Editor and committed citizen, the author has taught literature at college and is president of the governing board of a primary school. She co-directed and co-wrote the essay Shock Treatments and Tartlets. Critical assessment of the management of COVID-19 in Quebec (Total sum).
In several years, when we look at the contemporary literary field with a certain distance, we will speak of the feminist literature of #MeToo as a great story, which bears witness to the collapse of an old world.
On the day after March 8, I wanted to highlight the moving books by Pier Courville, Léa Clermont-Dion and Neige Sinno. Three writers who each add their stone to this building with their words which, “if not erasing”, as Sinno states, “is a takeover of one’s own story”.
They are all of us
In They (Hamac, 2024), Pier Courville deploys an uncomfortable range of situations experienced by women. “They” is at times the author, but it’s always all of us, clicking our “jackhammer heels on the city sidewalks as soon as darkness falls.”
The accumulation quickly becomes suffocating, awakening in our flesh many traumatic memories and attacks whose significance we trivialize. Breast brushed, buttock grabbed by a stranger, incestuous touching, rape (was it really rape?), but also injunctions and inappropriate judgments, They highlights everything that some men allow themselves towards women, their bodies. And this, even though they didn’t ask for anything. And this, whether they are mothers, grandmothers or students; whether they are playing ball, giving birth or dancing.
“His face, his private parts, his shapeits weight, its teeth, […] her ass, her neck, her legs around her neck”: the table of contents reads like a poem, in the third person, marking the feeling of dispossession that inhabits us. However, we close the book, also punctuated with humor, tenderness and good men, by not feeling alone.
The courage to file a complaint
“Without warning, the boss furtively slips his hand between my thighs, near the private parts, the vagina. He removes it just as quickly. I freeze. He doesn’t show any emotion. »
This sexual assault recounted by Léa Clermont-Dion in File a complaint (August Horse, 2023) could have appeared among the texts ofThey. She was then 17 years old and was an intern at the Institut du Nouveau Monde. She will file a complaint ten years later, in the wake of the Weinstein affair. In the meantime, she will be overcome by doubts, amplified by the intervention of a woman she admired, Lise Payette, who will make her sign a letter denying the events.
While putting history, society and the notion of privilege into perspective, File a complaint is the diary of an immensely courageous, very embodied trajectory, which takes us to the heart of the justice system, where we must always already be a “perfect victim”, who impeccably masters the logos.
We are with Léa in the taxi the evening of the attack, in the courtroom, in her car on the way to the trial, in her hotel room the morning of her testimony. We are with her when she files a complaint, with her in her head when her thoughts about what is expected of her (or not) run at full speed: “so I am told that I must file a complaint that filing a complaint is perilous that they are going to pursue me […] I am told that he did not rape me that I surely looked for him […] I’m told not to be angry to stay calm that you shouldn’t cry but crying a little seems good […] I’m told to keep quiet about my feminism […] I am told not to write.”
Léa nevertheless writes, to take back the words that have been taken from her, like so many women. Important “charge composed of I”, ultimately luminous, File a complaint “relates to a we” who should no longer have to justify writing.
The power of the tiger
It’s already messed up that I begin sad tiger (POL, 2023) by Neige Sinno. I succumb to the audio format, read by the winner of Femina 2023 in a soft and slow, calm and powerful voice.
Raped by her stepfather from the age of 7 to 14, Neige Sinno displays fine and complex thinking, which not only presents her perspective, but also attempts to understand what is happening in the head of the aggressor , in addition to questioning literature, language, the telling of its history.
“Autofiction is a knife for dissecting the world,” she writes, constantly reflecting on her words “capable of making things happen.” Thus, “showing the horror” of the aggression is for her a choice: “as long as we do not see the penis of the 40-year-old man in the mouth of the little girl, her eyes moist with tears under the imminent sensation of strangulation, it is still possible to say that it is a word. Often, tears come to our eyes — of horror, but above all of empathy. If it were more present, would that prevent potential attackers from falling over?
We are in literature, like at Courville and Clermont-Dion. “Testimony is a sharp tool that reaches to the bone, and when you touch the bone, art is never far away”; writing is “what we ourselves do with what has been done to us”.
The aggressors attack “because they can”, so “I write because I can”, insists Sinno, who would like “to be able to [se] take refuge in a plural, whatever it may be.” One of these plurals undoubtedly resides in this choir of women-writers who, through their words “which unites and protects”, regain the power that has been temporarily taken away from them.