Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Jim Taylor
[The following talk contains descriptions of sexual violence
[which may be triggering to survivors.]
[Can you help me?]
[Can you help change the world
[with more meaningful questions?]
[Question everything better.]
(Reciting) It began as a typical Thursday:
sunlight kissed my eyelids good morning.
I remember climbing out of bed,
making coffee to the sound of children playing outside,
putting music on,
loading the dishwasher,
putting roses in a vase in the middle of the kitchen table.
Only when my apartment was spotless would I step into the bathtub,
wash yesterday out of my hair,
like the walls of my home were decorated
with frames, bookshelves, photos I'd decorate myself.
Hang a necklace on my chest, hook earrings in,
apply lipstick like paint, sweep my hair back.
Just your typical Thursday.
We ended up better get together with friends.
At the end, you asked if I need a ride home and I said yes
because our dads work for the same company,
and you'd been to my place for dinner many times,
but I should have known
when you began to confuse kind conversation with flirtation,
when you told me to let my hair down,
when instead of driving me home
toward the bright intersection of lights and life,
you took a left to the road that led nowhere.
I asked where we were going, you asked was I afraid,
and that's when my voice jumped over the edge of my throat,
landed at the bottom of my belly and hid for months.
All the different parts in me turned the lights off,
shut the blinds, locked the doors,
I hid at the back of some upstairs closet of my mind
while someone came and broke the windows.
You, someone, kicked the front door in,
you took everything,
you, someone, took me.
It was you who dove to me with a fork and a knife,
eyes glinting with starvation like you hadn't eaten in weeks.
I was 110 pounds of fresh meat
you'd skin and gut with your fingers
like you were scraping the inside of a cantaloupe clean.
I screamed for my mother as you nail my wrist to the ground,
turned my breast to bruised fruit.
This home is empty now.
No gas, no electricity, no running water.
The food is rotten from head to foot.
I am layered in dust; fruit flies, webs, bugs.
Someone call the plumber,
the stomach is backed up, I've been vomiting since!
Call the electrician these eyes won't light up.
Call the cleaners to wash me up and hang me to dry.
When you broke into my home, it never felt like mine again.
I can't even let a lover in without being sick.
I lose sleep after the first date, lose my appetite,
become more bone and less skin, forget to breathe.
Every night, my bedroom becomes a psych ward
where panic attacks wake men playing doctors to keep me calm.
Every lover who touches me ends up feeling like you.
Their fingers - you, mouths - you,
until they're not even the ones on top of me anymore; it's you.
And I am so tired of doing things your way.
It isn't working.
I've spent years trying to figure out how I could have stopped it.
But the sun can't stop the storm from coming,
the tree can't stop the axe.
I can't blame me for having a hole the size of your manhood
in my chest anymore.
It's too heavy to carry your guilt.
I'm setting it down.
I'm tired of decorating this place with your shame
as if it belongs to me.
It's too much to walk around with what your hands have done
if it's not my hands that have done it.
The truth comes to me.
Suddenly, after years of rain, the truth comes
like sunlight pouring through that open window.
It takes a long time to get here, but it all comes full circle.
It takes a broken, twisted person
to come searching for meaning between my legs,
but it takes a whole, complete, perfectly designed person to survive it.
It takes monsters to steal souls and fighters to reclaim them.
This home is what I came into this world with;
was the first home, will be the last home.
You can't take it.
There is no space for you,
no welcome mat, no extra bedrooms.
I'm opening all the windows, airing it out,
putting roses in a vase in the middle of that kitchen table,
lighting a candle,
loading the dishwasher with my thoughts until they're spotless,
and then, I plan to step into the bathtub,
wash yesterday out of my hair,
put music on, sit back, put my feet up,
and enjoy this typical Thursday.
(Applause)
(Speaking) So when I first started writing years ago,
it was a private hobby,
and then years after that, it became a public one
that I shared with some family and some friends.
And then years after that, I began to share it with the Internet,
and today, I'm lucky enough to say that it's become my full-time job.
So when I first started to travel
to perform spoken word poetry like you saw here today
and to do readings of my book "milk and honey,"
family and friends always asked me, "Don't you ever get homesick?"
And on the plane rides to and from, I ponder that question
because the truth was I never really got homesick.
I mean, of course I'd lie to my mom and tell her that I did,
because what was I really going to say?
"Hi, mom. Yeah. No.
No, I'm actually completely fine, I don't miss being home at all."
Trust me, I did it once last year,
and I am still hearing about it a year later.
But the truth was
the fact that I never felt homesick made me feel bad.
"Was there something wrong with me?", I thought.
"Was I cold?"
And after months of wondering,
I realize that the reason I never felt homesick
was because, for me, home was wherever I was.
So let me explain.
I'd moved over a dozen times in my short life,
so this concept that home is some physical structure
just stopped making sense a long time ago.
