The power of a poem

the pain

taught me how to write

and the writing

taught me how to heal

–Harman Kaur

When asked why she is constantly compelled to put pen to paper, Instagram poetess and fourth-year SFU student Harman Kaur came up with the above poem as a response. “[My writing]’s for me,” she said when The Peak asked her the same question in an interview. “Most of the stuff I write, I write to free myself from all these emotions and any problems I’m having.”

Under the Instagram handle @_harmankaur, Kaur has been posting her poetry since January 2016. She currently has over 32,000 followers and more than 90 posts. The poem above was quoted by Alicia Keys on Twitter, another sign of Kaur’s writing gaining exposure online.

The beginning of the story

Kaur can remember herself writing since she was in the fifth grade, starting with short stories and songs, and gradually settling into poetry and prose as she entered high school. She spoke about wanting to share her poetry long before she actually took the step. “It was 2014 and I was in high school. I was scared of judgement, I didn’t want people to think I was a weirdo,” she laughed.

After posting her work online for just a little over half a year, Kaur’s Instagram account garnered over 10,000 followers by August 2016. Kaur remembered her surprise as her account began gaining more popularity than she’d ever imagined. “The account [initially] just had friends following me, and I expected that support, but I didn’t expect it to blow up like this,” she said. “This was not my expectation or my goal, it was just kind of my public diary.”

The themes that occur throughout Kaur’s work speak to her identity: what it means to be a woman, a Sikh, a child of immigrants. Kaur admitted to being a huge bookworm — with credits to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series — but the more she read and the older she grew, the more she realized how there was no one in her books that was like her.

As she pursued an English major in university, Kaur continued to note the lack of diversity in the work she studied in class. “Shakespeare, Renaissance work, these are stories we’ve been taught over and over again,” she emphasized. “Like OK, they’re great, but I can’t relate.”

Ultimately, the lack of representation for women of colour, Punjabi culture, and her balancing act as a child of immigrants were the factors that pushed Kaur to make her writing public. “There are many specific messages in my work,” she said, “but I’m not trying to be a voice for anybody. I’m trying to inspire others to use their own voices to tell their stories.”

From Abbotsford to the world

As her poetry continues to garner attention across Canada and the world, Kaur finds herself in places she’d never imagined herself — figuratively, but also literally.

During the interview, she could tick off a list of places in Canada and the US she had been invited to come perform at and talk about her poetry and the themes she writes about. “Before this, I had never [set] foot outside of Abbostford or BC,” she recalled. Most recently, she has been invited to New Jersey to speak at a conference at Princeton University in November.

Travelling and making connections, both physically and through social media, has been Kaur’s favourite part about her experience so far. “Being able to connect worldwide with so many different people and creatives who are into different things, like art and videography, that’s beautiful,” she said.

Standing up for standing out

Making her work and herself visible online has also come with drawbacks Kaur hadn’t previously anticipated. It forces her to confront issues such as negative social media attention and sexual harassment. “Sexual harassment, sexual DMs, those are just normalized for [women],” she said. “And people’s first response to me will be ‘hey, why can’t you just block them or erase it from your life?’”

For a brief period earlier this year, Kaur did choose erasure as a coping mechanism: when the negative attention and sexual harassment began significantly affecting her, Kaur deleted all pictures of herself from her Instagram account.

“But then, I thought about how there aren’t enough girls like me out there doing things like this, and how as a young girl I needed someone like me to look up to,” said Kaur, gesturing to herself. “I look different from everyone else, I’m visibly a woman of colour and a woman who practices religion. It’s something I struggled with growing up, but now I’ve really accepted [it]. Clearly not everyone has.”

Ultimately, after the support of her close friends, Kaur ended up bringing the pictures of herself back. She has since been following up on her campaign against discrimination and sexual harassment through poems and online discussions. Her efforts have gained online and local news attention. She was recently interviewed on the matter by OMNI News, a local Punjabi nightly news broadcast.

“Now I’m on this momentum where I don’t think I’m going to stop,” Kaur said about her newfound voice. She’s looking forward to beginning new creative projects that touch upon the topics of sexual harassment, discrimination, and erasure more thoroughly.

Reflecting and looking forward

For her long-term goals, Kaur looks forward to walking across Convocation Mall to receive her Bachelor’s in January 2019. She also hopes to take her writing beyond Instagram and make one of her earliest dreams — writing a book — come true in the next couple of years.

Almost two years after she posted her first poem online, Kaur can note the changes that have occurred in her approach to her writing, and in herself. “Before, I was concerned that my poetry should be relatable, and when I’d write something more personal, I’d always wonder ‘what if someone reading this doesn’t get it?’”

These days, she recognizes herself being more authentic with her work and her identity than she has ever been before. “If you don’t get it, it wasn’t written for you,” she summed up with a line from one of her poems.