Alunos: Marcus Castro e Aramys Ferreira

    Rupi Kaur's book deals with feelings, pain and the hope of self-healing. Her poems talk about many common traumas, especially in women. When reading the book, we couldn't think of a different intertextuality than other women's poems.

    Audre Lorde is a big black, LGBTQIAP+ poet in America, her books talk about this intersectionality of being a woman, black and LGBTQIAP+. In one of her books, From a land where other people live, 1973, we can find some similarities with Rupi Kaur’s book.

    We chose poems that talk about generations of women teaching each other how to deal with experiencing the world. The first is Rupi's, which says:

The second also talk about mother, Audre Lorde’s poems says: 

It’s interesting how both poems talk about anger in different forms, the father’s anger and the mother’s anger. In Rupi’s, she earned all of her mother, but anger she earned hers dad. In Lorde’s, she’s afraid about her own anger and about the memory of hers mother anger. We think this happens because there are different experiences of being a woman in two books, one has the experience of being an Indian immigrant woman in the US and the other has the experience of being a black woman in a racist America that already hates her. The two shares a non-place experience where there is an internal and external struggle to create strategies to stay alive in a place that tries to kill them.

Inspired by Kaur's and Lorde's poems, we chose a poem for our artistic creation:

noname

marcusv

when He left

I said

fuck you - deal with your own problems

I took it 

from my deep inside

I was silent for so long

that the voice that I screamed wasn’t mine

all this mix of being gay and

black cut my voice every time I tried

yell at Him

I was the other in His life

black and the other

It's almost a synonym

how ridiculous

the oedipal life

but that's it,

everything i’ve seen in life

was betrayal

sex

and death

those things lives in a painful place in my head

and I explode in anger

every time it touches me

chokes me

and makes me come

I said: fuck you

deal with your own problems

like it wasn't mine problems

It was mine

after that night i cried 

and I felt sad

for the rest of the week

fuck you

take care of your own problems

that's what I said when He left

and that's what I said

when my dad told me he was leaving

for the first time

when I was 15.

I got home and

my mother was worried

waiting for me

Mom, I don't want to be like you

I don't want to be like my father

I don't even want to be like Him

I cried

Mom, I want to be your hug.

Reference:

KAUR, Rupi. MILK AND HONEY. EUA: Andrews Mcmeel Publishing, 2015.

LORDE, Audre. From a land where other people live. Broadside Press, 1973.