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

by Meena Kandasamy

Naturally, I hope that anyone can understand why I am reluctant to allow my mother’s story to become the Standard, Authorized, King James Version of my misadventures in marriage.

The number one lesson I have learnt as a writer: Don’t let people remove you from your own story. Be ruthless, even if it is your own mother.

I was the type who had bought a Che Guevara badge as a fifteen-year-old, and would have slept with him had I not been underage and had he not been long dead.

You, the man who is not silencing me, shutting me up, letting me shout. For a second that will be everything I want from this world. A moon landing of sorts. As if I finally have the permit to be myself. Like someone stamping my passport and saying, yes, you are free to visit this land, free to shout all you can, all you want. I am not sure we have met. I do not think you know that I exist. Trust me, love, you will.

Fighting about who loved whom more. Fighting about our fighting. Giving each other names. Fucking, without giving a fuck. There was a lot of kissing. There was the blood and bones, the smell of sex and aftershave, the beauty that kept us going. There was, what could only be called, love.

In truth, it is a simple story. I had set out to love a man who loved people. Instead, I found myself with a man who loved women.

He can be kind, I know he can, I’ve seen how tender he is with the homeless boys in town, but with me I know that he will always choose to be cruel.

Hope prevents me from taking my own life. Hope is the kind voice in my head that prevents me from fleeing. Hope is the traitor that chains me to this marriage.

As long as a woman cannot speak, as long as those to whom she speaks do not listen, the violence is unending.

And everywhere, people only encountered normal-ness, an ordinary state of being, the absence of any trouble, because that’s what they had set out to find.

I am not the damsel-in-distress. I am not the picture of virginal innocence, someone whose parents hitched her to a man in an arranged marriage. This is the kind of thing that can happen to a helpless woman like that. But I am not that. I am rough, gruff, tough. The one who has written these mad and angry and outrageous poems about life and love and sex.

Not having a man in my life now becomes a series of little activities and rituals. I replace men with an array of placeholders. A blank page. Poetry, in translation, rife with awkward, charming metaphors. Reading the funny below-the-line comments that follow a sober article. Girl crushes. The supreme sense of accomplishment derived from preparing a meal just for myself. The mushrooms browning in butter, and for a little time, a sharp smell that reminds me of sex.

Wearing black. Wearing white. Wearing nothing but wine-red lipstick, because some men need to be remembered that way.

Some men keep it minimal: jangling regrets in their pockets with their car keys, hurrying to the door and leaving me with a final, clumsy love bite. I wear it on my skin for a week at the most, until it fades away along with the dreams we shared.

Some men leave me with unresolved fights and I ache in anger, never being able to apologize, or feel vindicated, and I have to live the rest of my life like a student with a failed grade, with a bulleted list of points that I cannot make, or concede.

Some men leave me because I am unpredictable – sunshine one moment and storm clouds the next; the scent of summer rain with the sleep-depriving aftershock of thunder. They cannot keep pace with the fighting that follows the kissing that follows the argument that follows the laughing in unending circles.

Some men leave me because they have just met another woman who does not wield her words like Molotovs, who creates better monochrome memories, who holds permissible quantities of bitterness, who knows her place and who sings their praise.

There is no end to his chameleonism.

My woman’s body, when it is written down, is rape resistant.

I decide to leave his words in this book, where they belong. Everything is writing material for you, isn’t it? This marriage, this love, this dream I’m trying to build for the both of us. Tomorrow, you’ll be making a book out of it. There will be interviews and readings. You’ll travel, pose for photographs, jumping across cities, jet-setting around the country, going to bed with any man you fancy that night. The writer. The free woman. The trouble is that you do not want a decent chance at life. You’re only after a story, and you make my life a living hell. These words are the equivalent of an epitaph. Underneath, a part of me lies buried.

Women, you see, can’t be trusted to make Art: to perform or write or paint informed by their life experiences but in control of their narratives.

So much of male-written literature conceives of peace, for a woman, as freedom from sex.