The Voice of Protest: Meena
Kandasamy’s When
I Hit You: Or A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
Dr. Ramnath Kesarwani,
Assistant Professor, Government Girls’ P.G. College,
Ghazipur, U.P.
Protest has been a very
vibrant theme in literature and it has been articulated
through various forms. The protest literature creates
awareness among people to injustices around them as Marshal
(2000) has viewed that protest takes place against the wrong
doings in society. Thus protest literature acts as a weapon
of the voiceless. Moreover, it serves as a vital tool for
social transformation, articulating people’s grievances and
challenges. The protest is expected to be directed towards
transforming the wrong system, not individuals, and focus on
the areas of growth and renewal. Its prime focus is on the
constructive and corrective criticism so that a better and
humanistic vision could be sustained with liberty,
fraternity and equality.
The terms domination and
resistance are very much co-defining words having meaning in
relation to each other. The conflict between the powerful
and the powerless is the existing dimension of the conflict
for power and authority. This conflict of power can be seen
most effectively among men and women. Patriarchy and the
stereotypical mindset of the gendered society privilege one
party, the men while subordinates the other, the women. The
patriarchal privilege, in fact, makes men believe having
total control over women – both in terms of their body and
mind. Male dominance is a trait of patriarchy – political,
social, cultural, economic and sexual. The male dominance
puts the idea that men are superior to women – an idea that
becomes the major reason of domestic violence. A critic
believed that male dominance means that where there is
concentration of power, men most likely are to take it.
There are many critics who
locate the trend of protest within the socio- cultural
nature of the field where there is always hegemonic
interplay between domination and protest. The study of
power- relation can be understood through this interplay
between hegemony and protest. In his book Domination and the
Arts of Resistance James Scott emphasises that for the
study of power relation we need to understand that
“virtually all ordinarily observed relations between
dominant and subordinate represent the encounter of the public transcript
of the dominant with the public transcript
of the subordinate” (13). When we talk about the female
voice of resistance we need to focus on the socio-cultural
conditions also. Usha Bande points out in her book Writing Resistance
that “women’s resistance is variable, complex and
multivalent because women live in dialectical relations with
the patriarchal ideological structure” (02). Women in
society are socialized in such a way that they internalize
their subjugation as a natural process, therefore, when they
strive to protest against that societal system their protest
takes place at multiple levels.
The voice of protest has been
well articulated through literary writings by women against
the patriarchal oppression. The real experience of women
with the patriarchal threshold deliberates them to carve out
their stories of protest through different genres of
literature whether through poetry or through novel. Their
personal experiences, when carved out in writings, become
the shared experiences of all women who have been the victim
of patriarchy and its agents. Indian women writers are able
to equip themselves with the power of pen in order to
narrate their narratives either personal or public and thus
create a link between their readers and themselves.
Meena Kandasamy is such a
writer whose marital life has been one of oppression and
subjugation both physical and mental perpetrated by her
husband. Unable to bear her painful memory, despite walking
out of the marital accord, she relieves herself with the
burden of psychological suffering by carving out those
painful experiences into novel. Her autobiographical novel When
I Hit You, subtitled as A Portrait of the Writer
as a Young Wife, becomes the very platform for
suggesting the reality of the Indian women within the
marital institution in which they become the victim of
domestic violence.
Men have applied various
strategies to have control over women. In marital cord the
husband has upper hand in Indian family, and if in any case
the husband fails to have that upper hand directly he plots
in other way to do so. That is what the husband of Meena
Kandasamy also does. He wanted to restrict the social
connections of Meena channelled through social media. So, he
first orders her to stop her activity through social media
but when she neglects his order he initiates self-ordeal by
burning his skin, a kind of emotional blackmail to have
authority over her. He seems to be a hypocrite communist who
calls social media platforms like Facebook only as a time
waster. According to him “There is no reason why you should
be on Facebook. It’s narcissism. It’s exhibitionism. It’s a
waste of time” (50). At literal level anyone can take his
opinion as concern of a husband for his wife in order to
save her from being the victim of social media. But the
discourse of the opinion lies in the strategic pattern where
a male master wants to discard his woman’s reach to the
world through social media, especially her attempt to become
a well known writer in English. He knew well that Facebook
was her lifeline to the world outside”, a “professional
link” to remain active in a “freelance world” (52) to be
connected to the literary giants but he did not like her
choice of becoming a writer. Meena could have opportunity
only at the mercy of others through Facebook and cutting
herself off from it meant “an act of career-suicide” (52)
but that was what he wanted. In fact, alienating women from
the main stream-line has been a very normal tendency of male
hegemony. And more so if a woman tries to make her career in
writing.
