Rupi Kaur, a trending poetess of Instagram, has recently gained critical acclaim online for her newly published poetry collection milk and honey which is a stunning depiction of trauma, survival, love, womanhood, and friendship. Identifying as a first-generation Canadian, Punjabi-Sikh, woman of color, Kaur works visually in her book and on Instagram to portray and subvert how space functions to produce the gendered, diasporic subject as a body that is “unhomed.” Through the complex interplay of illustrated imagery and verse, Kaur contests the violent spatial (and bordering) practices of nationalism by positioning her poems’ personae in new and different ways to occupy, produce, and claim space off and online—performances of celebration, reclamation, resistance, and ultimately, acts of (de)colonial self-love. Kaur’s art and cyberspatial narration adds an important dimension to considering the colonial project of space. Occupying space on Instagram, Kaur supplants the place where women have traditionally been relegated. It is exactly the embodied telling of Kaur’s artwork that she attributes to the importance of its public nature: the Instagram becomes the home—rehomed by her art—whereas the nation becomes the network. Through Kaur’s narratives shared online, Kaur connects to a cyberspatial sisterhood and demonstrates that healing through narrative is necessarily collective.
