And Here You Are Living, Despite It All

This evening I’m going to see the wonderful Rupi Kaur perform at Leeds Museum. If you don’t recognise the name, chances are you’ll recognise her brief lines of poetry which are paired with line sketches, from all over Instagram, Pinterest and the like.

Back in 2015, Rupi Kaur created the theme of a university photography project (she has a degree in rhetoric studies from the University of Waterloo) around the taboo about menstruation. Doing so, she started a censorship ‘war’ with Instagram – who removed the image below, twice.

She fought back, writing the following on Facebook: "Thank you Instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique... I will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in underwear but not be okay with a small leak when your pages are filled with countless photos/accounts where women (so many who are underage) are objectified, pornified and treated less than human."

Instagram eventually reinstated the image after Rupi Kaur’s post was liked by 53,000 people and shared over 12,000 times. They apologised to her, writing in a message: "A member of our team accidentally removed something you posted on Instagram. This was a mistake, and we sincerely apologise for this error."

 Fast forward a few years, Rupi Kaur is now a #1 New York Times bestseller, with milk and honey (her first collection of poetry) selling over 1.5 million copies. She has now released her second, the sun and her flowers. Rupi states she purposefully writes in lower case –

although i can read and understand my mother tongue (punjabi) i do not have the skillset to write poetry in it. to write punjabi means to use gurmukhi script. and within this script there are no uppercase or lowercase letters. all letters are treated the same. i enjoy how simple that is. how symmetrical and how absolutely straightforward. i also feel there is a level of equality this visuality brings to the work. a visual representation of what i want to see more of within the world: equalness.

and the only punctuation that exists within gurmukhi script is a period. which is represented through the following symbol: |

so in order to preserve these small details of my mother language I include them within this language. no case distinction and only periods. a world within a world. which is what i am as an immigrant. as a diasporic punjabi sikh woman. it is less about breaking the rules of english (although that’s pretty fun) but more about tying in my own history and heritage within my work.

Below is my favourite piece by her, a poem that resonates with me again and again.