Due to man’s physical, often
social, superiority it helps them to perpetrate violence
against women and this violence enormously creates fear
about which Neil Jacobson and John Gottman say, as quoted by
Steven R. Tracy in “Patriarchy and Domestic Violence” that
“fear is the force that provides battering with its power”
(574). Since there is a strange relationship between
Patriarchy and domestic violence, patriarchy is considered
as the ultimate reason of abuse against women. Lenore Walker
believes that all forms of violence are perpetrated against
women because of ‘sexism’. According to her, as quoted by
Steven R. Tracy, “sexism is the real underbelly of human
suffering” (576). This sexism comes into existence because
of the power-struggle when men, with all powers privileged
by patriarchy, resort to violence after finding their
position being engendered. In a similar context over the
views of patriarchy and violence Carolyn Holderread Hegen
puts her own understanding of the nature and function of
patriarchy when she writes, as R. Tracy quoted, that
In patriarchy, women and
children are defined in relation to men who control the
resources and the power. Women and children are the other,
the object. Men are the norm, the subject. In a
dominance-and-submission social order, there is no true
mutual care. Subordinates are to care for the needs of the
dominants. (577)
Rosemary Radford Ruether
also agrees with the opinion that patriarchy is most
responsible in promoting violence against women. She
thinks that domestic violence against women is, as R.
Tracy quoted, “rooted in and is the logical conclusion of
basic patriarchal assumptions about women’s subordinate
status” (577).
Most of the researchers agree
that abuse against women takes place because of abusive
males’ sense of insecurity and sense of low self-esteem. R.
Tracy states that in order to maintain their “fragile sense
of masculinity” abusive men use their force to keep their
wives in proper place and to eliminate threats to their
limited male potency. The physical abusers use many tactics
like verbal threats, control of financial resources and
control of her movement and contacts to others so that they
can dominate and subjugate their wives. Since man considers
himself superior to a woman he tries to have full control
over her. Moreover, since he is, somewhere, motivated by a
sense of insecurity his domineering attitude gets
strengthened. That is what Meena Kandasmy’s husband does. He
has the fear of insecurity that he might lose his
superiority over his wife if she becomes a well-known
writer. Therefore, due to this reason, he tries to block
every channel of contact that she may establish from outside
in order to forge a new, independent identity for herself.
The usurpation of Email Id is the very part of that design
of domination. Consequently, she feels “robbed of [her]
identity” (55).
The conventional attitude of
Indian parents towards daughter after her marriage treats
her as ‘other’ and if anything goes wrong in her marital
relation they, mostly, hold her responsible for that. It is
generally believed that daughters should try to be happy in
their marriage at any cost, at least should try to appear
happy. Any barrier, restriction put on her by her husband is
justified by her parents in order to save themselves from
any inconvenience and try to convince her to accommodate
with the hegemony of the husband. In the novel Meena
Kandasmy tells her parents about the abnormal behaviour of
her husband, when he fixes the limit of time for internet
access, a kind of “absolute insanity of . . . prohibition”
her mother, instead of supporting her, says: “Three hours is
a long time, . . . three hours a week will do. I only take
ten minutes every day to check my email” (59). Women are
stereotyped from childhood that whatever restrictions are
imposed on them it is for their own good. Every kind of
restrictive methodology is justified in the name of their
welfare. This phrase of ‘for your own good’ is so haunting
for Meena that whenever her parents justified it she felt
like “reduced to being a child again” (60) when her teenage
neighbour used to put his finger in her ‘eight year old
vagina’ to check for “forest insects and bed bugs and evil
imps” (60). In India, most of the domestic violence
flourishes because of the tendency of parents who consider
their daughter a liability and teach her to be obedient and
silent sufferer of the violence the husband inflicts
on her. Meena’s parents also try to convince her to follow
her husband’s instruction to be co-operative to him because
the “marriage is a give and take. Listen to him. He only
means well. Do not raise your voice. Do not talk back . . .
silence is a shield and it is also a weapon (157). The
parents are always in fear that if their daughter dares to
break the marriage bond it will be an insult for them in the
town.
