‘Our Bones in Your Throat’: A savage campus novel that takes the culture of bullying head-on

It has happened. Women’s rage has broken out of the debilitating stereotype of hysteria and claimed space on the frontlines of both discourse and literature. Adrienne Rich said it politely: “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. / The beak that grips her, she becomes.” Sylvia Plath was more on the nose with her “Beware/ Beware/ Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air.” Elisabeth Moss streamed it to our screens in her iconic portrayal of an incandescently angry June Osborne in the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Arundhati Roy, making no bones about her/her protagonist’s anger, has often tempered rage with hope. Kamala Das’s poetry has been scathing in her condemnation of internalised patterns of patriarchy. Exploding with a slow-burning rage now, is Megha Rao’s voice, unforgiving, unwilling to compromise:

Serves you right, now you’ve got stuck
our bones in your throat.
Swallow all you want –
we refuse to go down.
Our bones in your throat.

Rao’s just-released novel Our Bones in Your Throat, is a savage re-working of the campus novel, taking head on the culture of bullying that permeates academia, wearing its politics on its sleeve, using anger as a catalyst to effect change, asking accountability for not just the obvious aggressors but...

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