Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow. We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt, just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.” Toni Morrison in her first novel The Bluest Eye writes about the rape of a little black girl by her father.
It is a heart-breaking tale of internalised and manifested violence evoking a whole history of racism and its ramified perversions. In Beloved, one of Morrison’s best works, the theme of rape is central to the exploration of the history of embodied violence of slavery. Such a history, according to Morrison, cannot be narrated in the established conventions of novel-writing.
The ‘truths’ of this traumatic history require a new form of novelistic telling. Comparing Meena Kandasamy’s novel When I Hit you: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife to Morrison’s towering works is both unfair and high praise.
The novel, as many readers have observed, is a punch in the gut. The book begins with the writer (she insists on describing herself as one) making it clear as to why she wants to, has to, tell her story. The account of her abuse is endlessly improvised by her mother “until only the most absurd details remain.”
The writer says: “I need to stop this, before my story becomes a footnote. I must take responsibility over my life. I must write my own story.” The story is an unflinching, unabashed, narrative of the protagonist’s experience of the most dehumanising violence she suffers in her marriage.
The husband, who is not named (because of legal compulsions), is a political figure, an active agent in what he believes is an imminent Communist revolution. He makes his wife the site where the force needed to achieve this goal is tested and enacted.
Kandasamy describes in vivid detail how her body and mind are ravaged by this dehumanising project. Her only consolation and hope is her belief in her craft as a writer and poet.
Though her aspirations are systematically thwarted by her husband who tries to maliciously enslave her into becoming a pliant, unquestioning wife and mother, the writer resists this enslavement by continuing to imagine fictive worlds even while she gradually falls apart under extreme violence.
In the Indian context where the issue of marital rape has no legal recognition, the novel is a brutally explosive testimony that forces a debate on the subject. Kandasamy is unrelenting in her exposure of the hypocrisy that lies beneath social conventions, middle class morality, and the institution of marriage with its prescribed gender-roles.
The writer pre-empts the possible questions that such a narrative is bound to evoke. The novel does not take an “objective” view of rape. She does not forgive her oppressor by explaining the buried psychology (even though she mentions his troubled childhood) behind his inexorable viciousness.
There is no prevarication on rape, no excuse for violence. Having said that, one wonders why Kandasamy chooses to call this writing a work of fiction. And here, I come back to my earlier observations about Morrison who is extremely self-conscious in her use of the novel form and its possibilities.
It is in this aspect that When I Hit You seems unconvincing. There is no doubt that Kandasamy is a skilled writer, even though her poetic expositions can sometimes be artless; she has a way with language and knows how to deploy it. However, that alone does not make a novel.
Kandasamy has publicly acknowledged that her novel is very closely autobiographical. Her admission breaks the silence on the issue of domestic violence in India making this work as much about politics as it is about personal courage and resilience.