Most of the cases of domestic
violence and child-sexual abuse flourish in our society just
because women and girls are socialized to remain ‘silent’.
It is believed that if the woman remains silent and does not
react against husband, his anger and frustration may subside
and he may treat her tenderly. However, most of the time it
proves simply a myth and finding no reaction against his
actions, he becomes more violent. Meena recalls how her
husband used to find excuses to torture her mentally and
then physically. The reconstruction of events that leads to
the physical violence begins with trivial accusations like
why a particular man calls her ‘dearest’; why her email
inbox is empty and clean; why there are only few telephone
calls on the call log of her phone, why hasn’t she washed
the sink; why she can’t write as anonymous writer; why she
consented to attend the conference without consulting him,
etc. Meena confesses that sometimes his bones of contention
are “so thin that they make me wonder if any accusation is
only a ruse and excuse to hit me” (69). This situation of
Meena resembles to that of Tehmina Durrani, whose husband
Mustafa Khar invented accusations to execute violence
against her. Reflecting upon the conflicting condition of
Durrani Ramnath Kesarwani writes in “Writing Resistance: An
Analysis of Tehmina Durrani’s My Feudal Lord”
that she has suffered “in silence for thirteen years often
trading her self-esteem and identity. She is trapped in the
male dominated society where women are treated as possession
and an object to be consumed”, where her world is “plagued
by physical abuse, marital rape, hypocrisy, public scrutiny,
betrayal” (165-166). Kesarwani also points out that Durrani
becomes
the victim of domestic
violence which remains invisible because whatever is
happening within the four walls of a house is regarded as
a private matter and any interference in this matter is
taken to be as a breach of privacy of a person, a notion
against which the entire crusade of women’s movement
popularised world over. (166)
Thus, as Durrani felt lonely
and helpless to tell people what she suffered behind the
closed doors so was the case with Meena Kandasamy who had no
one beside her to tell about what she underwent behind the
closed doors. Even if she could find such a chance to share
her ordeal she might have not willed to do so.
How ironical as well as
hypocritical is the fact that the man, who was a lecturer in
English, never hesitated to insult and taunt his wife with
abusive words just because she was aspiring to become a
writer in English language. Meena says: “Being a writer
invites constant ridicule from my husband” (74). He compares
the Indian women writers writing in English to those whores
who used to serve as the “bridge between the colonizers and
the colonized” and now that role of the bridge is performed
by “the writer who writes in English” and thus is akin to a
whore. This kind of mindset towards the women writers
writing in English is highly prejudiced and misogynistic.
Here, her husband becomes the representative of those
patriarchal agents who are entirely against the idea that a
woman should be a writer rather they think it to be a field
in which men must have hegemony. He leaves no stone unturned
to intimidate his wife when she accepts the invitation to
write on sexuality. He tries to distort and malign her image
by accusing that she has been asked to write on this issue
because she has sexual experience with the men of each age
like “who are twenty years old, thirty years old, forty
years old, fifty years old, sixty years old, seventy years
old” (75). It has been a common belief in patriarchal
society that the women who are poets and writers are not
‘good’ women, especially those women writers who openly
express their views on sexual issues as it is considered a
taboo for women. Meena’s husband, having that kind of
mindset, tries to strangle her dreams of becoming a writer
by putting every kind of restrictions to move and write. He
says, “I do not want you to sit there and keep typing your
essay when there are more important things to do. Should
I remind Writer Madam that she is also a wife?” (76).
However, despite such adverse
circumstances Meena tries to resist those controls and
restrictions by nourishing her dream of a writer and does
not lose the opportunity to snatch time for it. Her struggle
to build her identity as a writer is like a long waged-war
against a man who intends to strangle an emerging writer.
