Beyond Mangoes and Monsoons: Rupi Kaur and Exploiting Diaspora Trauma
Image by Jo Ramsay
Rupi Kaur’s recognition as Poet of the Decade epitomizes the popularity of a particular kind of Asian American story that has been celebrated by Western audiences over the last ten years, one that is presented for consumption by a primarily white audience. But is this really a win for South Asians?
Twenty-seven-year old Rupi Kaur—Punjab-born and Toronto-raised —has been crowned Writer of the Decade. The author bestowing this title concedes that he finds her metaphors “impenetrable” and that “her work crumbles under traditional critical scrutiny,” but that’s not the point. To many, Rupi Kaur has made poetry, a genre that has long been thought to be confined to seventh grade literature classes, accessible to those who would otherwise not engage with it. In essence, Kaur is the latest and most popular poet to join a lineage of South Asian poets who write not for the prestige of publication in a renowned journal or graduate-level literature syllabus, but for the masses.
Whereas Kaur’s popularity is often lauded in Western culture as a major win in representation for South Asian voices, it doesn’t always feel that way within the South Asian community. For so many of us, it is unequivocally incredible that a Punjabi truck driver's daughter has had so much global success when caricatures like Apu from The Simpsons have been the most popular portrayals of South Asians most Americans and Canadians engaged with.
Kaur explains, “as a young girl, I needed [representation] — perhaps more than anything else. I can only speak as a South Asian woman, that is who I am.” However, Kaur tells a singular story of South Asian women, one centered on strict fathers, helpless mothers, longing and loss, suffering and sacrifice, all of which have a tendency to self-tokenize and self-orientalize. A Western audience looks at us and sees these stories, but we usually don’t look at ourselves and see them.
The proliferation of Facebook pages like Subtle Asian Traits and Subtle Curry Traits, which boast hundreds of thousands of members, show the power of speaking directly to a South Asian audience. We yearn to see ourselves reflected, to be spoken to directly and uniquely, but Rupi Kaur’s poetry falls a step short of achieving that. The representation she provides is more demographic than substantive.
In an interview, Kaur says that Sikh culture informs her work “every day,” explaining that the final human spiritual leader in the Sikh lineage, Guru Gobind Singh, “employed 52 poets in his court at Anandpur Sahib” and that the religious scripture of Sikhism, the Guru Granth Sahib, “is the most humbling and universal collection of poetry to be written.” She also holds that her lack of capitalization in her poems draws from the lack of capital letters in South Asian languages, specifically in Gurmukhi which was developed for recording the scriptures of Sikhism.
But while South Asian religion and culture may be implicitly understood to underpin Kaur’s work, it is never explicitly so. Kaur eschews any overt references to specific South Asian cultural or religious practices, drawing on Biblical imagery like the titular milk and honey, rather than invoke the smell of jeera, haldi, and lal mirch that fills the air when a gleaming silver spice dabba is opened. Reincarnation comes up numerous times in The Sun and Her Flowers, but scenes like the cool of water rushing over your feet as you cross the threshold of a gurdwara never are. That these specific references can only be unlocked by someone close to the South Asian experience and would be lost on a Western audience is entirely the point.
Poems like Kaur’s fall under the broad umbrella of what can be called “mango diaspora poetry,” an often-ridiculed subgenre (here, here, and here), which characterizes so much of the writing by and about South Asians in the West. These poems rely on stereotypes that often flatten the description of the complex South Asian experience into universal nostalgic sadness entwined with imagery of monsoons and plump, sweet fruit.
There are dozens of poems about the pain and sacrifice of being an immigrant, but none about pretty much any other part of the diasporic experience. Kaur falls in to line with this norm, stating on her website, “our trauma escapes the confines of our own times. we’re not just healing from what’s been inflicted onto us as children. my experiences have happened to my mother and her mother and her mother before that. it is generations of pain embedded into our souls.”
To Kaur’s credit, the young poet and activist is one of a very small number of South Asians both abroad and within India who have made a public statement in solidarity with one of the most pressing political struggles facing South Asians today, posting on her Instagram, “i stand with my muslim & kashmiri brothers and sisters throughout the country as they fight for their rights and freedoms. i am with them on their march toward liberty.” Other notable South Asian voices from chef Padma Lakshmi to Instagram influencers Hamel Patel and Sruthi Jayadevan remained silent on these issues while regularly capitalizing on the “aesthetics of their desi heritage.”
The fault isn’t Kaur’s for living and creating within this literary context; the responsibility falls on the shoulders of the media ecosystem that is willing to hear only one dominant immigrant story. The reality is that immigrants, their children, and most minorities of nearly any kind live in a setting that is conditioned to celebrate and understand stories of our suffering and little else. And as such, we feel we have to content-mine our lives for trauma to create stories that can sell, a phenomenon that has been dubbed trauma porn. Much has been written about Kaur’s tendency to construct a collective trauma of the South Asian experience, but when these trauma-centered stories are the only ones that are likely to gain traction, flattening the lines between lived experiences and imaginations of what those who came before us may have felt becomes inevitable rather than simply irresponsible.
It would be remiss to consider trauma porn without thinking about those for whom it has the greatest impact—Black Americans, several of whom Kaur has been accused of plagiarizing. Currently, Asian-Canadian and Asian-American stars like Lilly Singh, Awkwafina, and Kaur are becoming wildly popular and successful, winning awards and getting lucrative TV deals after having spent most of their artistic careers building their success on co-opting Black aesthetics from accents (Awkwafina) to hairstyles (Singh) to poetic style (Kaur). With Awkwafina becoming the first Asian-American woman to win a Golden Globe Award for best actress, Lilly Singh getting her own TV show, and Rupi Kaur being named writer of the decade, it is not insignificant that these three artists have built their careers largely off of adopting Black aesthetics and have distanced themselves from these traits after gaining larger fame and success.
In this context, it is not only apt, but also deeply reflective of the current moment in Asian-American media that Kaur has been deemed such a success. Kaur may have been the writer of a decade that has just come to a close during which movies like The Namesake and The Joy Luck Club reigned supreme, but there is hope that the decade to come will bring more stories not just broadly about an amorphous “us,” but stories truly for us. And with 2020 starting off with a national debate about immigrant stories and trauma porn, change may be on the horizon.
In this new decade, we hope that people will love us for more than our suffering.
ESSAY
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FEBRUARY 20,
2020
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7 MINUTE
READ
Kiran Misra
is a freelance writer and reporter, currently covering criminal justice in Chicago and South Asian American politics across the continent. She’s a proud midwesterner hailing from Cedar Rapids, Iowa and is currently based in Rome, Italy. You can find some of her other pieces here or find her on twitter here.