It’s the revelation of literary autumn. A book that makes noise. In the wake of other books which have shaken certain taboos linked to sexual assault, such as The consentby Vanessa Springora, and The great familyby Camille Kouchner.
But sad tiger is much more than its subject. Because Neige Sinno tackles head-on the questions of good and evil, the dark side that we all carry, the impossibility of redemption through literature.
Coming from a modest background, having grown up in the French Alps in a somewhat hippie family, Neige Sinno describes being raped between the ages of 7 and 14 by her stepfather. It was as an adult, after leaving home, far from France, that she found the strength and courage to denounce her attacker. Above all, she explains, in order to protect her younger brother and sister.
The man, who confessed and admitted the facts, was sentenced to nine years in prison “without obligation of care”. He has since rebuilt his life.
The awards season, obtaining the Femina, the media hurricane. Had she foreseen, perhaps even wished, such an outcome at the time of writing? Sad Tiger ?
“I knew there was a double possibility. Either it goes completely unnoticed, I told myself, like my other books, and I will be angry at not being heard, or something happens like it is happening now, and it will be strange for me too. confides Neige Sinno, 46, met in a Montreal café, 20 years after her first visit to the Quebec metropolis.
“I love my other books, I would defend them the same, but this one has an energy that justifies something like this happening to it,” says the author, who has lived for 18 years in a small town in Michoacán, in Mexico, where she teaches and translates.
I love my other books, I would defend them the same, but this one has an energy that justifies something like that happening to it
The writer had previously published two fiction books with confidential publishers: a collection of short stories and a novel. In addition to an essay devoted to the representations of readers in the fiction of Roberto Bolaño, Sergio Pitol and Ricardo Piglia — a book written in Spanish and published in Mexico.
Existing in literature not through its writing, but through its subject, has always been Neige Sinno’s obsession. The subject, “the unthinkable yet tragically widespread”, is a news item like there are unfortunately so many. She had to go further, she explains.
An indelible stain
Because the reasons for not making a book of his “sordid personal history” seemed numerous to him. Starting with the fact that telling her story disgusted her, that it even seemed to her that it was not a sufficient reason to write a book. And if she wanted the book to exist, she did not want “it to have many readers”. It’s a failure, we whisper to him. And that’s good.
“It’s linked to shame, speaking, saying: I was raped. Although I am comforted by all these readers who come, who have experienced the same thing as me, and who say thank you for daring to say it. Although I am congratulated. This stain of being the one who says “I was a victim”, I cannot exactly theorize it, but I feel it very strongly. And I assume it. And I tell myself that that’s also part of that experience. The few readers, obviously, would have protected me from that. He would have protected me from being the girl who goes on TV to say: I was a victim of incest. It’s pretty unbearable stuff, actually. »
When she decided, at the age of 44, to tell the story of “extreme violence without violence”, she knew she had to go beyond testimony. “I’m not telling anything new in this book,” she continues. My story is not exceptional. A news item is not exceptional. It is one journey among others of sexual violence suffered in childhood. »
Where his Sad Tiger stands out, on the other hand, because of its form, which places it somewhere between the self-narrative and the literary essay, the analysis and the interior monologue. Neige Sinno questions herself or addresses questions, sometimes dizzying, to literature and society. Questions that she raises with lucidity, steadfastly refusing to see the world with dichotomy, in black and white. Without ever looking away from the inhumanity of all of us.
“Since the experience is the unthinkable, it is the untold, we are stuck in it if there is only the story,” maintains Neige Sinno. It was by adding other things that it became possible, according to her, to get out of this impasse a little.
Consciousness in motion
This desire to understand, this distancing from experience through writing, this permanent recourse to nuances are nourished, she recognizes, by her university career – she holds a postdoctoral degree in literature. An exploration of the ambivalence of human nature.
“I didn’t want to give it a try. I didn’t want to become a specialist in incest, I really wanted that to be the particularity of this book. A consciousness, with its singularities, which reflects on a subject. With my uncertainties, with the things I don’t know, the figures I haven’t found, the books I can’t read. I wanted to make the book with that. »
Neige Sinno of course also hopes that her book can do useful work. For others, since for her, she believes, it is in a way too late. By freeing speech. She recalls the figures: less than 10% of victims of incest in France file a complaint. And only 10% of complaints are judged at the assizes, and most result in dismissals.
“Did I gain anything by experiencing what I experienced? Have I lost something? » she writes. Is this question still present? ” Yes. It’s pretty horrible. Since childhood, I have always had this doubt, which was put into me by my attacker, who told me: you are intelligent because you have this injury. » Even though she learned a long time ago that the truth was not in the language.
Literature didn’t save me. I am not saved.
“Literature did not save me. I am not saved,” she wrote. For Neige Sinno, making this book was not a liberation either. It never will. The writer speaks at most of “consolation”. “There is a certain moral comfort in being a victim,” she adds, always lucid.
His next book, a non-fiction story written in Spanish before Sad Tigershould explore more uncomfortable areas, addressing among other things the fact of being a Western woman settled in a country that was colonized.