Resilience through Autofiction: The art of Writing Back in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: The Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife.

Abstract

Postcolonial women writers often feature the issues and concerns faced by women located in specific cultural contexts. They come up with stories which retain their individuality even as they resonate with experiences from around the world. Meena Kandaswamy’s When I Hit You: The Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017) narrates one such story in which the protagonist finds herself marginalized within the society which turns a blind eye towards domestic violence and rights of a wife. This paper attempts to study how toxic masculinity and rigid socio-cultural values render the subject helpless and how the process of writing can be used to empower the voiceless. It also explores the use of auto fiction as an empowering narrative strategy.