Meena Kandasamy > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“What prevents a woman from walking out of an abusive relationship? Old-school feminists will speak about economic independence. A woman is free if she has the money to support herself. With a job, she will find her feet. If she has a job, it will miraculously solve all her problems. A job will give her community. One day she will walk into the office, and they will ask her about the bruise above her eyebrow and she will say she walked into a wall, but they will know it is her husband hitting her, and they will wrap her up in a protective embrace.”
― Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

“This poem declares the absence of a Hindu canon.
This poem declares itself the Hindu canon.
This poem follows the monkey.
This poem worships the horse.
This poem supersedes the Vedas and the supreme scriptures.
This poem does not culture the jungle.
This poem jungles the culture.
This poem storms into temples with tanks.
This poem stands corrected: the RSS is BJP’s mother.
This poem is not vulnerable.
This poem is Section 153-A proof.
This poem is also idiot-proof.
This poem quotes Dr.Ambedkar.
This poem considers Ramayana a hetero-normative novel.
This poem breaches Section 295A of the Indian Penile Code.
This poem is pure and total blasphemy.”
― Meena Kandasamy, This Poem Will Provoke You

“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

“No one treats us as writers, only as diarists who survived.”
― Meena Kandasamy, Exquisite Cadavers

“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

“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

“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

“This poem is a witness to the rape of Shurpanaka.
This poem smears Rama for his suspicious mind.
This poem was once forced into suttee.
This poem is now taking her revenge.
This poem is addicted to eating beef.
This poem knows the castes of all the thirty-three million Hindu Gods.
This poem got court summons for switching the castes of Gods.
This poem once dated Karna who was sure he was no test-tube baby.
This poem is not curious about who-was-the-father.
This poem is horizontally flipped.
This poem is a plagiarised version.
This poem is selectively chosen.
This poem is running paternity tests on Hindutva.”
― Meena Kandasamy, This Poem Will Provoke You

“I’m ashamed that language allows a man to insult a woman in an infinite number of ways.”
― Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

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

“I am the woman conjured up to take on the life of a woman afraid of facing her own reality.”
― Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

“I climb into the incredible sadness of silence. Wrap its slowness around my shoulders, conceal its shame within the folds of my sari. Make it a vow, as if my life hinged upon it, as if I was not a wife in Mangalore but a nun elsewhere, cloistered and clinging to her silence to make sense of the world.
To stay silent it to censor all conversation. To stay silent is to erase individuality. To stay silent is an act of self-flagellation because this is when the words visit me, flooding me with their presence, kissing my lips, refusing to dislodge themselves from my tongue.”
― Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

“Of all the things we could have said to the people of other planets, we chose to fire into space a capsule containing the model for the double helix structure, the composition of DNA and the formation of nucleotides. Not a message that declared: it is sunny here it also rains a lot we love colours and dope we sign and we dance we cook up a storm with anything we can find we are fucked up in too many ways but we are a funny bunch so may we request the pleasure of your company”
― Meena Kandasamy

“..Meanwhile, remember this: nobody lived happily. Nobody outlived the ever-after.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“Walk out. Walk out. The recurrent voice that stays stuck in your throat. It is how you know you need to run. It is how you know that now is not the right time. How you also know there will never be a right time. How you know it is not the how of it that matters, but the when. How you know the world will laugh at you for a month-long marriage. Even that is not as cruel as the sight of the sad faces of your parents. Disgraced. You have given them nothing but disappointment. The defeat they will carry in their eyes for the rest of their days. Never again the old pride. Never again the easy trust. Never again will the way they say your name be the same. No more will they carry their dreams on your shoulders. Not just them and their heavy, gathered sorrows. You will have to live with one person all your life: you. The you wanting to leave today might be the you who thinks you should have stayed tomorrow. The fear that when you face yourself ten years from now, you will blame your haste, blame your hot blood, blame your sharp tongue, blame yourself for giving up so easily. The question within you, coming from your own sense of fairness: what if he was given the chance to rectify his mistakes, to change himself, to begin anew? The next question, coming up after the commercial break: were you willing to forgive him? And then of course, the inevitable, the unavoidable, absolutely vital: have you fought enough for what you believe in?”
― Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

“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

“They said even hawks could not carry away the sky, so scavenger crows like us should not have lofty dreams.”
― Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess

“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

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