Sikh poet Jasmin Kaur has a bone to pick with white feminists.
The Canadian artist who wrote "her voice" in 2016, on the experience of being silenced and erased as a Sikh woman of colour, has ironically been silenced and erased all over again in the appropriation of her poem as a viral meme.
An edited version of Kaur's poem went viral as a protest against Brett Kavanaugh's in the wake of sexual assault allegations by Christine Blasey Ford.
In her 2016 poem, Kaur writes: "Scream/So that one day a hundred years from now/Another sister will not have to dry her tears/Wondering where in history she lost her voice."
Kaur said the poem was intended to express how she felt as a Sikh woman within a dominant white culture but was edited without her permission and shared widely by .
After Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court her title, Scream, was replaced with the word Vote, and the poem re-purposed as a rallying call for to women to vote. It is not known who edited the poem.
"The irony of this shitty poem edit is so blatant that I need to unpack it...the word scream was replaced with vote. I figured that people would clearly be able to see how this isn't cool, but I guess I was wrong," she wrote on Instagram.
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"To edit my ideas without permission for your own interests is peak white entitlement. It says that my voice doesn't matter unless it suits your specific needs. It says that you don't know anything about me + that you don't need to... that my voice doesn't actually matter in a poem about my voice."
Kaur told the , while she understood the importance of rallying women voters, to use her poem without permission ignored the challenges faced by communities of colour in participating in the political process.
"The issue is that overlap in experience (is not the same as) the same experience. When the word scream was changed to vote, someone made several shitty assumptions, that my words were directed specifically at their neo-liberal political experiences of Amerikkka (sic) and I had made a mistake in explaining how to confront injustice and erasure," she said.
Kaur said the imagery of a Sikh woman's voice being erased, in light of the fact her work aimed to vocalise the pain and invisibility racism invokes, was "too much".
"As a kaur - a Sikh woman - I write to disrupt my erasure from the world. From media, from feminist discourse, from social justice spaces, from everywhere. This poem, specifically, was inspired by my reflection on the way that kaur voices have been erased from history in many ways and the pain I have felt as a direct result of that," she said.
"I write to exist. To be seen. To hold a mirror up to myself + women who look like me. In a world that very selfishly consumes the work of women of colour and marginalised folks. If you share my poetry (or your version of my poetry) without actually understanding who I am and why I am, you're engaging in my work passively. If you, as a white person, feel that I matter so little within the context of what I create that you can remove me from the work all together, you're colonising my poetry."
