Meena Kandasamy QUOTES

1 " The problem with thinking up a new and original idea within a novel is that you have to make sure that Kurt Vonnegut did not already think of it. "

― Meena Kandasamy , The Gypsy Goddess

2 " I remind myself of the fundamental notion of what it means to be a writer. A writer is the one who controls the narrative. "

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

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

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

4 " Conversations here follow the same pattern. An endless back-and-forth relay of absolute pointlessness. No question demands an honest answer. A question is asked as an exercise in formal behaviour. Questions that are greetings. Questions that are placeholders. Questions that fill awkward gaps. Questions to suggest an interest that does not exist. Questions that pretend to listen. Never, ever a question that seeks to know. "

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

5 " In place of a firing squad, I stare down the barrels of endless interrogation.
Why did she not run away?
Why did she not use the opportunities she had for escape?
Why did she stay if, indeed, the conditions were as bad as she claims?
How much of this wasn't really consensual?
Let me tell you a story. Not mine, this time around.
It is the story of a girl we call after the place of her birth, lacking the integrity to even utter her name. The Suranelli Girl.
Forty-two men rape this girl, over a period of forty days.
She is sixteen years old.
The police do not investigate her case. The high court questions her character. The highest court in the land asks the inevitable. Why did she not run away? Why did she not have the opportunities she had for escape? Why did she say, if need, the conditions were as bad as she claims? How much of this wasn't really consensual?
Sometimes the shame is not the beatings, not the rape. The shaming is in being asked to stand for judgement. "

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

6 " Instead, their only daughter was only going to Kerala, just a dodgy neighbouring state, doing one of those five-year integrated MA degrees that held no charm, required no intellectual prowess, and did not even further one’s job prospects. ‘Everyone from Kerala comes here to study, but our unique daughter decides to go there. What can I do?’ My father’s intermittent grumbling was amplified by my mother who spoke non-stop about sex-rackets, ganja, alcoholism and foreign tourists, making Kerala – a demure land of lagoons and forty rivers – appear more and more like Goa. "

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

7 " Good women don't have bad things happen to them- in order to be raped, I need first to be made into this caricature of a bad woman. This male psycho-sexual logic looks at penetration as punishment. This is the rape that disciplines, the rape that penalizes me for the life I have presumably led. This is the rape that tames, the rape that puts me on the path of being a good wife. This is the rape whose aim is to inspire regret in me. This is the rape whose aim is to make me understand that my husband can do with my body as he pleases. This is rape as ownership. This rape contains rage against all the men who may have touched me, against all the men who touch me, against all the men who may have desired me. This nightly rape comes with a one-point agenda: she must derive no pleasure from sex. And yet, whenever he takes me against my will, he taunts me for enjoying it. In his ironclad logic: I am a whore, so I can be raped; I let myself be raped, so I am a whore. "

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

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

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

9 " I am the woman who is willing to display her scars and put them within exhibition frames. I am the madwoman of moon days. I am the breast-beating woman who howls. I am the woman who wills the skies to weep in my place. "

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

10 " Just because this is a novel set in rural India, do not expect a herd of buffalo to walk across every page for the sake of authenticity. "

― Meena Kandasamy , The Gypsy Goddess

11 " Everything is so precariously held together here that you might want a helping hand. Nobody is going to teach you that right after a harvest, poorly paid labourers were hungry enough to smoke out rodent holes and steal back the grains of paddy pilfered by rats. But you will manage. You will learn to relate without family trees. You will learn to make do without a village map. You will learn that criminal landlords can break civil laws to enforce caste codes. You will learn that handfuls of rice of rice can consume half a village. You will loafer learn that in the eyes of the law, the rich are incapable of soiling their hands with either mud or blood. You will learn to wait for revenge with the patience of a village awaiting rain. "

― Meena Kandasamy , The Gypsy Goddess

12 " What you went through is horrible. I'm not disputing it.'

'Okay. So?'

'Just that this man whom you depicted—it was like he was a monster. The sum total of all the evil things in the world.'

'No, I never said that.'

'But that's how it came across.'

'That's not what I intended. It was his violence. That's all.'

Here's a friend asking me if there was nothing redeemable about my ex-husband. I do not know how to justify myself. What do I tell people like him, who want a balanced picture, who want to know that this was a real person with a rainbow side, just so that they are reminded of their own humanity?

I realize that this is the curse of victimhood, to feel compelled to lend an appropriate colour of goodness to their abuser. "

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

13 " I write letters to lovers I have never seen, or heard, to lovers who do not exist, to lovers I invent on a lonely morning. Open a file, write a paragraph or a page, erase before lunch. The sheer pleasure of being able to write something that my husband can never access. The revenge in writing the word lover, again and again and again. The knowledge that I can do it, that I can get away with doing it. The defiance, the spite. The eagerness to rub salt on his wounded pride, to reclaim my space, my right to write. "

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

14 " I never understood rape until it happened to me. It was a concept- of savagery, of violence, of disrespect. I had read my share of Kate Millet and Susan Brownmiller but nothing prepared me for how to handle it. Within a marriage, fighting back has consequences. The man who rapes me is not a stranger who runs away. The man who rapes me is not the silhouette in the car park, he is not the masked assaulter, he is not the acquaintance who has spiked my drinks. He is someone who wakes up next to me. He is the husband for whom I make coffee the following morning. He is the husband who can shrug it away and tell me to stop imagining things. He is the husband who can blame his action on unbridled passion the next day, while I hobble from room to room.
I begin to learn that there are no screams that are loud enough to make my husband stop. There are no scream that cannot be silenced by the shock of a tight slap. There is no organic defence that can protect against penetration. He covers himself with enough lubricant to slide part my resistance. My legs go limp. I come apart. "

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

15 " I think what you know in a language shows who you are in relation to that language. Not an instance of language shaping your worldview, but its obtuse inverse, where your worldview shapes what parts of the language you pick up. Not just : your language makes you, your language holds you prisoner to a particular way of looking at the world. But also : who you are determines what language you inhabit, the prison-house of your existence permits you only to access and wield some parts of a language. "

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

16 " No one treats us as writers, only as diarists who survived. "

― Meena Kandasamy , Exquisite Cadavers

17 " The
reception reinforced my
perception that, to a Western
audience, writers like me are
interesting because – we are from a place
where horrible things
happen, or, – horrible things have
happened to us, or, – a combination of the
above. No one discusses process
with us. "

― Meena Kandasamy , Exquisite Cadavers

18 " It seemed as if the people of our nation had decided - or, as if it had been decided on behalf of the people of our nation - that the only way to counter the political narrative of 'dynasty' was to spin the opposite narrative if 'bachelorhood'. A man free of a visible woman would be free of visible progeny who would lay claim to his legacy. Maybe it was meant to signal that, having no heirs, these men would have no impulse to be corrupt, to amass wealth, to build dynasties. Maybe it meant that not having any domestic responsibilities, these men would devote all their time to the service of society. These bachelor politicians emerged in every tiny village and every tiny ward-councillor election - flaunting the absence of a family. "

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

19 " And I am thinking about how I am someday going to be writing all this out and I am conscious that I am thinking about this and not about the moment, and I know that I have already escaped the present and that gives me hope, I just have to wait for this to end and I can write again, and I know that because I am going to be writing about this, I know this is going to end. "

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

20 " This One True Love—which flourished for two, three years—left me wounded. I spent months scooped in bed, howling my heart out. In learning to forget him, I had to pick up what was left of me, the little fragments of individuality [...] like broken bangles, chipped glass, colourful pebbles. [...] This was a lover who had become the landscape. Everything in Kerala reminded me of him. "

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