Confinement and Liberation: A Critique of Meena Kandasamy’s When
I Hit You; Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
Prasanna M,
Ph.D. Research Scholar,
Department of English, Kuvempu University,
Jnana Sahyadri, Shankaraghatta, Shivamogga, Karnataka, India.
&
Dr. S Siraj Ahmed,
Professor & Research Supervisor,
Department of English, Sahyadri Arts College,
Shivamogga, Karnataka,
India.
Abstract: Dalit Literature,
which is the protest literature as stated by Sharan Kumar Limbale, an acclaimed
writer of the book Towards an
Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, has disrupted the literary scenario of
Indian Literature, as most of it was produced by the upper caste people, and
also at the global level in the past three decades. The present paper is an
attempt to explore one of the novels When
I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena
Kandasamy, the poet, novelist, translator and activist who is a celebrated
author of Touch (2006) and Ms. Millitancy (2010) and also a
first Indian women writer writing Dalit poetry in English. As domestic violence
has become a common phenomenon in recent times at the global level, one must be
curious to know how it operates on a different level in various communities and
ethnic groups. When all women undergo oppression, the women who have been kept
at the last rung of the social hierarchy might have been resilient enough to
resist and to recuperate from their suppression, as they are more vulnerable to
these inhuman acts. Hence, the present paper throws light on how the author
delves deep into the themes of domestic violence, gender stereotypes,
resistance, and voice through a searing exploration of women's plight in a
phallocentric society. The novel tells
the story of an unnamed narrator who had resisted the brutal treatment in her
conjugal life, which spans about just four months, only to reclaim the autonomy
of her body and her freelance career back on track. The paper also underscores
how women, who might have been bearing the brunt of upheaval meted out by men,
may reject and revolt against the same when it becomes ‘unbearable’ and
‘untenable’ and may stop playing the role of a good ‘Indian wife’. Such women
who have been ill-treated and humiliated in the wedlock have been voicing their
stories and Meena Kandasamy’s When I
Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife portrays one such
story of a woman who is well read but misread the true intensions of her
comrade, an English professor who assumes the role of an underground
revolutionary to whom she is married.
Keywords: Marriage, Domestic Violence, Female
Subjectivity, Resistance, Gender, Feminism, Liberation
The
more we try to familiarize ourselves with the strange, the more we become
strangers to the familiar! When I Hit You: Or a Portrait of the Writer as a
Young Wife depicts the pictures of sufferings of the conjugal life of a
young woman, the unnamed narrator in the novel, who had resisted the
brutal treatment in her conjugal life which spans about just four months, only
to reclaim the autonomy of her body and her freelance career back on track.
She, who has read extensively
to understand various aspects of life, finds marital life to be strange, and
the things that she once denounced as strange become familiar to her. She is
surprised to learn that her parents accept domestic violence as normal for her
good. She, who has been the ‘flag bearer’ of freedom, finds herself confined
between the four walls at the mercy of a monster husband. She chastises the
society that says marital rape, violence, and violations are to be seen as the
irresistible aspects of life. It's strange and distressing to learn that a
person who had been filled with revolutionary ideas had never allowed his wife
to be one—hypocrisy at its best.
An abusive, hypocritical, misogynistic, far-leftist, and yet conservative husband that she has got after a heartbreak, never gives her any opportunity to be herself, let alone support her in her endeavor. The narrator in the novel challenges many of the fundamental notions and beliefs that have influenced the thought processes of human beings. She questions the language theories of famous writers and, at the same time, takes Roman Jakobson's Functions of Language theory to prove her point that moaning while having sex is also a language. The narrator was very smart in rejecting the proposals that had filled her road of youth, only to finally fall in love with a person who is twice her age. Her 'one true love', an excellent orator, activist, progressive thinker, a chameleon politician who wanted to be a bachelor, had never missed a chance to bed with her, yet finally rejected her by citing her feminism as a problem. “Love is not blind; it just looks in the wrong direction.”Although the narrator berates all the characters in the novel for various reasons, she also fosters an expectation and a different perception.
Mother, who always narrates her
daughter's brutal marriage life to others, misses the sufferings that her
daughter faced, by focusing on the consequences, which enrages the narrator, as
the truth may soon vanish. Her lackadaisical father, who is much worried for
the dignity and honour of the family, made her stay in the marriage with the
abusive husband, for he says, “Your
husband is doing this for your own good.” (p, 60) Her
conspicuously amoral lover, who ‘used’ her for his political elevation, at the
end finds it difficult to be with a feminist and tries to save energy as Preti Taneja,
(FRSL) a British writer whose debut novel We That are Young (2017) won
Desmond Elliot Prize, puts it, “Public celibacy is here necessary for
saintliness (The Guardian, July 2017)Or as Kandasamy puts it, "To ejaculate was to emasculate.”
His extended groups of people never missed a chance to disrespect and degrade
her, for in their view, her acquaintance with her lover is a means for an end;
an end is to enter politics. It has become a matter of love, faith, and
respect. When he isn’t ready to accept her publicly, she decides to go far away
from him with a broken heart. For many days after the walk away, her delirious
state of mind put her in a precarious condition for having failed in her love.
Filled with love for communist
thoughts, she was attracted to a person involved in communist activities, who
had been a Naxalite. His passion towards the revolution, anger towards the
state, distaste for capitalism, and strong belief in communist ideologies
attracted her to finally marry him, but she was oblivious to the fact that he
was using the communist ideas as a
cover for his own sadism. (Preti Taneja)” His rule book- sown by
patriarchy, watered by feudalism, manured by a selective interpretation-
doesn’t allow her to be a writer, doesn’t allow her to be the person she always
wanted to be. He is unpredictable. He is outrageous.
