In how many ways can a child be let down? Neige Sinno cannot count them all. Abused by her stepfather from the time she was about seven till she turned 14, what the 48-year-old French writer and translator can remember instead is the slow burn of shame and the fine grit of unease that worked its way under the skin and hardened into a sense of never being entirely safe in the world.
And yet, when she decided to write her story, she did not begin with herself. “With victims it’s easy, we can all put ourselves in their shoes,” Sinno writes in Sad Tiger, her electrifying memoir, translated into English by Natasha Lehrer, and published last December: “The perpetrator, on the other hand, is a different story.”
It is there, she suggests, that every narrative eventually comes to rest — in the troubling question of motive, in the near certainty of denial. “Because for me too, when it comes down to it, the thing that’s most interesting is what’s going on in the perpetrator’s head,” she writes.
This preoccupation with the figure of the perpetrator feels newly urgent in a world still parsing the implications of the Epstein files, with their catalogues of association and influence and their suggestion that abuse does not flourish in isolation. Impunity is absorbed into systems that protect and deflect, into procedures that extend a disproportionate benefit of doubt to perpetrators.
In Sinno’s telling, however, it does not lend the abuser primacy. Her stepfather — a handsome, charming mountaineering guide in the Alps, whose authority structured their hardscrabble life and whose moods set its atmosphere, remains unnamed — a deliberate refusal to grant him the solidity of identity. What the reader knows of him is through a child’s disorienting, distressing observations of him. Alongside, Sinno offers an unnerving literary parallel with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, in which coercion is recast as grand passion and the victim as temptress. The ease with which violence is aestheticised, Sinno says, serves a warning about the stories society chooses to believe.
Sinno’s own story did, eventually, reach a courtroom after she told her mother of her ordeal when she was 21. By then she had left home. After the revelation, her mother would too. Her stepfather, who rationalised his assaults with grotesque inversions — “You don’t love me, so I rape you; you’re a good girl, so I rape you; you’ve been naughty, you’ve annoyed me, so I rape you as a punishment; I love you, so I rape you” — was tried and convicted in 2000. But he was released after five years of his nine-year sentence on account of good behaviour, remarrying and settling down to family life soon afterwards.
A product of the MeToo movement
In the questions it poses about power asymmetry and the social mechanisms that sustain it, Sinno’s account is very much a product of the MeToo movement. “As you may have noticed, the text begins with a sentence that includes the phrase ‘me too’, but this is not to say that I too have been a victim. It is to affirm that I too am fascinated by violence, by the monster,” she says.
When the French memoir came out in 2023, it had been an instant sensation, winning France’s highest literary award, the Prix Goncourt, and a slew of other European prizes, and selling in record numbers. Non-linear and formally restless, Sad Tiger moves between testimony, literary criticism and philosophical inquiry. “This is how I would like MeToo to be understood first and foremost: as an opportunity to think about sexual violence, not just to denounce it, but to discuss and reflect on the phenomenon, placing it at the centre of our analysis of society… I would like MeToo to be an exploration of our ambivalence, of the complexity of everything related to rape and abuse,” she says.
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This call to examine not only the violence but the cultural atmospheres that normalise or disavow it has taken on renewed urgency in the light of the ordeal of another French woman Gisèle Pelicot. For nearly a decade, her husband Dominique had drugged her and orchestrated her rape and abuse by scores of men. At the 2024 trial, Pelicot’s decision to waive anonymity and her insistence that the moral burden be placed on the perpetrators and the enablers in place of the victim — “Shame must change sides,” as she put it — echoed the deeper current running through Sad Tiger: the insinuations about character, the invariable scrutiny directed at the violated, but most of all, the dogged refusal to let stigma shutter survivors down.
The book’s title is a hat tip to William Blake’s poem, “The Tyger”.
From private shame to anger
It is from this pivot — from private shame to anger to public reckoning — that the book’s title, a hat tip to William Blake’s poem, “The Tyger”, draws fuller resonance. It animates Sinno’s inquiry about the nature of evil and the terrifying possibility that predator and prey are forged in the same moral universe.
“It is an ontological bewilderment. When we discover the world, as children, we ask ourselves those philosophical questions and we never find easy answers. Why do the strong abuse the frail? Why does oppression exist? In the context of child abuse, those questions manifest themselves as an intellectual and emotional rebellion against injustice. Are the tiger and the lamb created by the same energy? What do I have in common with my rapist? Can I understand him? It is a matter of going to the precipice and looking down: if the tiger is my fellow man, how can I not become a tiger myself?” asks Sinno.
These are questions that resist neat resolutions. If there is any solace in Sad Tiger, it lies in the reclamation of voice. “What is strange about the experience of abuse is that it is deeply personal and a very common experience. Child abuse, sexual abuse, happens everywhere all the time. But it is silenced everywhere. The fact that a door seems to be opening now, that many sectors of society show signs that we are ready to hear about that reality and want to do something about it is giving me hope,” she says.
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Sad Tiger
Neige Sinno (Translated into English by Natasha Lehrer)
Seven Stories Press
224 pages
Rs 599
The book’s title is a hat tip to William Blake’s poem, “The Tyger”.