When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

By Meena Kandasamy

Seduced by politics and poetry, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife, but what for her is a contract of love is for him a contract of ownership. As he sets about reducing her to his idealized version of a kept woman, bullying her out of her life as an academic and writer in the process, she attempts to push back—a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape. Smart, fierce and courageous, When I Hit You is a dissection of what love meant, means and will come to mean when trust is undermined by violence; a brilliant, throat-tightening feminist discourse on battered faces and bruised male egos; and a scathing portrait of traditional wedlock in modern India.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Release date: May 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786491275

Meena Kandasamy

Meena Kandasamy is a poet, fiction writer, translator and activist who is based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010). The Gypsy Goddess is her first novel.

Reviews for When I Hit You

[charl08-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Told in the first person, this is an powerful account of an abusive marriage in India. Kandasamy's protagonist is no victim, but horribly penned in by her new husband's jealousy and paranoia. From wanting her email passwords to violent abuse, she chronicles the loss of writing career, sense of self and control of her own body, as doctors, family and friends fail to see what is happening and her parents urge her not to leave her husband for fear of loss of 'face'. Tracking her experiences through imagining it as a film, a book, a love letter, the (never named, I think) protagonist distances herself from her own abuse. When she is finally able to leave, which we know has happened at the very beginning of the book, her parents' reactions are some kind of light relief: her mother's attempts to talk about her appearance when she arrived at the family home (her feet!), her father's denial that he has any influence over his daughter. The contrast between her 'modern' freelance lifestyle, and being uninvited from a wedding as a divorced woman, is particularly stark."I am the woman whose reputation is rusting. Who dissolves her once-upon-a-time in vodka with sliced lime, whole green chillies and sea salt. Who swallows it in the sweet heat of a neat whisky and rolls it into tight joints, smoking it up in circles of regret. I wear it in leopard print. I walk it around in red, outrageous stilettos. I take it to every seedy bar in town... I am the woman who did not know this woman myself, wild and ecstatic, trapped inside me. She is the stranger I am taking to town. She is the stranger I am getting to know, the rebellious stranger under my skin who refuses to stand to any judgement."Highly recommended.