The Margin Writes Back
Meena Kandasamy shows she doesn’t need characters to resemble her in order to invent intimacy
Only in her mid-30s, Meena Kandasamy is building a spiky, angular, fiercely singular corpus. A precocious teenage poet, she went on to earn a doctorate and become an activist, a trenchant critic of Hindu society. Kandasamy’s debut novel, The Gypsy Goddess, wrestled with the rendering of unspeakable atrocity—the burning alive of 44 villagers in Tamil Nadu in 1968 by thugs hired by local landlords—into art. Her next novel was another horror story, another attempt to render violence—this time in the context of an abusive marriage—into art. If Kandasamy’s first story was collective, her second zeroed in on an individual crisis, though her unnamed narrator could plausibly stand in for any woman in patriarchal India, ‘a woman at whom society cannot spit or throw stones, because this me is a she who is made up only of words on a page, and the lines she speaks are those that everyone hears in their own voice’. Having volunteered the information that her own marriage
was abusive, Kandasamy found that When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife—the Joycean subtitle hint enough of her writerly ambition—was read as if it were memoir. Exquisite Cadavers, her third novel, out this month, emerged from her dismay at how her second was received. To a “western audience,” Kandasamy muses, “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 treats us as writers, only as diarists who survive.”
The reader is privy to these thoughts because Kandasamy tells us in the margins of this novel about a pair of lovers, Maya and Karim, in London. As the title suggests, Kandasamy is playing a literary game, an Oulipian experiment she writes in the preface, ‘where each influence, each linchpin behind every freewheeling plot-turn would be referenced and documented’. On page, this looks like two competing narratives, the story of Maya and Karim, the latter a Tunisian filmmaker who returns to his country to try and help his brother who is being held in a secret detention centre, and the story of the writer telling the story of Maya and Karim and grappling with her own relationship, with motherhood, with research, and guilt at the people she has left behind in India still fighting the causes she can no longer fight in the same way, with the same intensity.
‘Some days,’ Kandasamy writes in her memoiristic margin, ‘the writing that I am doing now seems like the equivalent of pressing Ctrl+Z a thousand times. Undo, undo, undo. I take refuge in fiction, in forging a Maya and a Karim... Even if all the hate around us comes undone, what will become of those who were killed?... And if we do nothing to challenge this atmosphere of hate... Their inert corpses will mock and mock our inaction.’ In fewer than 150 pages, Kandasamy shows us what it is to forge a worldview and moral philosophy as if from thin air, or rather from the act of reading and committing words to the page.
“To the West, writers like me are interesting as we are from a place where horrible things happen”