This week we are discussing When You Ask Me Where I'm Going by Jasmin Kaur, chapters 'Skin', 'Muscle', 'Lung'.
Spoiler Warning!!! This post is full of spoilers for When You Ask Me Where I'm Going by Jasmin Kaur.
Trigger/Content Warning!!! This book has scenes and discussion of such themes as: racism, sexism, domestic violence.
Discussion:
Jacilyn: Hello readers and welcome to our first discussion of When You Ask Me Where I’m Going, a book of poetry by Jasmin Kaur. This is our very first poetry selection here at Shelf Explored, and although we’ve both read poetry on our own, neither of us are what I would consider well-versed in it. So, as we get into the rhythm of discussing poetry, we may be making slight tweaks to our discussion layout. We’re going to begin by talking about our general thoughts on the reading so far, and then we’ll each share some of the passages that stuck with us.
One of the things that stuck out at me right away was the use of what I *think* is Urdu language interspersed within the writing. I read this book as an ebook on my phone, which gives me the ability to highlight a word and do a quick search to either translate or define it, and I found that so helpful! I learned not only a lot of new words, but the references to actresses, films, and public figures that were included gave me an opportunity to look those things up and learn how they fit within the themes of the poems. I found that to be a really cool part of this reading.
Michaela: I also had tons of new words I looked up and that was a great experience. I loved getting to know these words, where they come from, and their meanings. Some of them were words I felt like I’d heard or read before; “punjab” was one of those words that I was like ‘I know I’ve heard this many times before but I can’t place the full meaning’. For those that may not know, Jacilyn and I are white women so this book is not something we expected to fully relate to since it is poetry primarily about the experiences of women of color. However, there were quite a few poems that I felt I could connect with. Even the poems that were not about experiences I’ve had personally, they were ones that I can understand, especially with the BLM movement and the Me Too movements that have brought so, so many stories from all communities, cultures, and genders forward in recent years. This felt like such a beautiful insight into stories we don’t always get to hear. Kaur truly uses such a descriptive and stunning language in these poems.
Jacilyn: There are definitely bits that I couldn’t relate to on a personal level, but those same bits still help me gain a bit more understanding of the experiences of people of different backgrounds. And I think having those bits nestled within poems that might speak to folks in other ways helps pave the way for more empathy and compassion all around. One thing that was unique in this book of poetry that I haven’t come across before is noting the inspiration for certain poems. I got excited when I read that one of the poems was inspired by Tupac’s The Rose That Grew from Concrete - one of my favorite authors, Angie Thomas, wrote a book called Concrete Rose that was also inspired by Tupac’s poetry. Concrete Rose, much like Jasmin’s poem, draws attention to the ways in which children of color are fighting to survive and flourish in ways that white children do not. “Simply call us children. So that for once that is what we are allowed to be.”
Michaela: I felt like I could relate to a lot of the poems that spoke about sexism and experiences of young girls growing up and women in general. Growing up in a conservative religious house, state, and country I can see a lot of parallels to the experiences Kaur wrote about. Women are the butt of abuse, bias, and blame in many cultures. One of my favorite poems from the beginning of this book says “you will be baptized into womanhood by all the eyes that own you.” That was such a powerful visual and representation of what it’s like growing up in a patriarchal society. Another poem that I thought felt extremely familiar to the experience growing up with the United States society’s beauty standards. “she is labeled, branded, and set on display waiting rigidly for ken to glance in her direction trying to fill that hollow space between molded layers of peach plastic but can you really blame her? She didn’t place herself in that box.” Again such a great representation of the experience of women from all backgrounds. We’re placed in this box and expected to exist there and only there. Then if you try to live outside that box you’re sinful, slutty, weird, ugly, bitchy, a prude, the list goes on and on and on. So many words that have been hurled at me and many women I’ve known.
