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

by Meena Kandasamy

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.

Let me tell you something that goes against popular wisdom. Love is not blind; it just looks in the wrong places.

And the more familiar the strange becomes, the more and more strange the familiar appears. That’s how the once-upon-a-time fiery feminist becomes a battered wife. By observing, but not doing anything. By experiencing, but not understanding. By recording but not judging.

In his rule book – sown by patriarchy, watered by feudalism, manured by a selective interpretation of Communism – a woman should not moan. That is how history steals her voice.

The shame of rape is the shame of the unspeakable. Women have found it easier to jump into fire, consume poison, blow themselves up as suicide bombers, than tell another soul about what happened. A rape is a fight you did not win. You could not win. A rape is defeat.

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. The hope that things will change for the better tomorrow. The hope that he will eventually give up violence. Hope – as the cliché goes – is the last thing to disappear. I sometimes wish it had abandoned me first, with no farewell note or goodbye hug, and forced me to act.

It is only now, finally, that I realize that if I want to be rescued, I’ll have to do it myself.

Sometimes the shame is not the beatings, not the rape. The shaming is in being asked to stand to judgment.

It does not cross their mind that a woman who is being beaten is intimidated into feeling, believing, knowing that to ask for help from others will only put her at greater risk. In their questions and their responses I come to know that even those of them who have mastered the theory have not lived through the experience: they lack the insight that a woman being abused can mostly trust only one person for help. Herself.