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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy

2/7/2017

8 Comments

 
Picture
I must remember that the responsibility of the female body belongs to me, and that I must not move or walk in such a fashion that makes others feel it is an object of allurement and enjoyment (although I should respectfully tolerate the gropes, the whistles, the hissed invitations); 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.

On the rebound from an unhappy affair with a politician, a young woman meets a man on social media who seems to be her soulmate. Smitten by his belief in building a better world, she marries this university professor and former Naxalite guerrilla and moves away from her parents in Chennai and university friends in Kerala to a small house in Mangalore, expecting to continue her freelance work as a writer while looking for an academic post. Instead, she finds herself subjected to an increasingly violent regime of re-education as her husband seeks to strip her of her feminism, her modern middle-class culture and her identity as a writer. What begins with petty criticism, segues into appropriation of her email and Facebook accounts to threats not only to her creative and sexual expression, but to her very existence. When I Hit You is the story of a “woman who asked for tenderness and got raped in return”.
 
Although there is a plot, with increasing tension as we discover the extremes of degradation to which this man subjects his wife, it’s written as a series of meditations on the theme. Sometimes the author distances both herself and the reader from the narrative, as if viewing it as a film; sometimes she brings us so uncomfortably close it’s almost unbearable. The opening, five years on from the marriage is tinged with comedy, an account that anyone with
a narcissistic relative will recognise, as her mother positions herself as central to the drama. Humour turns to horror as we see not only the part that her parents might have played in shaping her personality such that protest is alien, but in keeping her there even when, in the only phone calls she’s allowed, she tells them of her husband’s violence. Only when he’s actively threatened to kill her can they allow her to return home.
 
Some of this can be attributed to the context of a culture in transition from a traditional structure but, as depicted in
The Natural Way of Things, misogyny masquerading as progress, is a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, at the time I was reading this novel I also read an article by Louise Tickle in the Guardian on control and coercion in intimate relationships, prompted by a case in the UK of a woman murdered by her partner.
 
As my own recently published second novel,
Underneath, is also about a man who keeps a woman prisoner in an ordinary house (although my character relies on strong bolts more than threats of violence), I was curious about the husband’s motivation. Like my character, Steve, there’s a denial of his own vulnerabilities, but also an envy of privilege and a rumbling self-hatred, such that he perceives his marriage as a failure in him (p136):
 
It’s these tiny compromises that erode me. It’s why I’m a married man today, instead of being a militant. I’m a salaried dog, instead of being underground. That’s the petit-bourgeois vacillation that Mao talks about.
 
As with Steve, the longer the situation continues, the more
disturbed and mad he seems, until his paranoia sees him filling keyholes with chewing gum so that the boy who tends the garden can’t spy on them in bed. As for the woman, it’s her hope that things will change for the better that keeps her there, of which she says (p182):
 
Hope – 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.
 
The publisher informs us that the novel is “informed and inspired by her own experiences” but, as I’ve suggested before,
having lived an interesting story isn’t necessarily a reason to write about it. Like appearing in court, sharing these stories can be a “second, more sophisticated punishment” (p248). Though painful to read in places, I imagine it being even more painful to write. But in its honesty, its playfulness with form and language, When I Hit You is also an engaging and worthwhile read. Thanks to Atlantic Books for my review copy. If you’re interested in fictional domestic violence, see also my review of Shelter.

While the experience of marriage as affray leading to a fraying of the writer’s identity in an appalling manner, it’s rather neat for me as a link to this week’s flash fiction challenge. I do like the metaphor of fraying and unravelling and crude attempts to prevent it through excessive control. Although I’ve drawn on it before in my fiction, I thought I’d give this theme another airing:

Picture
Her knitwear will not fray

She played the pins the way the nuns taught her: in – over – through – off. Later, when her dreams began to fray at the edges, until all she’d worked for seemed to slip away, she added another stage, and another: pull – pull tight.

Her kids complained their clothes were too constraining, biting into their armpits, crushing their chests. They wanted the freedom to flap their arms. They thought, in their youth and innocence, they might fly.

But she was stronger, wiser, resolved to save them the only way she could. Weaving a cage with her yarn to lock them in.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
8 Comments
Norah Colvin link
4/7/2017 11:07:01 am

Hi Anne, Congratulations to you for reading the book. It sounds like a challenging read. Perhaps, though, it was even more challenging to write. It sounds like a good one for group discussion - why does he behave so, why does she stay?
Your ff is equally bleak and I feel so sorry for the children. It made me think of "Flowers in the Attic".
How can people do those things to each other?

Reply
Annecdotist
4/7/2017 06:33:19 pm

I haven’t read Flowers in the Attic, but I know what you mean. I think sometimes parents can make the choices from good motives – e.g. to protect their children – especially when they have limited resources and power.

Reply
Jeanne Lombardo link
4/7/2017 05:40:54 pm

Again, faint hints of The Handmaid's Tale. The demand of those in power (men) that women maintain an outer appearance of modesty and humility while at "home" be available for any manner of humiliation, violation, and abuse. I've not experienced the extreme of such a horrendous situation, though I have suffered the experience of a paranoid lover opening my letters and ripping open taped up journals during my absence, among other more threatening behaviors. (The question of why I was with this man must be dealt with later :-/ ) So this book does indeed sound bleak, but I think it is such an important topic, and I applaud writers who can pull it off, without the book being a paean to victimhood. And now that I am here, off to Amazon I go to order Underneath. Have been meaning to get my hand on a copy for weeks. Happy 4th of July! You Brits must be celebrating your fortuitous disposal of those pesky colonies today, given the road this "land of the free" is on.

Reply
Annecdotist
4/7/2017 05:59:04 pm

Thanks for reading, Jeanne, and glad you got yourself out of that bleak situation. Fortunately it’s a long way from my own personal experience, but I think many of us have had situations where we’ve adapted ourselves to suit the needs/desires of a more dominant character. I think it’s the gradual erosion of identity that makes it so powerful.
I hope you enjoy Underneath and as for 4th of July, Mr A and I had exactly that conversation (or something very close) this morning, although it seems that these days we just follow your lead. Quite likely that by the end of the summer we’ll have a similarly bumptious president (of course I mean Prime Minister).
Whatever the occasion, wishing you a great day.

Reply
Deborah Lee link
5/7/2017 01:35:49 am

It is sad, the ways in which parents try to keep their children from harm, it ways that only actually hurt them. My mother had a few tricks too, that backfired.

Reply
Annecdotist
5/7/2017 12:03:53 pm

Thanks for your comment, Deborah. I so agree, it's very sad.

Reply
Charli Mills
5/7/2017 11:37:22 pm

That's a book with a title to grab one in or repel. I'm beginning to believe that misogyny is cloaked in many ways as progress or protection. Ultimately, and not to over simplify the complexities of human nature and events, it come down to power and control. The husband exerting such over the wife; the mother knitting in her children. Your flash carries the power many women chose to exert over themselves and their brood, locking away potential in favor of safety. It makes us all easier prey for those who think they can succeed only when others are subjugated. Lots to process in your review, links and flash, but look where fraying took you!

Reply
Annecdotist
6/7/2017 06:33:56 pm

Thanks, Charli. Sometimes I think the way the powerless (or those who feel powerless through their personalities) take what little power they can can be the most frightening, as in the poor mother in my flash. Can be difficult to it properly conscious of our limitations.

Reply



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