It is also distressing to see how men
try to take control of everything that women do and Kandasamy ironically says,
“The effect of adhering to my husband’s
wishes gives me the appearance of a woman who has given up. But I know that
attired in this manner, I am all set to play the part of the good Indian wife.”
(p.16) The role that women play in their married lives and its unexpectedness
are well captured in the poem Life While-You-Wait:
“I know nothing
of the role I play
I only know
it’s mine. I can’t exchange it.
I have to guess
on the spot
Just what this play’s all about.” (Szymborska, lines 5-8)
The conditioning of women in an
androcentric society and how they are neutralised in their married life, which
turns them into taciturn individuals, is again a question of dilemma that women
face on a day-to-day basis. Juliet Mitchell
in Women’s Estate rightly defines gender as a “socially
conditioned fantasy.”One is not
born, but rather becomes, a woman as described by Simone De Beauvoir. Meena
Kandasamy has captured the nuances of every detail with an unflinching
narration in a poetic tone. The narrator says, “I contemplate the right response to every provocation, I cross out lines
of dialogue when I realise that silence sinks in better.” (p, 22)
In the due course, sex turns into rape
to teach her a lesson: “He unwittingly believes that sex involves more than
body fluids, and convinced that he is injecting ideology into his crazy wife.”
(p.22) She finds it hard to resist a monster, not even her body resists the
rape. She knows rape is a defeat, but she is helpless now, and she waits for
the time. She waits for the change. No one should have to say this in any
relationship: “I climb into the incredible sadness of silence.” Her husband
tries to break the silence with more violence and rape. In this marriage in
which I am beaten, he is the poet. And
one of his opening lines of verse reads:
“When I Hit
You,
Comrade Lenin
weeps.
I cry, he chronicles.
The institution of marriage creates its own division of labour.” (p, 84)
UN researchers in their largest
international study on rape found that ‘rape occurs within marriage and the
sexual offenders feel a sense of ‘sexual entitlement’ when inflicting violence,
and about half of them don’t feel guilty about it. She finds it suffocating as
she is not allowed to use the internet, mobile, social media, mail, etc. She
finds it hard to believe that any of her wishes to lead a normal life like any
other would be concluded by her husband as a petit-bourgeois lifestyle. His
misdemeanor gets the mask of comradeship. It has become a weapon of abuse to
remind her of her past, to call her slut, a whore. He finds mistakes in
everything to abuse her physically, mentally, and emotionally. Fear of
accepting a person who he had been and the fear of remembering the acts he had
committed made him stop writing poems about his abuses and her emotions. The
narrator acknowledges, “Marriage became
a re-education camp. He transformed into a teacher, and I became the
wife-student learning from this communist crusader” (p.32), but he is
hypocritical enough to write a poem on his abuses. Fear of being murdered by
her husband, who claims to have murdered many, made her stay in this marriage.
It has become unbearable when he tries to kill her. She decides to walk out of
the marriage after realizing that she is more useful alive than dead, and to
feel free at her parents’ home. Once she is at home, she feels accountable for
the innumerable questions that she faces from the people. The questions: why
did she not run away? Why did she not use the opportunities that she had for
escape? Why did she stay if, indeed, the conditions were as bad as she claims?
How much of this wasn’t consensual? Those are hard to answer, and elevated her
pain by making her husband's crime acceptable. Once she takes the task of
punishing him, she realizes that he has become a chameleon, so that any act
would be a blasphemy against the crusader who is working for people. She is not
to write an essay that demonises him as one of her friends suggests. She is not
to take any proper support from the police to punish him. In her solitude, she
finds the reasons as to why she has been told by her father to “Go away and
never come back” and decides to leave for a place where her past wouldn’t haunt
her and which can make her live a life that is not attached to her bygone days.
In her distress, the narrator says, “I
rushed into it. The rest, as they say, is the unrest of this story.” (p.45)
Kandasamy’s prose flows like poetry,
which creates images in the minds of the readers. The conduct of the men, which
is most of the time double-faced, is brought to the limelight throughout the
novel through the behavior of her father as well as her comrade husband and
said, “I must remember that the
responsibility of the female body belongs to me, and that I must not move or
walk in such a fashion that makes others feel it as an object of allurement (although
I should respectfully tolerate the gropes, the whistles, the hissed
invitations)” (34) Andrea Dworkin writes early in 1970s, “ In our
culture not one part of women’s body is left untouched and un-altered….every
section of her body is subject to modification.” (p.113-114)
There are no names for the characters,
but they play the roles. Though the narrative seems like an autobiography, it
distances itself from certain aspects of an autobiography. Embellished with
illustrations of the marital life of a young woman, the novel itself is a
crusader against the patriarchy, which made it seem like the submissive role of
a wife is the inevitability of a perfect married life. At the end, she finds it
difficult to live an unmarried life. Opposing a tradition is to attract the
abuse from society. But she never loses hope, she is anti-fragile as she writes
for the change, and she lives for the change. She herself is a change.
In conclusion, Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer
as a Young Wife depicts the harsh realities of a conjugal life, and the protagonist's
fortitude in resisting the atrocities gave her the strength to liberate herself
from all her familial and marital clutches.
Works Cited
De
Beauvoir, Simon. The Second Sex,
Vintage, 2011.
Dworkin,
Andrea. Woman Hating: A Radical Look at
Sexuality, Penguin Classics, 2025.
https://www.newslaundry.com/2018/04/20/mind-of-a-rapist-kathua-unnao-paedophilia
Kandasamy,
Meena. When I Hit You: Or, A
Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, Juggernaut Books, 2017
Mitchel,
Juliette. Woman’s Estate, Verso book,
Reprint Edition, 2017
Preti, Taneja. Review of “When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife” The Guardian, Fri 7 Jul 2017.