She Had a Miscarriage During Her Book Tour. Nobody Knew.
The poet whose first performance went viral overnight, and the loss she never spoke about until now
Jaspreet Kaur was eighteen when she took a train from East London to a small open mic night in West London, certain that if it went badly, nobody there would ever see her again. It didn't go badly. The poem she performed that night, about sex selective abortion and the missing daughters of South Asian families, was filmed by someone in the audience and had gone viral across the UK, North America, India and Australia before she woke up the next morning.
That poem grew out of a master's dissertation on son preference in Punjab, research that took her to a girls' home in Jalandhar, where she volunteered for two weeks and heard an alarm sound each time another abandoned baby girl arrived through a window in the wall.
She later turned what she'd learned into her first book, Brown Girl Like Me, a guide for South Asian women and girls that she wished had existed when she was growing up. She is now writing its counterpart, Brown Boy Like Me, prompted by the birth of her son and the realisation, as she puts it, that "I actually have no idea what I'm doing."
Quotes
I was at a point where I was like, well, I can't stop everything that's going on around me. This everything was moving at 100 miles hour and I just had to at that point just hold it all in.
This Episode Is About
Jaspreet Kaur talks to Naroop Jhooti about the poem that went viral overnight, the two week placement in a Punjab orphanage that led to it, and the miscarriage she hid from the public through her own book tour.
The conversation moves through son preference and sex selective abortion in South Asian communities, why she believes feminism has been misread by both men and women, and the profiling her husband still faces as a turbaned Sikh man.
It ends on the book she's now writing for her son, Brown Boy Like Me, and the questions she still doesn't have answers to.
Who This Episode Is For
- Men of colour navigating dual expectations from family and wider culture
- Partners trying to understand a man who processes emotion differently to them
- Fathers of daughters and sons thinking about how to raise them differently
- Men who feel pressure to hold everything together without anywhere to put it down
What You'll Takeaway
- Softness and strength can exist in the same person
- The gym can be a form of meditation
- Feminism is about access to choice, not becoming a man
- A beard reads differently on a brown man than a white man
- Around 60 million girls are missing across South Asia
- Real change often happens quietly, not on a stage
- Grief can sit unprocessed for months
