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A review by allthatissim
When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy
4.0
Full review: Flipping Through the Pages
Trigger Warning: Sexual & physical abuse, marital rape, domestic abuse, violence
When I Hit You is a hard-hitting reality. Sometimes, you read books which give you nightmares, make you think about the reality and give you goosebumps. THIS book is one of those books. Before we progress further, I want to tell that this book is not for the soft-hearted persons. This is brutal and horrifying. This book is full of paragraphs like this:
The unnamed narrator falls in love with a university lecturer because of his Marxist ideologies and revolutionary thoughts and marries him. Soon after the marriage, they move to Mangalore and she realizes that she is all alone there. Her husband decides to show her “right path” and soon her marriage becomes a training camp for her. He dictates her what to do, how to behave in public, whom to talk and even he limits her online presence time. He demands all her passwords and took the control of everything from her. She is constantly under his radar and finds herself totally cut-out from the outside world.
She was a writer but her husband deletes all her old emails thereby deleting her existence of being a writer. She was trapped in an unknown city within a house of three room with a husband who was always ready to punish her with his belt and other gadgets in case if there was even the tiniest mistake. And he calms down his anger by raping her.
But before losing her identity completely, she decides to fight back. She refuses to forget her words and that she is a writer and instead started writing letters to imaginary lovers, within the limited time that she was allowed to use a computer. And one day when her husband threatens to kill her, the realization dawns on her and she finds enough courage to leave him and return to her parents.
The most dangerous words for Indian parents is “what will we tell the world? What will they say?”. They fear more about what the people in the community will say, rather than what their daughter is going through. When the narrator tried to tell her parents about her husband, they told her that it will get better with time. And because hers was a love marriage, it puts more pressure on them, because ultimately the culture is of arranged marriage and if you have done a loved one then you have already crossed a line.
The thought of equality has been well put through this book. Kandasamy has referred that often the system of thought that talks about maintaining the equality, itself oppress other people. The husband claims to be a true communist but whenever his wife behaves in a way which he doesn’t like, she suddenly is a bad comrade and a whore to him. behind the curtain of Marxist ideology, he beats and rapes his wife. While telling her the consequences of abandoning the capitalist system, he tries to take away the identity of his wife.
While reading this, the first thought that you will get is how a well-educated, informative, intelligent, feminist girl ended up with a guy like this. But the truth is, you can’t figure out the real motive of anyone. It is hard to believe how a man can be so toxic and heartless. But kudos to [a:Meena Kandasamy|3027717|Meena Kandasamy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1360459496p2/3027717.jpg], she has portrayed this beautifully. At one point, you would think that is there is nothing redeeming in this man? But I am afraid, you won’t get what you want to find out.
[a:Meena Kandasamy|3027717|Meena Kandasamy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1360459496p2/3027717.jpg] writing is raw and brutal and yet honest and fierce. There are honest accounts of violence. So in order to read this book, you have to be strong. Though the book is said to be a fiction, we find a very thin line between this fiction and the reality of the author’s life. In this dark story, I applaud the author to find the humor wherever possible. Her language is kind of poetic and full of sarcasm.
However, within these circumstances, the narrator found her piece in writing and creating the new characters. She starts writing a page or two daily, recounting the various persons in her life, her ex-boyfriends and friends, the good time she spent and how she overcame from her first serious relationship. That writing time was her happiest time each day. She starts living a different life within her characters and on paper, she was able to express which she wasn’t able to do in real life. Her husband made fun of her writing and gave her threats to kill. That threat proved to be the final toll that she could take. I am really glad that at that point, she decided to left.
This story is not just the author’s own story. This is a story of many Indian women. There are women who are not that lucky to escape. There are the ones who were burned because of dowry. There are many such cases. However, the important thing is how we, as a society, are addressing these issues and how important it is to support the women instead of thinking “what will they say?”.
Overall, When I Hit You is real, raw and brutal but it is an important story which needed to be told. This is not just important for the adults but is equally important for the youngsters too to learn that doing suppressing the another in terms of a relationship shouldn’t happen and that everyone needs a personal space. This book will definitely make you angry and will leave you to think afterward. The author has bravely put forward the issues that we all have seen at one time or another, for sure, but fails to talk about. She admitted that no one forced her to into this relationship, yet she went into it because no one knows what future holds. This was undoubtedly a tough read but undeniably an important one.
