Rupi Kaur is feminism, poetry and Instagram

For some years now, social networks have been announcing what many already suspected: new ways of creating literature and reaching readers in a more democratic way. The movement deployed by networks such as Facebook, Twitter or, especially, Instagram has resulted in a new design, the "Instapoet", of whose tribe the Canadian poet Rupee kaur is the queen mother after turning her publications into two best-selling books. A reality that not only confirms the renewal of literature, but also the return of poetry as the "mainstream" genre that had been clamoring for years.

Rupi Kaur (and the most famous menstruation of the millennium)

Born on October 5, 1992, a girl from a family of the Sikh religion, in the state of Punjab, in India, received the names of Rupi (goddess of beauty) and Kaur (always pure). Two names that seemed to announce the liberation that this girl, who emigrated with her parents to Canada at the age of 4, promised to a long generation of condemned women and a poetry seen during the last century as a less commercial genre than others such as the novel.

A post shared by rupi kaur (@rupikaur_) on Apr 30, 2017 at 3: 21pm PDT

Since she was little, Rupi Kaur wrote and drew, conceiving both arts as a "whole". At school she was the strange girl, the one who preferred to spend time between writings and photographs that sought to change certain perspectives and disarm some universal taboos. In 2009, Kaur began to recite at the Punjab Community Health Center in Malton, Ontario, and in 2013 to write poems on the social network Tumblr. The explosion would come when the young woman created an account on Instagram in 2014 and then everything changed.

The poems of Rupi Kaur they refer to topics such as feminism, violence, immigration or love in a way never seen before. Denoting a singular sensitivity that uses universal elements to strike a chord and simplify concepts that have caused some of the great conflicts in history, Kaur began to publish part of her poetry on Instagram.

However, fame would come with a photograph, one in which the young woman appeared lying on her back in bed while leaving a trail of regular blood.

thank you @instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique. you deleted a photo of a woman who is fully covered and menstruating stating that it goes against community guidelines when your guidelines outline that it is nothing but acceptable. the girl is fully clothed. the photo is mine. it is not attacking a certain group. nor is it spam. and because it does not break those guidelines i will repost it again. i will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in an 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. Thank you. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ this image is a part of my photoseries project for my visual rhetoric course. you can view the full series at rupikaur.com the photos were shot by myself and @ prabhkaur1 (and no. the blood. is not real.) ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ i bleed each month to help make humankind a possibility. my womb is home to the divine. a source of life for our species. whether i choose to create or not. but very few times it is seen that way. in older civilizations this blood was considered holy. in some it still is. but a majority of people. societies. and communities shun this natural process. some are more comfortable with the pornification of women. the sexualization of women. the violence and degradation of women than this. they cannot be bothered to express their disgust about all that. but will be angered and bothered by this. we menstruate and they see it as dirty. attention seeking. sick. a burden. as if this process is less natural than breathing. as if it is not a bridge between this universe and the last. as if this process is not love. labor. life. selfless and strikingly beautiful.

A post shared by rupee kaur (@rupikaur_) on Mar 24, 2015 at 9:02pm PDT

The photograph, part of the material of a photographic essay on prejudice about menstruation, was censored by Instagram, being returned to the author shortly after. To this day, the snapshot published in 2015 has more than 101 thousand likes, being the starting gun for a collection of poems that would gradually unravel on the social network until it became two books.

Rupi Kaur: emotional like water

Shortly before the publication of his famous photograph, Rupi Kaur had already published his collection of poems in 2014 Milk and Honey via Amazon. The author herself also designed the covers and designs that accompany each of the poems in the book, divided into four parts: "the hurting", "the loving", "the breaking" and "the healing". Feminism, rape or humiliation are the main themes of a book whose success caught the attention of Andrews McMeel Publishing, who published a second edition of it at the end of 2015. The result was half a million copies sold in the United States alone and a # 1 in The New York Times.

Milk and Honey would be published shortly after in Spain in Spain under the title Other ways to use your mouth by Espasa.

The success of the book would derive in a second, called The Sun and her Flowers, published in October 2017 and has already become one of this author's favorites. Preceded by a meteoric advertising campaign on the author's own Instagram account, the collection of poems deals with themes such as immigration or war in addition to the artist's flagship themes, who has divided her work into five chapters: «wilting», « falling "," rooting "," rising "and" blooming ".

Emotional as water, as defined in one of the poems of The Sun & her Flowers, Rupi Kaur has changed the rules of the game by turning a social network as visual as Instagram into the perfect showcase through which to enliven a poetry that he was not going through his best moments. Influenced by authors such as Alice Walker or the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran, Kaur is also inspired by its Sikh culture, especially in its sacred readings, to readapt old exotic stories that deal with universal themes without forgetting that magical and tragic point. Writing is Kaur's weapon, her way of channeling past episodes and setting an example for the rest, as she suggested during an interview for the newspaper El Mundo:

«When I started I needed to express myself, to get out the pain that I had inside, because I was not a very popular girl in school; I was an introvert and they used to mess with me. And writing helped me. It has been a tool that has helped me to heal wounds, even if it was painful. For me writing has great cathartic and liberating power. It has helped me grow. I have learned, among other things, that life is a gift, yes. She can take it all away from you and still you will be willing to love her.»

some of the love poetry in #thesunandherflowers was directly inspired by the folk punjabi music i grew up on. this music carries such of love. longing. and devotion. in this particular poem i pushed the inspiration further by illustrating a very famous punjabi epic titled 'sohni-mahiwal' as painted by the 20th century sikh artist sobha singh. sobha singh produced hundreds of works in his lifetime touching on everything from sikh history to historical reimaginings to punjabi epics. i can confidently say that most punjabi and / or sikh households own his work. we have five! and now back to the story of 'sohni-mahiwal'. the tale that inspired the painting 🖼 'sohni-mahiwal' is one of the great tragic romances of the punjab region. sohni is a young girl who falls in love with mahiwal. her family disapproves and marries her off to someone else. nevertheless sohni and mahiwal continue to meet. except mahiwal lives across the river. so to see him each night sohni crosses the legendary chenab river by using a large baked earthen pot to help her stay afloat. one day sohni's sister-in-law finds out about their meetings and replaces sohni's pot with an unbaked one. that night as sohni makes her way across the chenab to see her lover the unfinished pot dissolves and she drowns. when mahiwal hears screaming he rushes to save sohni but it is too late and he also suffers the same fate. it is said that sohni and mahiwal reunite only in death. ~ i imagine that in this particular poem from #thesunandherflowers the character arrives on a shore to confess a love that cannot be contained any longer. i imagine the spirits of sohni and mahiwal are here. gracing the waters that once took them. greeting every lover who approaches to share their story with open hearts ♥ ️

A post shared by rupee kaur (@rupikaur_) on Dec 13, 2017 at 7: 27pm, and PST

Kaur's passion has become an inspiration for new authors and an influence in the world of letters. His tour, which covers Canada and the United States and which this month will land at the Jaipur City Book Fair as the first stop of his The Indian Tour, confirms the impact of this young woman on social networks, poetry and, especially, a feminism in which some of the great authors of this millennium have deepened during these years.

We hope that the arrival of Rupi Kaur will not only serve to reduce to the essential some of the great evils of our time, but also to return poetry to the place it deserves and see on social networks the perfect way to expose the world new ( and necessary) ways of expression.

Have you read anything from Rupi Kaur?