Meena Kandasamy Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

..Meanwhile, remember this: nobody lived happily. Nobody outlived the ever-after.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You have a big man's never she tells him. You need a old man's patience.

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.