Birmingham-based multidisciplinary artist and writer Rupinder Kaur Waraich is a BBC New Creative. Her one-woman show Imperfect, Perfect Woman was performed at Wolverhampton literature festival in 2022, and she co-wrote and acted in the short film The Two Artists which had its première at the UK Asian Film Festival in 2023. Tigress with Wings follows her debut collection Rooh which was published by Verve in 2018.

Early on in this collection Waraich asks: “What stands between childhood and adulthood?” The question is pivotal to unlocking her exploration of how to live in her body, claim her voice and awaken her own power as she journeys from girlhood to womanhood. Her focus is that of “a woman trapped inside a girl”. It is a woman who asks many questions: “What is real love?”, “Is love ever wrong?”, “Can humans be kind?”, “Can desire be pure?”.  Transition points are also reflected in nature; the poem ‘We Were Once Great Artists’ describes February as being “the border between winter and spring”.

Waraich’s emphasis on clothing and dance make this collection sing. Both elements are present in the first line of the opening poem ‘Ghazal: Birthworts’:

 

     Do you remember, when I threw my salwar kameez in river Beas

     and danced naked into another life …

 

Dance is again mentioned in ‘Traveling Jhumke’:

 

     Maybe Mama was a dancer in her past life,

     a kathak dancer. They use their entire

     bodies — hands, feet, eyes.

     Dancing as if the world’s opaque

     but it’s transparent.

     They can see right through us.

     We can see right through them.

 

The mix of language and culture found in a single line such as ‘”Black renuka kumkum bindi, dimples, and a big smile” also add colour and rhythm to her work.

The poems in this collection are addressed to her younger self, her family and feminist heroines such as the prolific Indian novelist and essayist Amrita Pritam, the Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, and the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.

There is some experimentation with the way the poems fit on the page. In ‘Which Body’, for example, the poem takes the form of a series of short texts placed within a table of 12 boxes (3 x 4). The structure can be viewed as a set of frames through which to contemplate various scenarios, a longing to break out, “to run freely across open fields”, and a refusal to be boxed in, or a realisation that our lives tend to be compartmentalised, prescribed by a set of unwritten rules.

In ‘Pause’ Waraich arrives at some sort of conclusion by commenting on the fleeting nature of youth and our fruitless efforts to attempt to preserve it. Despite the poem’s title, ‘Pause’ is not something that you can press: “Jawani, the moment you realise it, it’s already gone.”

Waraich’s long return to herself, wandering through worlds within worlds is a highly personalised poetic narrative of considerable force. Each poem is carefully bound up with her Panjabi heritage in which she discovers and celebrates the unique authority of her own identity.  Highly recommended.

A substantial glossary is provided at the end to aid our understanding. 

Rupinder Kaur Waraich: Tigress with Wings, Seren, £10.99