She says that “all I need is half an hour of freedom and I
keep looking for the minute such a chance opens up” (77). In
fact, she is not ready to succumb to the role of a ‘good’
Indian wife to dance at her husband’s finger. She was
determined to spell off the prejudice of her husband who
called her a ‘fake’ feminist capitalizing on her cunt.
Instead, she thought that the job of a wife “comes somewhere
in the middle: labouring with my cunt, labouring with my
hands” (79). Meena’s opinion on the role of a wife is very
similar to that of Nila in Taslima Nasrin’s novel French
Lover where she says that a wife’s position is no more
than that of the three figures – maid, cook and prostitute.
Nila compares a wife’s position to that of whores because
“she’d have to be the perfect whore and sell herself just as
they sold their bodies for some money” (28). Meena knew well
that her identity of a writer was associated with her
self-respect which was threatened by her sadist husband. She
asserts that being a writer is now
a matter of self-respect. It
is the job title that I give myself. I realize that my
husband does not hate anything in this universe as much as
the idea of a writer (a petite bourgeois woman writer, at
that), so I forge a sense of reverence towards the job of
being a writer. (80)
Meena feels writing to be the
potent medium to wage a war against patriarchal feudalistic
atrocities. She feels the urge to defy the imposed position
of loneliness, the similar kind of situation Tehmina was
propelled into by Mustafa Khar when he had imprisoned her
with her children in his distant village Kot Aadu. Meena
finds poetry as the easiest and potent medium to express her
helplessness and the result comes as a mode of resistance
and defiance against male hegemony. She had the feeling to
defy her husband’s oppressive attitude which could be best
executed through poetry because, as she writes, “There is
something about my act of writing a poem that disturbs him
deeply” (81-82). He knew the power of poetry that’s why he
was vehemently against putting her pain into poetry.
Although, he himself liked to write poetry focusing on the
ideals of communism yet was against her poems. His character
very much resembles to Mustafa Khar of My Feudal Lord
and Namdeo Dhasal of I Want to Destroy Myself who
also talked about communist ideals expressing their vision
to reform the condition of the marginalised but in fact
their all claims of public welfare proved only a sham as
they carried hypocrisy. In public they earned the position
of a leader for the marginalised but in their private life
were oppressor of their women. Meena tells that she had
married this man because he talked about “the revolution it
seemed more intense than any poetry, more moving than any
beauty” (89). But now, after the bitter experiences of life,
she comes to realize that the revolutionaries like her
husband used the word revolution only to their own benefit
because under this dignified garb of ‘revolution’ he is, in
fact, “a careerist, a wife-beater, an opportunist, a
manipulator, an infiltrator, a go-getter, an ass-licker, an
alcoholic and a dopeheaded” (90). In this respect the
opinion of Meena towards her husband is very similar to that
of Tehmina Durrani about her husband. Durrani was also
impressed by her husband Mustafa Khar who talked like a
socialist to bring ideals of public welfare in politics.
However, later she realizes that the man whom she married
was a complete womanizer, a “professional seducer” (My Feudal Lord 83)
who had a glorious image in public life but his private life
was flooded with domestic violence and wife beating. Malika
Amar Shaikh also had married such a man like Namdeo Dhasal,
a Panther man, a poet of powerful voice who led the Dalit
Panther Movement to an uproar. However, after marriage she
found him only a “rough, a maverick, arrogant, uncaring and
often resorted to violence” (Malika 86). The shared
experiences of Tehmina Durrani, Malika Amar Shaikh and Meena
Kandasamy attest the claim that domestic violence is the
bitter truth of women’s life irrespective of class, caste
and religion.
The issue of freedom of
expression has been a crucial factor in democratic society
in which every individual is privileged with it. However,
most of the time it happens in male dominated society that
the range of women’s writing is restrained by male
authorities, particularly by their husbands thinking freedom
of expression may make women faithless towards them. And if
any woman tries to reject that restriction she is considered
fit to be treated violently and savagely. Moreover, they
find it as a better excuse to hide their own sense of
inferiority regarding the possible superiority of their
wives and try to dominate them by verbal and physical abuse.