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Trigger Warning: Sexual & physical abuse, marital rape, domestic abuse, violence
When I Hit You is a hard-hitting reality. Sometimes, you read books which give you nightmares, make you think about the reality and give you goosebumps. THIS book is one of those books. Before we progress further, I want to tell that this book is not for the soft-hearted persons. This is brutal and horrifying. This book is full of paragraphs like this:
"That is the aim of the rapes, all this rough sex. Not just a disciplining, but a disabling. He believes that after him, I will have nothing in me to love, to make love, to give pleasure. This is a man breaking his own wife. This is a man burning down his own house."
The unnamed narrator falls in love with a university lecturer because of his Marxist ideologies and revolutionary thoughts and marries him. Soon after the marriage, they move to Mangalore and she realizes that she is all alone there. Her husband decides to show her “right path” and soon her marriage becomes a training camp for her. He dictates her what to do, how to behave in public, whom to talk and even he limits her online presence time. He demands all her passwords and took the control of everything from her. She is constantly under his radar and finds herself totally cut-out from the outside world.
She was a writer but her husband deletes all her old emails thereby deleting her existence of being a writer. She was trapped in an unknown city within a house of three room with a husband who was always ready to punish her with his belt and other gadgets in case if there was even the tiniest mistake. And he calms down his anger by raping her.
But before losing her identity completely, she decides to fight back. She refuses to forget her words and that she is a writer and instead started writing letters to imaginary lovers, within the limited time that she was allowed to use a computer. And one day when her husband threatens to kill her, the realization dawns on her and she finds enough courage to leave him and return to her parents.
The most dangerous words for Indian parents is “what will we tell the world? What will they say?”. They fear more about what the people in the community will say, rather than what their daughter is going through. When the narrator tried to tell her parents about her husband, they told her that it will get better with time. And because hers was a love marriage, it puts more pressure on them, because ultimately the culture is of arranged marriage and if you have done a loved one then you have already crossed a line.
“I must learn that a Communist woman is treated equally and respectfully by comrades in public but can be slapped and called a whore behind closed doors. This is dialectics.”
The thought of equality has been well put through this book. Kandasamy has referred that often the system of thought that talks about maintaining the equality, itself oppress other people. The husband claims to be a true communist but whenever his wife behaves in a way which he doesn’t like, she suddenly is a bad comrade and a whore to him. behind the curtain of Marxist ideology, he beats and rapes his wife. While telling her the consequences of abandoning the capitalist system, he tries to take away the identity of his wife.
In this marriage in which I’m beaten, he is the poet. And one of his opening lines of verse reads: When I hit you, Comrade Lenin weeps.
While reading this, the first thought that you will get is how a well-educated, informative, intelligent, feminist girl ended up with a guy like this. But the truth is, you can’t figure out the real motive of anyone. It is hard to believe how a man can be so toxic and heartless. But kudos to [a:Meena Kandasamy|3027717|Meena Kandasamy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1360459496p2/3027717.jpg], she has portrayed this beautifully. At one point, you would think that is there is nothing redeeming in this man? But I am afraid, you won’t get what you want to find out.
[a:Meena Kandasamy|3027717|Meena Kandasamy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1360459496p2/3027717.jpg] writing is raw and brutal and yet honest and fierce. There are honest accounts of violence. So in order to read this book, you have to be strong. Though the book is said to be a fiction, we find a very thin line between this fiction and the reality of the author’s life. In this dark story, I applaud the author to find the humor wherever possible. Her language is kind of poetic and full of sarcasm.
However, within these circumstances, the narrator found her piece in writing and creating the new characters. She starts writing a page or two daily, recounting the various persons in her life, her ex-boyfriends and friends, the good time she spent and how she overcame from her first serious relationship. That writing time was her happiest time each day. She starts living a different life within her characters and on paper, she was able to express which she wasn’t able to do in real life. Her husband made fun of her writing and gave her threats to kill. That threat proved to be the final toll that she could take. I am really glad that at that point, she decided to left.
This story is not just the author’s own story. This is a story of many Indian women. There are women who are not that lucky to escape. There are the ones who were burned because of dowry. There are many such cases. However, the important thing is how we, as a society, are addressing these issues and how important it is to support the women instead of thinking “what will they say?”.
Overall, When I Hit You is real, raw and brutal but it is an important story which needed to be told. This is not just important for the adults but is equally important for the youngsters too to learn that doing suppressing the another in terms of a relationship shouldn’t happen and that everyone needs a personal space. This book will definitely make you angry and will leave you to think afterward. The author has bravely put forward the issues that we all have seen at one time or another, for sure, but fails to talk about. She admitted that no one forced her to into this relationship, yet she went into it because no one knows what future holds. This was undoubtedly a tough read but undeniably an important one.
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