Warning: This post may trigger negative emotions!
Estudos Linguístico-Discursivos em Língua Inglesa IV - Matutino
Written by Isabella Monteiro de Almeida & Lindemberg Alexander Karon.
RGM: 25907760 & 26410907
Poem:
every time you
tell your daughter
you yell at her
out of love
you teach her to confuse
anger with kindness
which seems like a good idea
till she grows up to
trust men who hurt her
cause they look so much
like you
to fathers with daughters - rupi kaur
Reference: KAUR, Rupi. Milk and Honey. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2015.
Artistic Production:
Open Letter To My Dad
Father, where were you when I needed you the most?
All the men I met were the same
Looking for love, more pain and misery
Always haunted by your ghost
Growing up was a decline
When you came along it was all violence
I had to learn to live without love
With bad memories coming back instead
Telling me that I can't do anything
Yelling at me all the time
As if I had no feelings
Is this not a crime?
I stayed strong and I've moved on,
Sometimes I still feel the pain in my heart,
But now I know that men aren't the same
And I'll show that I can be loved.
by Isabella Almeida
Intertext:
After reading Rupi Kaur’s book, we had many feelings. So, Isabella decided to write a poem and then we wrote this intertext together.
To Fathers With Daughters by Rupi Kaur shows the reader the pain of a daughter who is repressed by her father with an education based on the psychology of fear, when, in this case, yelling is a kind of education and which is also considered “love”. It confuses the girl, she mixes anger with kindness and this can and will affect her when she starts a relationship. We can interpret the poem as a cycle. From To Fathers With Daughters, Isabella Almeida had the inspiration to make a poem called Open Letter To My Dad. This letter constructs a narrative of the father’s absence in his daughter’s life even though he is physically present. Love, care and affection were scarce, but hurt and violence marked her life.
Ps: this poem isn’t based in real life.
The relationship between father and daughter in both works is the most important narrative. They share a feeling of loneliness and loving absence from their father. Thus, when the girl grows up, she’ll only meet men who are like their dad: violent and abusive. We can see this in both poems when Kaur writes “(...)trust men who hurt her cause they look so much like you” and when Isabella writes “(..)all the men I met were the same/looking for love, more pain and misery”.
In both stories there is a bad dad and they’re bad men. The stories are about violence, pain and strain, tears, heartbreak and loneliness. Concepts that have been so common in our world nowadays, unfortunately. So, these poems are related to each other by the interpreted story of both. In conclusion, these poems talk about a daughter who has a violent dad and grew up without love, looking for men and they’re all abusive with her. But, in Open Letter To My Dad, this cycle is broken in “(...)but now I know that men aren't the same/and I'll show that I can be loved.”