Embracing Pain

Domestic abuse can leave emotional scars that last a lifetime. This is the story of how a feminist wrote her way out of suffering.

- Moeena Halim

London-based Meena Kandasamy is a fiery feminist, a Dalit rights activist, a poet, an academic and an author. Her first book, The Gypsy Goddess, was based on the Kilvenmani massacre of 1968. When I Hit You, her second novel, is about violence at home based on her own experience of being in an abusive marriage.

This isn’t the first time she has written about domestic violence, but much of her published poetry, except a handful of protest poems, was written before her marriage in 2011. “I look back at these poems and wonder how much I dealt with these themes—of domestic abuse, intimate violence, marital rape—in my own poetry, before I had had any sort of first-hand experience. I think that happened because these were huge concerns, they were all around me, happening to people I knew.... Thank goodness I’m not a believer in premonitions, because if I were, all this obsession about violence, and then the same happening to me would seem eerie,” says Kandasamy.