The experience of Meena Kandasamy seems to attest this
opinion when she says that her husband is “railing at me,
slapping me, throwing my laptop across the small kitchen,
forcing me to delete a manuscript” (87) accusing that she
was nourishing her secret past love affairs through writing.
This kind of sham accusation was hurled at her only to
hostile her writing spirit so that she could not gain name
and fame, independent from him, a mentality many hypocrites
have. However, Meena pursued her purpose which included
writing as a kind of revenge against his masculine
prejudices. She was determined “to rub salt on his wounded
pride, to reclaim” (88) her space, her right to write. For
her writing in English revived her romanticism which
marriage had ruined with words like “Bitch. Whore. Slut”
(92) flung at her face. According to her if Tamil made her a
word huntress, English made her a love goddess. The assumed
refuge in English was more crucial to come out of those
scary thoughts that pinched her to commit suicide and she
felt to be moving like in a pendulum of choice “Alive. Dead.
Dead. Alive. Alive. Dead. Dead. Dead” (93). This Hamlet-like
situation could lead her to the verge of tragedy if she had
not made English language as a medium of expression.
Silence is also considered as
a kind of protest and, therefore, Meena assumes silence to
register her protest against her husband’s violence.
However, her silence irritates him and instead of serving as
a weapon it becomes reason of more violence as is apparent
from these lines: “He kicks me in the stomach. ‘Prove it! He
yells as I double over. ‘Prove it to me that you are my
wife. Prove it to me that you are not thinking of another
man. Or I will prove it for you’” (163). And later on the
same ‘silence’ becomes the reason of horrific experience of
life that many Indian wives suffer – the marital rape. Her
husband rapes her repeatedly using abusive words: “this is
the miracle cure to your silence . . . you are a whore. This
is what whores do. This is why I don’t treat you like a wife
. . . Next time you taunt me with your silence I will tear
your fucking cunt apart. Now say sorry, bitch. Say sorry”
(164). The words suggest enough how demonic and violent her
husband was. He treats her like an object to be smashed and
slashed into pieces through words. This is simply a
hegemonic tendency of male superiority to have female body
under control and his own weakness.
Rape is one of the prime evils
of the modern civil society. When committed outside of the
domestic periphery there is possibility of rape case being
reported but when the maligning act takes place within the
home women suffer it silently. However, now, due to
education and awareness women are coming out courageously to
speak out against rape. In literature, particularly in
fiction, women writers are emerging eloquent to discuss the
issue of rape in their writings. To write about rape is also
considered as a kind of resistance to rape. Usha Bande
comments in her book Writing
Resistance that this job of women that they have
chosen to “speak rape” is itself a kind of resistance. Their
act is a “measure of liberation” because it shows the “shift
from serving as the object of voyeuristic (the act under
which is derived sexual satisfaction by watching other
object or person involved in it) discourse to the occupation
of a subject-position as master narrative” (221). The cases
of marital rape, although unacknowledged, are not rare in
India. Susan Brown Miller states in her classic book on rape
that in human history rape has been man’s basic weapon of
force against women and also the symbol of the triumph of
manhood. She concludes that rape, as R. Tracy quotes “has
played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than
a conscious process by which all men keep all women in a
state of fear” (577). The experience of marital rape is more
psychological than physical as it breaks the heart and
spirit of a woman who can’t imagine that the man who rapes
her is not a stranger, not a masked assaulter but her
husband for whom she has to make coffee every morning. Meena
felt like Saru, the protagonist of Shashi Deshpande’s novel
The Dark Holds No Terrors in which Saru also had the
similar kind of experience of marital rape. In Tehmina
Durrani’s Blasphemy, Heer also had the similar kind
of experience of marital rape in which her husband used to
tie her with bed and impose his masculine force into her
body. These examples of marital rape suggest strongly how
there is a net of shared experiences of marital violence
across South Asian society. In his article “From Subversion
to Assertion: A Study of The Dark Holds No
Terrors” Ramnath Kesarwani writes, “It is a pity that
rape within the marital institution is not recognised in
Indian families. Believing that a husband has every right
over his wife he can do anything in bed even without the
consent of his partner” (80-81). He also states that though
Susan Brownmiller makes it clear that if a woman chooses not
to have intercourse with a specific man and the man chooses
to proceed against her will, that is a criminal act of rape,
yet it is not accepted if it is done by a husband in Indian
tradition.
