jalisa

Every single Native culture is distinct and unique, though many share similarities, and lumping them together is ridiculous. And while some practices are pan-Indian, the vast majority are not.

Kokopelli isn’t “Native American,” He’s Hopi.

Dreamcatchers aren’t “Native American,” they’re Ojibwe.

War bonnets aren’t “Native American,” they’re Plains Indian.

Wendigoag aren’t “Native American,” they’re Algonquian.

Totem poles aren’t “Native American,” they’re Northwest Coastal Indian.

Skinwalkers aren’t “Native American,” they’re Navajo.

Skeleton, Vincent van Gogh

a gifset of planet facts because i rlly love space!!

A fan vaults through the window of Fela Kuti’s home in Nigeria

ph. Bruno Barbey

I don’t ever assert my artistic opinions as universal - I’m not here to comment on people enjoying her poetry - but that Rupi managed to very obviously plagiarize Nayyirah, disrespect Nayyirah in the confrontation process, and then continue her business and collect acclamation while her poetry doesn’t compare to many big ‘internet’ poets let alone WOC poets outside of the blogosphere (in depth, complexity, or form)….is frustrating. 

There is such thing as artistic simplicity but the simplicity of Rupi’s poems doesn’t concern me - you can achieve minimalism and emotional weight (and avoid plagiarism). Rupi’s tone, rhythm, meter, and vocabulary - let alone sense of sincerity or sense of deliberation or fundamental things like line breaks - are exceptionally limited and disjointed, and her book is not uniform (suggesting that this limit isn’t intentional). Meanwhile, much of her good syntax and specific imagery is lifted from poets like Nayyirah and Warsan.

And yet: my local B&N has at least 30 copes of “milk and honey” while it carries max 2 copies of any other poet, including classics. She’s a bestseller. I don’t know how but Rupi Kaur somehow surpassed the phenomenon of white mediocrity in poetry (possibly through tokenization + manipulation of online spaces) to promote woc mediocrity, and as a woc poet/artist I Can’t Abide. 

The idea I get from “Instagram poetry” is taking sometimes simple, sometimes more complex emotions, stripping them of personal context - e.g. narrative about one’s life - making an observation about those emotions, and turning it into a graphic. Emotions that are extremely relatable about, say, bad relationships or wanderlust, become an aesthetic. They’re super palatable and easily digested but don’t require much artistry or authenticity from the artist; that they make sense no matter who you are allows them to gain traction.

What concerns me with Insta poetry is that it isn’t insulated. It’s great that people connect to this writing, and that there are happy suppliers of this content. There is strategic art that goes into it, surely. And again, I’m not here to comment on what anyone enjoys, but this content does lack artistry. It lacks personality. It often has nothing to do with a poet’s life.

Rupi does this well. Most of her poems are very generalized comments on diaspora, relationships, misogyny, growth. This is Fine (when not plagiarized). But, in combination with what I discuss in my original post, her poetry feels like something that’s just supposed to be consumed, not engaged with. I often wonder what an interviewer could reasonably ask her about her process - artistic process, emotional process. And this process of consumption very much relates to the process of tokenization, which turns the oppressed body into an aesthetic to fill a quota.

I don’t think it’s totally wrong to interrogate artistry. I do believe most things are “art” but quality isn’t 100% objective. It’s not. Especially when an artist dominates a market and plagiarizes from Black artists. I talk about this here (mobile only, sorry) - that when we discuss things like resources, narrative, and struggle, artistry is absolutely relevant and we can’t disregard it and hide behind attitudes that artistic quality is purely subjective and thus cannot be reasonably critiqued.

So going back to my original post - where is the narrative? How does her work relate to what ISN’T seen as easily consumed: work made by Black and Indigenous artists, LGBTQ artists, disabled artists, poor artists, artists who don’t put diaspora & war in easy terms, artists who don’t frame trauma as neatly? Where is the restitution for so many struggling, extremely skilled poets whose words are too many, too complex, too DIFFICULT? Where are their 1.5 million followers and second book deals and stuffed shelves in Barnes & Noble? Where is the money for them to eat? Where are their reparations as they write from historical trauma? What happens to those poets who cannot ever be consumable under market capitalism and white supremacy, because of who they are and how their art resists white supremacist capitalism?