurting, the loving , the breaking, the healing, with an additional two pages, one about the book and one about Rupi Kaur. The format of the book is black and white, including several black pages with white print. Kaur includes several of her own illustrations alongside her poetry to complement her words.
I finally decided to jump on the bandwagon, albeit far too late. The reason for this review and even reading milk and honey in the first place was my sister's references to the book, her underwhelmed opinion and her seeking my thoughts on the matter. Naturally I wasn't quite in a position to give a fair opinion on Kaur's work without having read it. So now here we are. No doubt I had heard a lot about this book and consequently I went in expecting a certain kind of narrative. I also know that Rupi Kaur's work seemed to bring joy to many women of colour. I'll describe what she writes about, how she writes, the nature of love in her work and some references to her work as a woman of colour.
Kaur uses highly emotional language in her poetry to evoke strong feelings in her readers; she appears to have wholly adopted an aesthetic approach to her writing in order to create an experience of strong sentiments and physical sensations. Kaur covers issues like rape and sexual violence and the silencing of the female voice, including abusive relationships and even angry couples. These images can be taken literally or interpreted metaphorically as various difficulties being faced in life.
Kaur calls on "self-love", a popular term referring to caring for oneself, to be the foundation of human strength and this comes before loving others or seeking the love of others. There is a consistent desire to be loved, wanted and to belong in these poems and Kaur attempts to balance these desires out with advice on beginning with the self. However, she nonetheless values the search for love and a partner, recognising it as an added strength.
I was quite surprised at the highly sexualised imagery Kaur used, mainly because I wasn't expecting it. The poetry felt so much about human desires, its wants and needs and they are significantly on carnal and "animal" levels. The strong sexual themes and language, for me, seem like a contemporary "necessity" for success in the arts. I remember once during my Bachelors degree having a class discussion on how it is literary critics who decide whether sexual representations in literature are pornographic or tasteful and artistic. I personally found it a little vulgar and a strategy to pander to a wider audience, considering that mainstream modern Western society is hyper-sexualised and we live in an increasingly promiscuous culture. These themes subsided towards the end of the book.
Kaur included one poem on mainstream European standards of beauty and highlighting the richness and beauty in Indian and other coloured skin tones. There is one poem on women of colour and then one poem on being a Kaur and Sikhi. She also writes a three-lined poem on seva, selfless service, which is an element of the Sikh religion. While I was glad to read these short poems, I felt they were too little and too discreet. I could not but help compare it to Nayyirah Waheed's approach, which is far more potent as she abruptly condemns her colonisers and their languages. Kaur is far more gentle and doesn't point fingers at the colonisers or the West, which may well have allowed her to enjoy a more white, middle-class audience.
Towards the end, the book felt like a self-help handbook for women coming out of relationships or difficult periods in their lives, which is useful to those who want to seek solace in it. However, I was somewhat disappointed with this collection of poems because I had hoped for a richer representation of Punjabi and/ or Sikh culture. Not only did I not get these, but I felt the Divine was not referred to at all and these poems were only about humans at their lowest levels, and not the transcendent. Greatness was in the "universe", terms that probably sound lovely to atheist ears. Overall Kaur's writing is definitely provocative and the themes may well resonate well with a mainstream audience but I didn't quite find them to suit my taste nor did I find them particularly uplifting (in a spiritual sense); it was a tad mundane.
