Fictionalizing the Self: Autofictional Fragments in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You

Abstract

By fictionalizing the self, autobiographical elements play a crucial role in analyzing the narrative instability, memory, and language in Meena Kandasamy’s 2017 novel When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife. The novel depicts domestic violence through fragmented, non-linear lenses of display and creates an autobiography that becomes an intense reflection of the protagonist’s pain. This research article employs a qualitative research approach along with the theoretical concepts of autofiction and feminist narrative criticism to explore how Kandasamy creates a semi-fictionalized self to express the phenomena of gendered violence, postcolonial identity, and resistance. The novel’s fragmented structure, metafictional devices, and autobiographical elements create an intervention into a conventional means of discourse (both fiction and memoir), acting as an intervention into the conflicting ways in which women are silenced, whether patriarchally or literarily, creating a strong counter-narrative. Through a close reading of select passages and with the layering of critical secondary texts, this paper illustrates how When I Hit You (Kandasamy, 2017) functions as a site of feminist self-fashioning and subversive storytelling.