The Presentation of Sexual Violence and Race in Literature

 This is the text of a presentation to PGS Literary Society given today by Demi Armstrong

The Presentation of Sexual Violence and Race in Literature: The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker and When I Hit You, Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017) by Meena Kandasamy. 

The Color Purple is an epistolary novel that follows the life of Celie, an african american teenager in Georgia in segregation, through letters that she addresses to God, after she has been raped and she is told: “You better not never tell nobody but God.” The letters provide a painfully honest insight into her life and how events affect her. In following her life the narrative portrays her changing perspective of the world, her self-realisation, and her developing empowerment and emancipation against those who control and abuse her including the man she and her sister Nettie call “Pa '' and her husband who she is forced to marry. Celie’s limited perspective and personal narrative portrays how her experiences and trauma immediately, and in the long term, affect her and how she understands and processes these experiences that she may not understand. 

When I Hit You is based on Meena Kandasamy’s own experiences in marriage, the book is written from the perspective of a young writer who is a survivor of domestic violence, although there is a significant power imbalance within the marriage the retrospective narrative ensures that control remains with the narrator. The book is also about writing itself as the unnamed narrator wishes to “write her own story”. The narrator falls in love with a university professor and after being married experiences extreme violence. She sufferes emotional, physical and sexual abuse and becomes socially isolated. While the book is painfully honest, it is also poetic and lyrical and explores how the narrator processes and deals with domestic abuse. She repeatedly refers to her life as a film and her role as a wife playing an actress playing a wife. In the book there is a poem at the beginning of every chapter, a poem by Wislawa Szymborska called ‘Life While-You-Wait’ goes:

Life While-You-Wait. 

Performance without rehearsal. 

Body without alterations. 

Head without premeditation. 

I know nothing of the role I play. 

I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it. 

I have to guess on the spot

just what this play’s all about. 

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living, 

I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands. 

I improvise, although I loathe improvisation. 

Alice Walker was born in 1944 in Georgia, she was involved in the civil rights movement and her work often examines racial and sexual abuse, gender equality and civil rights. 

The 1980s in America, when The Color Purple was published, saw worsening racial tensions and developing civil rights from the Miami Riot in 1980 to the first African American studies PhD being offered in 1988, a notable event in the 1980s was the election of Ronald Reagan with was follows by the Cold War intensifying to then end in the early 1990s. The publication of The Color Purple and achievement of the Pulitzer Prize of fiction also became a significant event in American black history in the 1980s. 

Meena Kandasamy was born in 1984 in Chennai, similar to Walker she is both a poet and novelist. She is an anti-caste activist, which ,as a generalised definition, is the opposition of social interaction and exclusion based on cultural notions of purity, similar to anti-classism. Her writing often aims to deconstruct violence and trauma as well as bringing light to resistance against gender and ethnic oppressions. Although ``When I Hit You'' is influenced by Kandasamy’s experiences in an abusive marriage it is not autobiographical, she once said, “if I was going to write my actual life story, I would condense this entire marriage into a footnote”. Around the publication of When I Hit You, recent movements such as the #MeToo movement, lead to an increase in reports of gender based violence, domestic and sexual violence being one of its manifestations. The effect of the narrator in When I Hit You remaining nameless allows the reader to more easily become immersed in the story and also notes on the prevalence of similar stories. 

A common theme in The Color Purple is violence, many of the female characters experience violence, mainly from men and often in marital relationships, however these women are not defined by their abuse and remain complex and honest characters, which is a significant characterization and interpretation of the effects of sexual and domestic abuse. The women in the book have varied reactions to violence, Celie repeatedly suffers violence and responds by shutting down emotionally whereas other female characters have a more immediately defiant reaction. In a letter to God that Celie writes about a couple she knows, she describes how the wife fights back, “They fight. He try to slap her. What he do that for? She reach down and grab a piece of stove wood and whack him cross the eyes.” (p37). Through Celie’s experiences of sexual abuse, for much of The Color Purple, she sees sex as a form of violence, control or obligation to her husband. However as the book continues she develops a more spiritual understanding and comes to acknowledge her worth and deserve to be in a respectful relationship. 

In When I Hit You, the narrator's perspective of violence varies from Celie’s, her comprehensive understanding of needing to escape her abuse provides a different analysis of aspects of sexual abuse, marital rape and the subsequent affects on self-identity. The narrator in When I Hit You is portrayed as strong-minded and strong-willed which is presented as a challenge to her husband. In enduring violence from her husband, unable to escape, the book explores how the narrator's fight in her life intrudes on her consciousness and concept of self. “Violence is not something that advertises itself. It is not written on my face- he is too careful of that, of course, aiming his fists at my body. As long as a woman cannot speak, as long as those to whom she speaks do not listen. The violence is unending.” - Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You 

The developing presentation of violence against women in literature has, in certain cases, become normalised and imitates violence against women without giving depth of value to these characters. Although When I Hit You and The Color Purple can be discomforting to read in parts, they provide a characterisation that reflects the complexity to real people and allow their narrative characters to remain in power and have ownership of their life.   

The Color Purple is mainly set in two places, Georgia and a remote African village, both suffused with problems regarding race and racism.  In the setting in Africa, the characters face British imperialism as the British Empire has control over their colonies without concern for native culture. In Georgia, especially in the beginning of the book, Celie views her dark skin as ugly and both her and the other black characters, especially the women, as women are a key focus in the book, suffer racial abuse. The book is set in pre-Civil Rights South during the Jim Crow Laws, however as Celie learns about African culture and the history of African civilization, she becomes proud of her heritage. “The Color Purple is a lush celebration of all that it means to be female, to be a black female and like the best celebrations, it’s an honest one” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 

In When I Hit You, Kandasamy repeatedly uses poetic depictions of Indian culture to embody the narrator's assumptions of a marriage, comparing her false expectations from Bollywood movies to her reality. Kandasamy criticises the concern and idealisation of marriage and the expectations of a married woman in the book, often commenting on the narrator's shame in her failure as a perfect wife. From a phone call with her mother: “What can I say? I can suggest you leave him, start again. How long would that cycle go on? What if you fail again, with another man? What is the guarantee that he will not be another monster? Finding the perfect man is a myth. Do not believe in it, work with what you have.” (p160). 

“I am the woman who asked for tenderness and got raped in return. I am the woman who has done her sentence. I am the woman who still believes, broken-heartedly, in love.” - Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You.

“Fear is real but so is love.” - Alice Walker