Jacilyn: You know, I read poems like some of these, that break down the way that women feel when experiencing the abuse, the possession, the disrespect, sometimes even what feels like the vitriol of an entire nation…. And I wonder how it is that the pleas and demands have fallen on deaf ears. Is it because people truly don’t realize, or because they don’t WANT to realize? Or, perhaps people just don’t care. I can’t decide if that’s worse than ignorance.
When I read poems, I tend to get hung up on whether or not I’m getting what the author is trying to convey with a poem. Am I understanding the words as they are intended? What do the metaphors mean *exactly*? And in the process of doing that, I don’t pay enough attention to how the poem speaks to me on a personal level because I’m so focused on how the author wanted the poem to speak to people. I do the same thing when looking at any other kind of visual arts. I made an effort to avoid that this time, to the best of my ability, and in doing that there were a couple of poems that spoke to me directly from this section.
One of the poems was broken up into days of the week. As I was reading this section last week, I was experiencing some incredibly intense anxiety that really got in the way of functioning like a proper adult. This line “you find yourself consumed with glass. Rectangles and squares and prisms and shards that are always painful no matter the dullness of the edges.” and then later in the poem “You’re trying to hide from glass, but your body was not made only to run. What if you slowed your pace long enough to listen to your skin?”.... I read those and just started crying because I had been trying to put everything I was feeling last week into words, and I wasn’t able to properly express it, but the glass analogy really just hit the mark for me. My anxiety was the glass and although most of the fears were entirely irrational (aka, dull), they were still wearing me down and my body was begging me to stop and listen and rest.
Michaela: I used to spend so much energy on understanding what the author or the artist wanted me to see which meant I never understood anything. Art can be but also is not about finding the artist's meaning, it’s about finding your own meaning in the art. Even with this book that is clearly about women of color you can still find parallels to your own experiences. How I connect to the art personally is the understanding I was always searching for, art is never straight forward.
There were a lot of the shorter poems that I could really connect to my own personal journey, especially the journey I’ve been going on since becoming an independent adult. College and/or your 20s is such a huge part of life where all you do is learn. You learn about yourself, what you like, don’t like, who you like as friends, the way you trust is different, the way you look at the world is different. All because now you’re experiencing the world outside of the bubble created by your family, no matter if that bubble was a negative experience for you or not. I have changed so much since moving away from my family. One of the poems that I felt represented how I look at the things some of my family believes and things I used to believe. “i don’t know how to smile through the debate that turns my humanity into a question. I don’t know how to stand for a country. for a cloth. for a border. that fences me in and keeps me out.” Perfectly sums up how I have felt especially in the last five years with all the legislation trying to be passed that completely undermines progress we’ve made with women’s rights and the bodily autonomy of women. I can’t even pretend to support something that does not care if I live or die, if I am in pain, or even that I exist. Women are fenced in by these laws but kept out of the decisions to make them. Another poem that I related to on a similar mentality was “the empowerment i seek does not degrade other women. i will not suffocate someone with that which allows me to breathe.” I thought this was beautifully worded and something everyone should hear. Your search for your own identity does not take away from anyone else’s journey or experiences no matter what people may say about it otherwise.
There are two last poems I want to talk about that are my favorite ones so far. They both felt like they were looking straight into my brain and analyzing how I think. The first was “don’t get me wrong forgiveness and i are well acquainted. but just because she had good intentions it doesn’t mean she ever kept me safe.” I am not a person who easily trusts and therefore when that trust is broken I am also not one who easily forgives. I used to forgive and forget things a lot but the problem is that it was expected to just get over it. Something mean was said to me/about me and I’d hear “you just need to let it go”. It’s never let go, it’s never actually forgiven. Things get stuck into the quicksand that is my brain and it gets brought back to the surface every time I sink down into a depression episode or a period of low self esteem. Forgiving these things never helped me, they helped those people know that I would just take the hurtful things over and over again. Forgiveness “had good intentions it doesn’t mean she ever kept me safe”, I feel that all the way to the core of my being. Some people say forgiveness isn’t for other people, it’s for yourself, and they’re right but only if you’re thinking of forgiveness with that mentality already. I forgave a lot just to keep the peace, that’s not forgiving for myself.
