How can we say “this unthinkable evil that constitutes us”? How to tell “the extreme violence without the violence of abuse”? At the end of the 1980s, Neige Sinno’s stepfather, a petty domestic tyrant, “a titan and a loser”, made her, when she was seven years old, his sexual object for several years.
It was as an adult, after leaving home and even France, that she found the strength to denounce her attacker – especially to protect her younger brother and sisters. And that she finds the courage to tell her story publicly, during a publicized trial, casting shame on herself, on her family and on the small village in the Hautes-Alpes where the affair took place. The man, who confessed and recognized the facts – while justifying himself – will be sentenced to nine years in prison “without obligation of care”.
Taking up his pen at 44, after extensive studies (a doctorate at the University of Michigan, in the United States), today married and mother of a little girl, living since 2006 in Michoacán, Mexico ( “We are never far enough.”), Neige Sinno exhibits in sad tiger his story to try to tell and understand the unthinkable.
To achieve this, she uses texts. Of Lolita from Nabokov to The opponent from Emmanuel Carrère, from Jean Hatzfeld’s field investigation into the horrors in Rwanda to Christine Angot, from Virginie Despentes to Toni Morrison or Virginia Woolf. Until disturbing Tiger, tiger! (Flammarion, 2012) by the American Margaux Fragoso who nourished Neige Sinno’s book in her own way, before a detour to the poet William Blake.
What seems most “interesting” to him is what’s going on in the heads of the executioners. For her, for most of us, it is a bottomless mystery. Why do they do what they do? “Because they can”, quite simply, repeating the words of a historian of the two world wars regarding vile crimes committed by soldiers.
Do the executioner and his victim, the lamb and the tiger, have the same creator? How to say the unspeakable? And what form should we give to what we tell? The author of sad tiger learned early on that truth is not in language. “I know that the truth is nowhere,” she affirms, in the same way that she is not unaware that lies constitute her, she who has kept silent about these attacks for too many years .
It is true, Neige Sinno could have explored “the protected territory of fiction” to tell her story – she has already done this a little –, “to create the unheard of that would please intelligent critics”. She, who was dominated by words, instead chose to make a sober and almost affectless book, a testimony as much as a quest for truth. Because in his eyes, autobiography is a knife for dissecting the world, knowing that “a well-sharpened tool reaches to the bone”.
“Isn’t making beauty out of horror just making horror? » Isn’t the goal of literature, ultimately, to bring out the “thing” – desire, crime, beauty, evil – from between the pages to sow reality? A bit like letting the tiger out of the cage.
For her, in any case, the cause is understood: “Literature did not save me. I am not saved. »