tl;dr

An extraordinary novel about spousal abuse written with a great deal of passion, pain, anger and even humour.

opening remarks

I switch back to the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist with When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy.  John Self raved about this novel last year, so it’s been on my radar, but as with most things I needed an award inspired nudge to read it.

knee-jerk observations

I know it doesn’t always seem like it but I do try to avoid quoting large slabs of text.  Sometimes, though, it’s important to share the full extent so you can appreciate the author’s tone and rhythm.  This is the opening:

Alright maybe our narrator’s mother is over-egging the pudding a tad, but I’ve had to deal with lice (my children, not me) and it’s a fucking horror-show:

A handful of pages in and I’m already in love with this book.  It’s not simply the biting sarcasm or the self-awareness, it’s the humanity that underscores it all.  I’m sure what follows is not going to be an easy read, but I feel like I’m in the hands of someone in complete control of their story, no matter how painful.

Our narrator describes herself as belonging to the “broad left”.  What that means was much clearer when she was younger – wearing a Che Guevara pin, falling in love with Bob Marley – but it’s upended somewhat with the fall of the USSR and discussions with her husband.  He is “of the far left” and sees it as his duty as a communist crusader to educate his wife on the joys of Marx, Lenin and Mao.  This leads her to draw the following, disturbing conclusion:

Our narrator isn’t just abused physically by her husband; he also embarks on a passive-aggressive mission to hinder her creativity.  She wants to write poetry, but he stops her arguing (nonsensically) that it will provide a material or objective basis to her ephemeral emotions.  As he says, “If you put this within a poem, it will stay there, imprisoned forever. It will be a poison that will never let us move further, it will never let us forgive, or forget.”

He, of course, is allowed to write poetry.  When our narrator asks him why he can and she can’t, he explains that:

At the centre of the book, there is a magnificent chapter – an almost self-contained story – where our narrator details a past relationship with an older man, a charismatic politician.  Her sense of identity and her feminism is tested throughout the relationship.  At one point, when she questions why he won’t marry her, he attacks her feminism:

At the end of the chapter, as the politician lies in a hospital dying – she is the last to find out that he’s sick – our narrator makes the following resolution:

When our narrator puts on lipstick, she is told be her douche of a husband that she will be mistaken for a prostitute.  Her response doesn’t go down so well:

You can’t help but be angry with our narrator’s parents and their desire that she stay in the marriage even though they understand her husband is beating her.  In the end, it comes down to reputation; her failed marriage would be their shame in the eyes of the community.

It’s hard to believe her father means well, that he isn’t selfish.  And yet I also know he is defined and guided by cultural expectations:

What breaks up the awfulness is our narrators’ forays into linguistics.  In this instance formal examples of sexual language in Tamil.  Obviously, it’s not entirely disconnected from her current nightmare:

Wow.  Gut-wrenching:

There are so many compelling, poignant, visceral passages that it’s hard to point at one chapter, one scene, one paragraph and say – this is the key insight of the novel, this is what it’s about.  But I’m going to do it anyway.  I feel out narrator’s painful; brutal story culminates in these three sentences:

The Gist Of It

It would be so easy for Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as Young Wife to be wall to wall misery porn.  A novel about spousal abuse lends itself to numerous and lengthy graphic scenes of brutality and pain.  And let’s be clear Meena Kandasamy doesn’t hold back.  When, in the second half of the novel, the husband’s cruelty goes up a few hundred notches, Kandasamy’s narrator doesn’t flinch, she methodically describes his actions.  When he rapes her again and again, almost making a sport of it, she details the pain, the violation and the horror.

But in contrast to a much longer novel like Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, where the abuse is so regular, so over the top that it becomes impossible to engage with the character’s trauma, Kandasamy never revels in her narrator’s pain, never lingers on the welts and bruises.  Instead, she tries to understand, to tease apart the reasons why someone would stay in a violent relationship, especially an intelligent woman who considers herself to be a feminist, who actively writes about and debates issues of female empowerment.  How could a woman like this stay in a savage relationship for four months?  The answer is partly cultural – her parents, in particular, view her leaving as an embarrassment for the family – and it’s partly that the question is irrelevant.  It shouldn’t matter why a woman stayed in an abusive relationship, what matters is that we listen to her, we support her, and we don’t jump to conclusions or make judgements about her upbringing or state of mind.

What also makes this less about the misery porn and more about the courage to speak truth to pain and abuse is Kandasamy’s ability to vary tone and language throughout the novel.  Her narrator can be cynical, can be hilariously funny, can be erudite and insightful and, when it’s needed, filled with righteous fury and disgust.  She can also be vulnerable and scared, terrified of the next assault.

This remarkable novel, this book that should have garnered more attention, more award nominations, more frank and fearless discussions, should be a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and in what I’m sure will be a very strong shortlist, it should also win the award.