The poet opens up about the indisputable effects of burnout, pays homage to her parents, and discusses her self-released live special.
Don’t Tell Rupi Kaur She Looks Tired
In her latest book Home Body, poet Rupi Kaur writes:
You look tired he says
I turn to him and say
Yeah I'm exhausted
I've been fighting misogny for decades
How else do you expect me to look
"Getting told I look tired, especially if I'm fully rested, is one of my biggest pet peeves," says Kaur as she shares a story on Instagram of sitting next to a stranger during a business meeting and being on the receiving end of the offense. "I've had dark circles under my eyes since I was in grade one, but that exchange and writing it down is how I learned to roar."
In a year where women are shouldering a much heavier workload and experiencing severe stress symptoms, the pandemic has shed light on the fact that burnout—even if it looks and feels a little different than it used to—is very real.
And as a love letter to the tribe that's been on the journey with her, Kaur is releasing her first-ever poetry special, Rupi Kaur Live. A self-released film premiering April 30, 2021, at 9 pm ET on rupikaur.veeps.com, the poet takes her audience on a journey of trauma and loss and lifts them into a place of healing and wholeness. "Many of you only know me for the books and the poetry," says Kaur, "but the way we come alive together is on stage.” Here, Kaur opens up about her live special, her close friendships, and the effects of the past year
Glamour: First off, how are you feeling right now?
Rupi Kaur: I feel like there's so much heaviness, especially this year. And it's a culmination of the weight of your own life, and then the weight of everything else that is going on: these mass shootings, the COVID situation in India where over 3,000 people are dying every day, half a million farmers are still protesting, fascism, climate change. That's my brain right now.
So with everything going on, where did the idea for Rupi Kaur Live come from? Talk me through the inception of choosing to go on tour as a poet?
I'm known and recognized for the short pieces that I post on Instagram. But that journey started over 11 years ago for me. And it began on stage. As a teenager in a working-class immigrant family and not having family support in the arts, I needed to take control of my life. And that somehow led to me being at this open mic night, which went against all of my characters. I grew up saying very little and being painfully shy, but that night something just snapped in me. To be a teenager who feels like she doesn't have a voice and to have 20 people look up at her and listen was the most magnificent thing that I had ever felt. I didn't even know it was performing poetry.
In your poetry, you talk about love, heartache, depression, abuse, womanhood, and immigration. What's been the most meaningful exploration?
The poems about women make me the happiest, but what heals me is when I write the difficult topics, my journey [with] sexual abuse and toxic relationships. It's cathartic at the time that I'm writing them.
But I feel like each of my books is a different era of my life. Milk and Honey I published at 21, and it's about those 21 years—that very loud, unfiltered expression of love and pain. And then The Sun and Her Flowers was a much-grown version of me. Yet it's timeless because I'm talking about us: the women who came before me, my girlfriends, our wounds, and the aches of so many others. Home Body was a full-circle moment. I learned how to be vulnerable again and write the book that I needed to read.
In Home Body, you talk about how we treat our bodies like machines—planting seeds in the ground and expecting flowers the next day. What does self-preservation look like to you?
I would say that moving slowly and being still are two of the biggest things that can help you be present. And I only started being present last year. I was always living in the future and worried about the next thing. Chapter three, “Rest,” is me trying to teach myself what self-preservation looks like and what it should feel like. And a large part of it was learning how to redefine what productivity meant. Realizing that rest was a part of that. And having fun and learning how to play is the most productive thing I can do because if I'm not having fun, if I'm not living, then there is no poetry.
Do you feel like burnout needed to happen for Home Body to exist? And I guess that begs the bigger question of whether creatives have to feel the lows to create content?
Burnout is not needed at all. Even just saying it makes me feel burnt out. While writing The Sun and Her Flowers and being on tour for two years, I was in complete burnout mode. And the only reason I was able to write Home Body was that I recognized that I was not doing well mentally. And I fixed it through meditation, therapy, and all things self-care involved. Yes, many artists believe that if they are happy, they're not going to create work anymore. I felt that too after releasing Milk and Honey, but I'm realizing now that I actually can't write when I'm not doing well. When there is pain, it is tough for me to be creative. I have to be mentally fit to dedicate years to writing a book.
There's a piece in which you say, “no one is in more denial than the white man, that regardless of evidence still thinks racism, sexism, and all the world's pain don't exist.” How do we encourage the next generation of youth when we ourselves are tired?
I'm trying to figure that out myself. Especially at this moment, every time a Black person is killed by a police officer or the racially motivated mass shootings against the AAPI community. How can something be so blatant? And you deny it.
I'm at a place right now where I'm tired of chipping away at it, so I've been reaching to people asking them, like, how do they keep going? And I think it does help to be told that you don't have to be fighting it all the time. You can take a minute, and you can do things for yourself and enjoy yourself and then get back to doing the work. And so much in doing the work is the need to listen and hear each other. Sometimes it feels like everyone is just screaming all the time. That's why it feels like nobody is listening. And it's a skill that we, as a society, really need to learn how to do.
You are so conscientious about celebrating your Punjabi background, whether that’s shedding light on the farmer's protest or dressing in Indian designers for your tours. But when we were young immigrants, conformity and assimilation were the curricula. How do you reconcile honoring tradition while forging your own path?
To be an immigrant becomes such a unique part of your ancestral history because you become the turning point. I will be the only one able to document my story as an immigrant and my parents' story because my kids and the generations afterward will never be able to do that. My experience was the same as yours. And my turning point was that open mic. It was getting involved in the work that I was doing in the Punjabi community because I had so much self-hate for who I was, where I came from. And then boom, when I met this group, and they were so in love with their heritage, and they celebrated it in this beautiful way. It was the first time I was seeing people my age celebrate and owning that. I was electrified by it.
You said, “when much of the world erases the efforts and unseen work of mothers, I use poetry to document that.” What's the biggest lesson your mother has taught you in your journey?
Love. I think about her and the things that she's done, and I'm reduced to tears because I don't know if I'll ever be able to love like she has. I don't know if I have it in me. Honestly, I don't know if anybody in my generation has it like we, children of immigrants, have it. And that's because the way that they loved was different. Everything they did was for their kids. That's just what they were taught. There is no concept of, am I happy? What is happiness? My parents never asked that question.
I remember talking about this with my old therapist. And she didn't understand it. I was heartbroken to think that my parents had spent decades of their lives not enjoying anything and just working, especially my dad. We want to be able to give our parents that comfort because we've seen what a lifetime of not having any comfort looks like. But also knowing, I won't be able to return all the time that they've lost. That's always such a source spot and I don't know if I know how to reconcile with that yet. It's really, painfully beautiful.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Ruhama Wolle is an associate editor at Glamour. Follow her on Instagram @ru_wolle.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Ruhama Wolle
