Once, when I was little, my stepfather told me that it was thanks to him I did so well in school. It was because of what he did to me that I was special. My intelligence, my precocious intellectual ability, came from experiencing something extraordinary that pushed me beyond my limits.
Christine Angot recounts how her abusive father suggested that she write about the incest he had subjected her to. You should write about what you experienced with me . . . It’s interesting. It’s not something that everybody experiences.
He even had an opinion about how she should go about writing it: The reader should question themselves, wonder whether it is dream or reality, it should be a little hazy, a bit like Robbe-Grillet.
That’s another reason why it’s hard to write about this. Not because it brings back painful memories (a person who was abused as a child has no need for a book to bring back painful memories, they are lying in wait every morning upon waking), but because the text, into which the author pours so much effort and will, years of reading, her heart and soul, is, from the very start, the abuser’s project, he is right at the heart of it, he almost predicted it, even almost hoped for it.
A person rapes in order to exist. Perhaps they don’t know that until it happens (I happen to think they do know, most of the time) but once it has happened it’s obvious that this irreparable act will mark for life the victim, the world. It is an act that engenders power, a power that extends far beyond the perpetrator.
Several years ago I learned about a recently uncovered child pornography ring called damagedforlife. This was not the name of a victim therapy group, but a site on the dark web passed among predators who are aroused by the knowledge that the acts they are watching involve genuine victims whose lives will be damaged forever. The victim as a person does not exist for them, these people are entirely devoid of empathy, or at least they have a bizarre kind of empathy that doesn’t allow them to imagine the victim’s suffering experienced from the other side. The victim exists for them simply as a vehicle that will permanently bear the trace of their abuse.
Damaged for life. This book is the proof. I want it to exist, but I hope it doesn’t have too many readers. It would mean existing in literature not for my writing but for my subject. The thing I have always dreaded. And that it should be of all things this subject, which I did not choose, or want, or create. It would mean existing in literature not because of something I have done but because of something that someone did to me. A nightmare.
And yet I am going to write it anyway, in a kind of senseless rebellion. Take the bull by the horns and drive it completely mad. Fill it with words until it cracks, begs me to stop, and leaves me in peace, at last.
— Neige Sinno, trans. Natasha Lehrer, Sad Tiger, “The one who bears the trace”
