"One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is meansure, which is rhythm, and so on. So it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write it's power."

Toni Morrison

 

“Fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarely perceptible…But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.”

Virginia Woolf

Meena Kandasamy (2017) When I Hit You. London, Atlantic Books. 978-1-78649-128-2

 

When I Hit You is set in southern India – between Chennai, Kerala and Mangalore and is a fictionalised account of the brutally abusive four-month marriage the author experienced shortly after leaving college

 
[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence and Abuse; Rape]
 
[Spoiler alert]
 
The novel travels back and forwards in time to detail the main character’s life as a woman in society where the expectations of her are clearly set out, both by her family and society around her.
 
Having left home to study in neighbouring state, she returns to her family home to nurse a broken heart. Under some pressure to marry, the writer meets and falls in love with a university lecturer who describes a past as a revolutionary communist – and we are never entirely sure if his tales are true or fantasy. He takes up a lectureship in a coastal town where she accompanies him, intending to keep writing.
 
Once isolated geographically from her friends and family, he then isolates her further by taking over her on-line presence, deleting her emails and contacts and limiting her time on the internet. She is ground down physically and emotionally as he gas-lights and manipulates her until the abuse turns more and more violent as he attempts to break her spirit completely.
 
Finally, as the violence escalates, she is able to escape and return to her parents who now use the story of her degradation (she came back with lice in her hair, dirty and unkempt) to justify supporting her against the shame society would choose to identify her.
 
The mental manipulation is really well described and I found myself identifying with the actions in this book, despite the brutality of her experience and the setting in a different cultural milieu.
 
Awards:

• Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018

• Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2018

• Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2018

• A Guardian Book of the Year

• A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year

• An Observer Book of the Year

• A Financial Times Book of the Year   

 I prefer, 

where truth is important, 

to write fiction. 

                                                                                                                 Virginia Woolf

Cherie Jones (2021) How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House. London, Tinder Press. 978-1-4722-6877-8

 

Set on the Caribbean island of Barbados, this novel highlights the huge inequalites between the White, foreign, villa-owning rich and the local poor Black and mixed-race population forced to hustle, hawk and sell their bodies to make a living. The stark inequality brings harms to them all.

[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence and Abuse; Murder, Infanticide; Child Abuse; Elder Abuse; Incest; Rape]

[Spoiler alert]

The novel is not an optimistic one, filled with stories of child abuse, rape, incest, domestic violence and abuse, elder abuse and murder.

It tells the story of Lala, conceived through incest and rape, who marries a man she feels is strong and will enable her to have a happy home life and a family, while her childhood sweetheart is in jail. Adan is violent and abusive, and within an argument, shortly after he has murdered one of the rich men he was trying to rob, their baby is dropped and dies.

The story includes the machinations of the local police officer, angry at having officers brought in from outside handling the murder case. He is not easily fooled by the story of the baby being abducted and found dead on the beach.

The domestic violence and abuse between the two main characters, Adan and Lala includes coercive control, financial abuse - when he steals all the money she has saved and buried- physical violence and rape. Again, we have a perpetrator who is portrayed as consistently a low-life villain and a victim-survivor left with few options in life having come from an abusive childhood with her father and grandfather being one and the same.

Cherie Jones has said in several interviews* that she has experienced domestic abuse herself, not only personally as the victim-survivor, but also amongst her extended family. She has also said that the story of Lala is not her own story.

*https://www.essence.com/entertainment/cherie-jones-explores-race-class-and-domestic-violence-in-the-caribbean-in-her-debut-novel/

Awards:

·        Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2021)

 "There was a fine line between being looked after 

and being monitored, I suspected"

Stacey Jameson p115

Mimi Thebo (2004) Hit the Road, Jack. London, Harper Collins 978-0-00-714278-1

 

A young adult fiction book about a teenage boy feeling a misfit at a school and beginning to clash with his mother, wondering if finding his father will help him find himself.

[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]

[Spoiler alert]

Jack is a young teenage boy who finds letters from his father to his mother. He has only hazy memories of his father but has heard that he is now living on the streets. He blames his mother for rejecting his father and sets out to find him.

Breaking all the rules he sneaks out after bedtime and meets a cast of interesting characters who are drawn into his search, risking their own safety in doing so.

In finding his drug addicted and homeless father, he recovers memories of the physical abuse his father subjected his mother to – and as a small child he witnessed 

His search reaches a dramatic and dangerous end but cements his friendship with the people who he has met and enables him to find “his tribe”.

This is really heart-warming tale and deals with the recovered memories of the abuse in a way that would be appropriate for a young teenager to read without diminishing the horrific nature of the abuse.