The last poem I want to mention speaks about how diamonds are made under pressure “although what they become can never be scratched, their walls are so hardened that they will shatter whatever they please, tough as the pressure that let them be so maybe that’s why my insides look so much like a struggle that should have set me free”. What I got from this poem is how you have to harden yourself so much from the powers that push you down that you lose yourself along the way. How can you be the full you when you’re trapped inside a diamond exterior, it protects you but it also it’s your true form. No matter if you’re hardening yourself against controlling figures, abuse, societal standards, religious standards, or whatever; you lose so much of yourself that you never got the chance to experience. I tried so hard to make myself a tough exterior throughout adolescence that now at 27 years old I’m having to rediscover who I actually am and what I actually enjoy. I recently discovered that I like the color pink and I like flowers which was truly exciting for me. For so long I didn’t allow myself to like things like that because it would make me “girly” and that was just the worst thing I could be. Or even discovering my sexuality, also something I never accepted because it just wasn’t accepted in my community. Diamonds are hard on the outside but they give off so much sparkle, there are rainbows trapped inside.
Jacilyn: One of the things I like about poetry is how so few words can pull on emotional cords and speak to you so intensely. One of the poems from this book that did just that called attention to a trait that I consider proud to possess; extreme empathy. I joke that I absorb emotions like a sponge, and I’d like to believe that that helps me be a more compassionate, understanding person. The poem says “sometimes my body feels like nothing more than a metal conductor for the emotions of others & i open my chest not knowing the weight i already carry.” I know that I sometimes get burned out by all the feeling and absorbing I do, but there’s something about reading a poem like this and realizing the general idea of the thoughts could have come from your own heart that hits a bit different. The last two lines of the poem say “i want to hold you but i haven’t yet learned how to hold myself”...... A good reminder that sometimes, it’s okay to focus less on the emotions of others and more on my own.
If any readers have read some of our other discussions, I speak a lot about how I am quite the cryer. I cry at everything. Happy. Sad. Bittersweet. Angering. The list goes on. That being said, there were only two poems that actually made me cry in this section of the book. This poem speaks to some of the PTSD symptoms I still experience from my childhood, “i still have nightmares about the rage. It finds me in my stillest dreams where gentle wind slips through grass to graze my skin and charges toward me like an unforgiving storm. Skies churn to ash sun disintegrates below horizon and i am eight years old all over again.” I’ve touched on my experiences with my mother in discussions before, but I’m not sure how much detail I’ve given. I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable or triggered, so I’ll leave it at this; there were times when her rage felt unending and was directed almost entirely towards me. It could happen at the drop of a hat. It felt like walking on eggshells. I don’t often dream of being younger, but I do have dreams in which my mother is here, alive and in front of me, and I’m still walking on those eggshells, doing everything I can to prevent her anger, even as a grown adult with my own home and life. I still have nightmares about the rage, and I am eight years old all over again.
The other poem that made me cry happened to find me during a particularly rough week with anxiety and depression. I had been feeling so overwhelmed, but was having a really hard time putting those feelings into words. I wanted to express what I was experiencing so that hopefully others would have a better understanding of why I was struggling so much, but it was so difficult and I just felt frustrated. Then along came this poem… I won’t include the entire piece, but bits of it so that you get the gist “and if my words do not find you well, if they find you curled up beneath the covers with eyes that hurt to open……i only hope that my words can sit with you a while and hold you. That you can rest your head on their shoulders. That they help you untangle all the mess that other words have left.” It felt like Jasmin was speaking directly into my soul with those words, and I had a good, therapeutic cry after reading it through a couple of times. I didn’t feel entirely better afterwards, but I felt a little less weighed down by my own thoughts.
Well, my friends, this is the end of our very first discussion of a poetry book! As I mentioned earlier, we may adjust these discussions until we find a good groove - if there’s a certain format that you think works better than others, we would love to hear from you! Until next time, happy reading!
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