How could I place the idea of home
on places that kept on changing, on temporary roofs?
Houses were structures. Home was here.
When I was three, home was on that two-wheeler scooter
rocketing around my village in Punjab.
When my father left India as a refugee,
he went to search for a home in far-off countries
while my mother tried to maintain our crumbling one there.
And years after that,
mum and I found home
on an airplane hurdling towards a Canadian tarmac.
And then,
in the dozen plus moves that followed that,
the only constant I had under each of those roofs
was my art,
it was my writing and my expression.
So naturally, writing became like a limb.
It became an extension of my being.
So then, what happens
when your home, when your body is attacked?
What happens, say, when you thrust
something as dark as sexual abuse,
molestation, a rape, onto a person?
It makes you feel robbed like you don't even own your body.
They own it, and you're living in it on rent.
And this feeling of homelessness within the body
isn't restricted to only sexual violence.
Domestic violence can make you feel just as far away from yourself.
Navigating this world with a physical or a mental disability.
That first treatment of chemotherapy
will make you feel like your body's turned on you,
and you're living someplace foreign.
The sensation of being trapped,
being born into the wrong body altogether
is terrifying.
The boy or girl mercilessly bullied at school and battered at home,
the refugee, unwanted on the old shore
and deemed a scavenging vulture in the new.
So many of us are trying to reclaim our bodies from something.
At my lowest point -
this was right before I began to take writing seriously
and make it into an everyday practice -
thoughts of ending my life were constant,
and attempts weren't far off.
I could not stand myself.
I'd walk into the bathroom, and I would seriously turn the lights off,
I would shower in complete darkness,
so I wouldn't have to stand there, under the water,
have to look down and see my body
because this thing had brought me so much pain
that seeing it filled me with disgust.
I honestly avoided mirrors like one would avoid an ex at a party.
I refused to acknowledge it, look at it, appreciate it.
I craved physical pain to manage the emotional pain.
And so I began to break the body down,
refused to nurture it with good food and good sleep,
abused it through language and vandalized it through self-harm.
But there was one day,
where I was crying upstairs in my room -
and it was always Niagara Falls in my room at that point in my life -
but this day was different.
This day the tears suddenly stopped, it was like the taps went dry,
and like a robot, I got up,
I walked to the closet, I found some charcoal,
I found some paper, and I sat, and I drew for hours.
What I ended up with was a picture of a woman,
and in the corner of the page, I'd written a poem.
And little did I know that sitting there in grade 10 or 11
that this combination of picture and poetry
would one day lead
to a New York Times bestselling collection of poems.
The writing was a guttural response to my trauma.
I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote
with the intention to survive.
The poetry in the books, all of that, was just the side effect.
And it was this writing that led me to reclaim my body.
You see, I come from a tradition of poetry.
Being raised in a Sikh household,
every instance of my life from birth has been informed by poetry.
Sikh scriptures are written in poetic verse.
It was on the lips of my mother as she rocked me to sleep,
it was on the lips of her mother whose own mother rocked her to sleep
as they traveled an ox cart
through the carnage and pillage of the South Asian partition.
The poetry is Punjabi, and Persian, Braj, and Sanskrit.
It is how millions viewed life, in concert,
constructed by the languages of nomads, and warriors, and mystics.
Even our names are picked from poems written hundreds of years ago.
When I'll decide to marry,
it will be poetry that will bond that marriage.
And even when I pass,
it will be poetry that will mark my departure.
And so, it comes as no surprise, I think,
that I would use writing poetry as a means to reclaim this body,
to find home here again.
It was this writing of poetry
that led me to find love for myself,
and with that love, a path lit up.
I took that love, walked back into myself,
to that five-year-old girl,
to that 10-15-year old girl who was still sitting inside of me scared,
the one who had no one.
I walked over to her,
picked her up, and told her it was going to be OK.
We all sat in this body that day, joined together as one.
And I said to all the younger versions of me,
I said, "You are welcome here. You have always been welcome here.
This place belongs to you.
Nothing was your fault, and I love you."
The truth comes after years of rain,
the truth comes like sunlight pouring through that open window.
It takes a long time to get here, but it all comes full circle.
It takes a broken, twisted person
to come searching for meaning between my legs,
but it takes a whole, complete,
perfectly designed person to survive it.
It takes monsters to steal souls and fighters to reclaim them.
This home is what I came into this world with,
it was the first home, will be the last home.
You can't take it.
There is no space for you,
no welcome mat, no extra bedrooms.
I'm opening all the windows, airing it out,
putting roses in a vase in the middle of that kitchen table,
lighting a candle,
loading the dishwasher with my thoughts until they're spotless,
and then, I plan to step into that bathtub,
wash yesterday out of my hair,
decorate my body in gold,
put music on, sit back, put my feet up,
and enjoy this typical Thursday.
(Applause)