A Victim of Childhood Rape Close-Reads Her Past

SAD TIGER, by Neige Sinno; translated by Natasha Lehrer

In December of last year, a court in Avignon, France, found 51 men guilty of raping 72-year-old Gisèle Pelicot, including her husband of 50 years, who repeatedly drugged and assaulted her, invited other men to join him and filmed their abuse. He was given the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and Pelicot emerged from the four-month trial, whose proceedings were open to the public, a feminist hero.

“All the women on Earth support you,” one sign outside the courtroom read. She became one of Time magazine’s Women of the Year.

Twenty-four years earlier, another French court, this one in Grenoble, found a different man guilty of systematically raping a member of his family, this time his stepdaughter, from when she was around 7 into her teens. Sentenced to nine years in a penitentiary on a nature reserve in Corsica, he served only five.

At the time, the plaintiff, 23-year-old Neige Sinno, was not celebrated for making his crimes public, for protecting others, including her younger siblings, from her stepfather’s violence. Instead, she was made a pariah in her hometown.

“You have looked evil in the eye,” Sinno writes in “Sad Tiger,” her achingly vivid, cerebral memoir of her abuse and its long aftermath, “and now no one can look at you.”

First published in France in 2023, where it won multiple awards including the Le Monde Literary Prize, the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens, “Sad Tiger” eschews the 10-foot pole for the scalpel, approaching the subjects of pedophilia and incest with the determined curiosity of a forensic pathologist. Sinno dissects not only her own memories and their impact on the ensuing decades of her life but also the perspective of her abuser.

“Because for me too,” she begins the book, in medias res, as if in the middle of a thought without beginning or end, “when it comes down to it, the thing that’s most interesting is what’s going on in the perpetrator’s head.” She continues,

Being in a room alone with a 7-year-old child, getting an erection from imagining what’s about to happen. Saying the words to make the child come closer … coaxing the child to open wide. That is fascinating. It is beyond comprehension. And after it’s over getting dressed, going back to family life as if nothing has happened. And once the madness has taken hold, doing it again, doing it again and again, for years.

From there the narrative doesn’t so much flow as spiral, moving circuitously, disjointedly, between her early childhood as the elder of two daughters of “rural hippies” in the Alps; to her mother’s later marriage to a mountaineer with whom she has two more children and moves into the basement of a dilapidated farmhouse they hoped but could never afford to fix up; to Sinno’s adult life in Michoacán, Mexico, where she and her partner raised a daughter of their own; to her concerning adolescent affairs with much older men; to the great volume of literary knowledge she has accumulated over decades as a scholar and fiction writer.

These analyses — of “Lolita,” of course, and “The Bluest Eye”; but also the less obvious “Tomb Song,” by Julián Herbert, Mary Gaitskill’s story “The Other Place,” Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical “Moments of Being,” Margaux Fragoso’s “Tiger, Tiger,” from which the book takes its title — are not digressions from her narrative, but the meat of it. Humbert Humbert’s first-person delusion that it is the 12-year-old who seduces him echoes Sinno’s stepfather’s own “framing of consent,” she writes. “You like that, don’t you? You like that, yes, yes you do, you really like it.”

Close-reading her own shards of memory alongside these texts, Sinno contends with both the power and the inevitable impotence of writing, particularly about abuse. On the one hand, she categorically rejects the trite expectation that giving language to trauma is healing: “Literature did not save me. I am not saved.”

On the other, there is an undeniable force to her unblinking delivery — Natasha Lehrer’s translation is as raw as it is poetic — of such bloodcurdling episodes as the “orgy of violation” that unfolds one snowy night when Sinno is 12 and her mother is away; the attempts to sodomize her after she gets her period, to avoid making her pregnant; the safety pin she sticks in her vagina when she is 6 or 7; and, finally, the more recent memory of her 10-year-old daughter asking for a back massage before going to sleep: “I’m alone with her in the bedroom and I begin to envision what I could do to her.”

It is excruciating to read the author’s vivid chain of associations, her tortured effort to understand her own attacker a generation ago. “I know I could never hurt her. But I can sense the border between good and evil. I can guess what they feel, the rush of crazed energy, the adrenaline.”

There is, Sinno hauntingly suggests, a nightmarish proximity between abuser and abused: “He showed me his dark side, and mine, and that of the whole of humankind.”

Like a mirror image, the victim reflects her abuser’s evil back onto himself, her truth the uncanny opposite of his delusion: “No, I don’t like it. I never liked it, not once.”

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