Dominique Sigaud, Virgin Whore, Actes Sud Editions, 07/10/26, 128 pages, €15.50
« Having a body». The narrative opens with an evident truth, but not just any body, for a fragility reveals itself when one is born a girl. At fifteen, Dominique loses her virginity to a man ten years her senior, whom she barely knows, yet whom she chose. Desire comes first, and the author asserts that she was free from constraint, acknowledging that she knew nothing. Then there follow the acts of two men. At sixteen, her father commands her to strip and administers a spanking that he has the audacity to present as an educational act. A few weeks later, that summer, during a wedding on the family property in the Var, on a path in the pine grove and in broad daylight, a guest of the groom, a stranger never seen again, slips his fingers into her sex by surprise. The book treats this gesture for what it is—a rape—and bears an indelible mark on the reader’s mind, “the mark of that man.” She remains silent. Failing to push her father away, she remains mute this time still. It will take decades for her to dare to say the word, and the book’s force lies in this reversal of candor, the adolescent judged by the woman who writes.
Dominique Sigaud names the gestures and leaves the gaps of her memory gaping. This candor touches the very principle of testimony: reconstructing the scene would be to replay it once more on the body of the adolescent, whereas the restraint returns to the reader that childhood and that innocence which were torn from them. She dismantles the paternal sleight-of-hand, which tucks what is erotic under the label of a lesson, and the junction between authority and sex immobilizes the child in place. The book speaks of an “idiocy,” a word that denotes the one who lacks knowledge and awareness in the face of what is happening. For decades, the author said nothing.
From there arises a jagged style, made of brief sentences and repetitions, where one can hear anger: she trips over what memory has erased and returns to it stubbornly. One clause repeats page after page, and a pair of underpants goes down and up again. The work calls this a “narrative of traces,” and its rigor lies in recording the uncertain, the shadows in memory, the flashes of clarity, the door that her father crossed.
The Word That Accuses
Approximately three years have passed since the spanking. In the mother’s living room, the father pronounces the sentence that gives the book its spine. “You are a whore.” Dominique Sigaud recognizes there the present of general truth, the axiom that binds the past to the future. The insult becomes a definition, and the grammar weighs down more than the word itself. The confrontation that Dominique Sigaud names “competition of narratives” pits a woman’s voice against a man whose power to name and condemn holds sway. The text sums up this clash in a single formula, “a language without power, mine, facing a power without language, his.” The young woman wishes that, once, only once, the father would utter the same phrase to the elder brother. He will never be questioned and does not hesitate to relish the privilege of his birth. It is here that masculine domination is measured, in the disparity of treatment between two rooms that stand opposite one another.
Since it is the mother who warned the father about her daughter’s loss of virginity, her role bears even more weight. She hands her to a man whom she hates and dreads, and she does not utter a word during the scene. Subjugation takes the form of complicity, carried by a fear that explains the fault and does not dissolve it. For the daughter, desire is disqualified in advance, speech suspected even before it can rise. The mother, meanwhile, averts her eyes. It requires an unusual audacity to write this about one’s own mother, and Dominique Sigaud writes it without absolving her.
Bend, Then Reclaim the Voice
Dominique Sigaud lives in Arles, and it is within the corrida that she finds her central figure, “incest as bullfighting.” The mechanism runs from the pen of the enclosure to the lances that tire the young animal, from the red cloth that provokes it to the men in golden outfits who enter the arena, to the thrust and the marks left behind. “To bend the girl as one bends the bull.” The decorum serves no other purpose than to conceal the essential, which is to attack a living body. The hunted body becomes inseparable from those who hunt it.
Another image accompanies the stunned reader: “I attack the monument.” The book grants this monument the names of the Founding Fathers and makes of it the Mount Rushmore image, where four presidents, among whom Washington and Lincoln, are hewn into stone. For Dominique Sigaud, Rushmore designates the order itself.
Behind the father stands a lineage of Catholic notables, Freemasons, rooted for centuries, with a grandfather who was an admiral. Dominique Sigaud, a thirty-year-old journalist, knew how to cry out in Lebanon against a Syrian soldier who threatened her with a Kalashnikov, and in front of this father she foresees that she will be defeated. “Behind the prestige of the lineage, the father finds both the justification of his authority and the shelter of his violence.”
The fragments and the repetitions, which spoke of the obstruction, become the tools of a reclaiming, and each retelling shifts a little the one who tells it. Writing, long after, consists of retracing the same path in reverse, slowly, to arrive at “liberation from the monument,” using a language that others have forged.
This book is salutary. It makes legible what entire families have organized to keep silent, and it asks the reader to go all the way. It also speaks to mothers, from whom we sense fear and dependence. Their protection over their daughters comes first. One leaves with a man’s and a father’s shame before what a father can inflict on his daughter, even more before the silences that cover the power he avails himself of. This shame obliges every man to set his own limit to his force and his impulses. Albert Camus wrote the formula in Le Premier Homme.
“A man, you can stop him.”
The lesson is for all men. Those who commit such horrors are excused by Camus, who glides past them, and they lie until the end. The suspicion then turns against the one who speaks, who becomes, in their eyes, “a liar, a fabulist, and mentally unstable.” All their cowardice lies in this reversal, and one comes out of it wrecked.
The article “Virgin Whore, a Narrative of Two Gestures That Erase a Girl” first appeared on Mare Nostrum.
