Sad Tiger | Sinno Snow

"He said he loved me. He said that it was to be able to express this love that he did to me what he did to me, he said that his dearest wish was that I love him back. He said that if he had started to approach me in this way, to touch me, to caress me, it was because he needed closer contact with me, because I refused to be gentle, because I did not tell him that I loved him. Then he punished me for my indifference to him with sexual acts. »
N.S.

Between the ages of 7 and 14, little Neige was raped regularly by her stepfather. The blended family lives in the Alps in the 90s and leads a somewhat marginal bohemian life. In 2000, Neige and his mother filed a complaint and the man was sentenced to nine years in prison after a trial.

Years later, Neige Sinno delivers a heartbreaking account of what happened to her. Without pathos, without complaint. She tries to literally unpin what she calls her "little bomb." It's not just about the chilling story the text tells, her story, a child subjected to systematic rape by an adult who should have protected her. It is also about the way in which this text works, which leads us into a sensitive, intelligent and sharply sincere reflection.

This book is a confessional account that is as much about the facts and their impossible explanation as it is about the possibility of saying them, of hearing them. It is an exploration of both the power and powerlessness of literature. To tell her story, the narrator must question other texts, other stories. She takes us on a radical rereading of Nabokov's Lolita, or Virginia Woolf, and many other texts on incest and rape (Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, Virginie Despentes).

How do you tell the story of the "monster", "what's going on in the head of the executioner", not be satisfied with the victim's point of view? To the point of repeating the question that the poet William Blake addressed to the Tiger: "How could He who created the Lamb create you?" (The Tyger).

The story of Neige Sinno then takes us into the community of those who have known "the other place", that of night and evil, who have been able to extract themselves from it but who are forever marked by it, and thus stand on the border between darkness and day. No resilience. No forgetfulness or forgiveness. Just trying to stand up, writing your story like a "little homemade bomb that you blow up all by yourself at home, in the intimacy of reading. It has the intensity and fragility of things conceived in loneliness and anger. She also has the crazy and ridiculous ambition, which is to shatter this world. »