Denied Speech and Enforced Silence: Subaltern Female Subjectivity in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You

Abstract

Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You (2017) is examined as a narrative that foregrounds the systematic denial of speech and the production of enforced silence within marital patriarchy. Mobilising subaltern theory—particularly Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s formulation of the subaltern’s structural inability to speak—the analysis demonstrates that the female protagonist’s voice is foreclosed not through muteness but through the violent invalidation of speech itself. Acts of explanation, denial, or rational dialogue repeatedly precipitate further abuse, converting language into a liability rather than a means of self-articulation. Marriage emerges as a discursive and disciplinary apparatus in which interpretive authority is monopolised, and everyday practices of accusation, surveillance, and correction consolidate control. Within this framework, silence functions not as passive absence but as a coerced condition produced through epistemic and bodily violence. The domestic sphere operates as a micro-regime of power that regulates conduct and meaning, resonating with Michel Foucault’s conception of discipline and normalization at the level of everyday life. While spoken resistance within marriage is rendered futile, the narrative act of writing reconfigures agency beyond the immediacy of violence. Testimony, displaced from the marital space, enables the reconstitution of subjectivity and exposes the mechanisms that silence women. By situating subalternity within the intimate institution of marriage, the reading extends postcolonial feminist discourse beyond public and institutional sites of domination. When I Hit You is thus positioned as a counter-archive that documents how patriarchal power produces silence while simultaneously revealing how narrative articulation recuperates subaltern female subjectivity.