the sun and her flowers

In “Rooting,” the speaker puts aside the personal emotional distress that dominated the first two chapters and focuses on the distress of immigrants. The first poem, “immigrant” (119), invokes the lives of immigrants, who are willing to leave their own country for an uncertain future. This announces one of the main themes of the chapter: The speaker has in mind the immigration of her parents to Canada and also, as a member of the South Asian diaspora, she wants to dig down into her ancestral roots to find out who she is in the wider sense. She presents this as a vital part of her life—she wants to know where she came from so she can honor her forbears and their traditions.

After a reference to the pain that Earth itself is enduring because of the chaos caused by humans (“green and blue” [120]) and a characterization of refugee camps as an “open wound” (“refugee camp” [121]), she looks back, this time fondly rather than critically, at what her mother taught her about how to listen as well as speak, and how to be grateful for the many choices she has in life (“lessons from mumma” [122-23]). The speaker’s connection with her mother is particularly important for her, and she writes with compassion and understanding of what her mother has had to endure in her life. The speaker has learned, for example, that it was “not easy” for her mother to leave her native country, and she still seeks to maintain a connection to it by watching “foreign films” (presumably from India) and frequenting the “international food aisle” in grocery stores (123). The speaker reports things her mother has confided in her about, such as the death of her brother one year before her wedding, which left her so grief-stricken that the wedding day was the “saddest of her life” (“amrik singh (1959-1990)” [124]); and her hysterectomy, when she lost “the first home of her children” (“hysterectomy february 2016” [129]).

One of the longest poems is “advice I would’ve given my mother on her wedding day” (133-35), in which the speaker reverses the usual mother-daughter relationship to bring her own more modern, Western-influenced ideas to bear on what she understands of her mother’s life before she was born. The poem lists 16 points. The first one states, “you are allowed to say no” (which harks back to the poem in Chapter 2, in which the speaker recalls how as a child she was not permitted to say no). Mother must also understand that “sex is not dirty” (no. 3), and she must not believe that she must sacrifice herself in order to show her love (no. 7). The speaker’s advice extends beyond the wedding day, to the future: Her mother is not to worry that she cannot speak English correctly or use a computer or cell phone. This is not her fault; it is because she had a very restricted life in her homeland (no. 10). The final five points are not advice but appreciation, including, “you are the person I look up to most” (no. 12).

In three untitled prose paragraphs that follow (138), the speaker extends her insight and compassion to both her parents, recognizing how as immigrants, they struggled to establish themselves in a new land. She regrets not learning more from them about their lives in India, but they never spoke of it: “one was always working and the other too tired. perhaps being an immigrant does that to you.” The speaker adds, “perhaps the weight of the new world was too much. and the pain and sorrow of the old world was better left buried.”

Her mother continues to occupy her thoughts in the remainder of the chapter, and she longs for a closer connection with her. In the poem that begins with “what if” (142), the speaker whimsically imagines “begging the sky” to send her mother’s soul back after death as her daughter. Notably, the speaker begs the sky, not God; in her poetic world, the sun, moon, flowers, all of nature—here, the sky—have consciousness; they show human-like attributes and qualities and they react to human actions and feelings. (In the poem that begins with “my god” (132) the speaker makes it clear that she does not have any faith or belief in churches, temples, or sacred books. Her god is suffering humanity and is revealed especially within people who have the strength and will to express their full humanity.) In “to witness a miracle” (143), the focus on her mother continues; the speaker wants to go back in time to learn everything she can about the earlier part of her mother’s life in the village and her dreams as a teenager.

All these poems about her mother and, less frequently, her father, are interspersed with general observations about life, often about immigrants. “boat,” for example (126), depicts the perilous risks taken by migrants in crowded boats; in “we are not enemies” (128), the speaker comments that borders are man-made and should not make people turn against one another. Kaur’s feminism comes to the fore in “female infanticide / female feticide” (144-45), which brings attention to the fact that in the culture from which she comes, a male child is valued more than a female one, and female babies have often in the past (and in the present, too) been killed at birth or subject to abortion.

In the penultimate poem, “I will find my way out of you just fine” (147), the speaker returns to herself and focuses on her own resilience in the face of adversity. She feels great strength and the ability to overcome any difficulties. She has been buried alive many times—metaphorically speaking—but will always rise up. When she was buried, “the earth rose in fear” and helped her escape. (This is another example of the natural world showing human-like emotions.)

“broken english” (149-51), the final poem in the chapter, is another tribute to her parents, who succeeded in raising the family from poverty even though they had limited ability to speak the language of their new country. The speaker expresses especial appreciation for her mother, although she says she lacks the words to do so effectively: “her life is brilliant and tragic” (151), she writes.