However, after so many
repeated episodes of rape and violence Meena determines to
finally walk out the marital bond as there was no reason to
continue the horrific experience. Slowly she develops an
understanding of the ‘self’ and determines to write her
story in the category of “Women writing women” (221).
Although she knew that a woman who talks about her private
life in her writing is attacked and blamed by the
patriarchal society verbally and sometimes even physically
yet she took the task of revealing her violent martial
relation as a kind of protest which also posed a challenge
for the society. To question the established system of male
superiority is never an easy task and there is always a
threat of being targeted for such daring task yet without
question no system can be corrected. However, this challenge
was more difficult for Meena because her husband was a
social activist and the “messianic status conferred on him
for picking up the causes of the dispossessed allows him to
entrench myself into communities. At this stage, talking
about his misogyny, his violence, becomes an act of
blasphemy against a crusader” (233).
Meena’s situation was more
like Heer in Tehmina Durrani’s novel Blasphemy. Heer
also faced the similar situation of difficulty in exposing
the evils of her husband Pir Sain because he was worshiped
as the Man of God and to talk about his evil doings was
considered as nothing but blasphemy. Heer’s friend Tara also
warns her about the danger of exposing the evils of her
husband and says, as quoted by Ramnath Kesarwani in
“Patriarchy, Religion and Women: An Analysis of Tehmina
Durrani’s Blasphemy”,
“how will we fight decades of established thought? They will
brand us kafir
and burn us at stake. Their propaganda is deep rooted” (07).
However, this act of exposing the experienced marital
violence is a necessity for a woman for two reasons: first,
it is about registering a kind of protest against the age
old masculine hegemony to control female body as Meena
herself claims: “My woman’s body, when it is written down,
is rape resistant” (240) and second it is about raising
one’s position from being a victim to becoming empowered and
it is very much clear from Meena’s views that the “only body
I feel empowered to share is the body I fashion out of my
own words” (240). On this assertion, Meena strives to share
her personal experiences of domestic violence to the public
through writing following the wide acclaimed idea of
‘personal is political’.
Autobiography/autobiographical
novel has been taken as a challenge by writers to examine
and face their life experiences with all their
contradictions, and to emerge with a picture of
assertiveness. This kind of taking challenge is the
manifestation of a writer’s courage because revealing
intimate personal details to strangers always incorporates
apprehension and slander. When I Hit You: Or a
Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena
Kandasamy manifests her spirit of conquering her
socio-cultural fear and leaves a permanent mark in the field
of women writing as a sign of victory against the silence
most Indian women are subjected to. Her autobiographical
novel, in a way, also dismantles, what Rahat Imran calls,
“the Orientalist stereotype of eastern women as docile and
subservient subjects of patriarchal cultures and religions”
(05). Meena’s autobiography becomes an act of, as Rahat
Imran writes, “feminist resistance against patriarchy and
bonding across cultures with women, regardless of their
social class and cultural calling who can identify with her
gendered experiences of oppression” (92). Thus, by narrating
her own life experience Meena seems to stress that action
must originate from women’s personal experiences and
increased awareness. Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka
Tripathi also point out in “When a Violated Body
Strikes/Writes Back: Unveiling the Violence in Meena
Kandasamy’s When I
Hit You: Or a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife”
that
Kandasamy did not make any
distance with the unnamed narrator or write in a third
person. She took it too closely to her heart that in the
first section of her novel she gushed out her own stand as
a writer as well as the narrator of the story; even it is
autobiographical novel, she decreed whatever she had
learnt. (51)
This implies that it is women
who are best placed to articulate their agenda and demands.
The emphasis on women speaking out for themselves is also a
pathway of empowerment. Through autobiography/
autobiographical novel a woman narrates her life-history to
her female readers who easily identify the story with
themselves despite their cross-cultures because women
throughout the world share the similar life experiences of
torment and repression in the hands of patriarchal power.
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Resistance: A
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