In his first book, the novel Female dog (Héliotrope, 2019), Marie-Pier Lafontaine testifies to a childhood spent under the yoke of a violent, incestuous and misogynistic father. Through a series of chilling vignettes, she confronts horror, dissects it, shows it in all its cruelty and ugliness, perhaps in the hope of changing things.
His writing in fragments, punctuated with hard-hitting sentences that become embedded in the memory as in the flesh, has been widely criticized for its ease. In his new book, the essay Cock the rage. For a combat literature, which will be published on March 14 by Héliotrope, it responds to its detractors, defending a form that takes up the logic of a state of post-traumatic stress. “Writing in fragments molds the contours of a fragmented memory,” she writes. Simply. To claim that it translates a laziness of writing is to deny that the realities of women living with trauma are adequately represented. It is to deny us a literary existence. It’s misogynistic and ignorant. »
This verve, this anger, marks each page of this great intimate and political reflection on trauma, this literary charge against the culture of rape, the trivialization of violence and a society that deprives women and minorities of agency.
After Female dog, the writer believed that she was done with writing and the thought of violence, as if putting it on paper could make it possible to overcome the wounds of the past and the relationship with the father. However, although the writing allowed him to regain control of his story and to claim the power to denounce, the need to understand and to intellectualize remains intact.
“My novel allowed me to work on a very precise dimension of violence: incest. By offering this imaginary to readers, I hoped to be able to explain this reality and its consequences, and thus provoke questions about what needs to be changed. Since then, I have understood that a single project does not make it possible to understand all the dimensions of violence. With my essay, I want to grasp the social dimension. »
Validate victims
Cock the Rage opens with an episode of aggression, when Marie-Pier Lafontaine is the victim of touching in the Montreal metro; an attack that rekindles her memories and traumas, plunging her into a series of flashback, accentuating her fear, shared by several women, of leaving the house, of walking alone in the streets at night. To overcome the anxiety that clogs her throat, and give herself the means to respond to the aggressors, she enrolls in a self-defense course for women, offered by the Montreal Police Department.
“Very quickly, I was made to understand that women who dare to defend themselves often come out worse off. By fighting back, they are more at risk of escalating the situation and experiencing lethal violence. I would have liked to be given the illusion that I could act. We must reverse this discourse, which perpetuates this idea that we are powerless and which justifies the power that men give themselves over us. »
During her research, the writer discovered that society had no shortage of loopholes to invalidate the traumatic experiences and violence suffered by minorities. In particular because the first research on trauma was mostly androcentric, written by the very people who benefit from the maintenance of systems of oppression.
The events considered in the prognosis were therefore limited to those which disrupt the lives of men of the dominant classes: attacks, wars, accidents… Interpersonal violence, harassment, intimidation and sexual assaults committed within the couple do not were not considered, all as indirect and insidious traumas, which threaten the daily sense of security of women and cultural and gender minorities, and cause anxiety, fear and hypervigilance.
“These physical manifestations are part of the trauma. Pretending otherwise, claiming that someone must have suffered an assault on their own flesh of an inordinate magnitude to suffer from violence, keeps the abusers irresponsible, encourages the perpetuation of these acts and fails to bring about political and social change” , she says.
A culture of agency
Marie-Pier Lafontaine also tackles head-on a reproach often addressed to writers of her generation: that of creating a victim culture, turned towards the past, where everyone is only defined through their traumas, like this professor at the Sorbonne who had criticized him for making literature a space for denunciation.
“I have the impression that some people think that political literature, which seeks to denounce, loses its aesthetic qualities. For me, politics and aesthetics are intertwined. It is a form of denunciation that does not fall under testimony and factual truth, but which sets up a truth of representation, opens a breach towards other survivors and puts what is in the margins at the center of the social debate. To be a woman and to write I is a gesture of transgression and affirmation. We are not in a victim culture, but rather in a culture of agency. We are saying no, refusing to be completely destroyed by violence and silence. »