The primary response to trauma is dissociation, the evacuation of oneself when too much reality can’t be borne. This splitting is a death, an evanescence, and Sinno writes about how a ghost-self comes to hover and haunt her in its wake. Surprisingly, she doesn’t return to her epigraph in light of all this, Humbert Humbert on that strange feeling of an “oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.” It’s a missed opportunity, because we victims are made to feel like our own murderers. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing you of your own guilt. (It’s also surprising that Sinno doesn’t cite Nabokov’s passage in his memoir Speak, Memory about being fondled at the age of eight or nine by his Uncle Ruka at the dining-room table.) The hideous constraint can lead you to place stones in your overcoat pockets and walk into a river. That splitting, the leaving and return, as Sinno’s literary achievement shows, can also lead to a remarkable ability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of someone else.
Sinno’s book is remarkable for another, related quality. It’s suffused with ambivalence. Does she contradict herself? Very well then, she contradicts herself. She brings up Eichmann, then retreats: “I know Eichmann has nothing to do with my story.” (Clearly, I’m less certain.) Whenever she sees a new book by a survivor she wants to flip to the gruesome parts, “what he did, how many times, where, what he said,” but she’s horrified that a reader might do the same with hers. So many things both fascinate and repulse her. Much that could be pure or simple is conflicted, tortured. And what Sinno is most ambivalent about is Sad Tiger.
She doesn’t believe literature frees us—the writer isn’t liberated through an alchemy of reflection and truth-telling, the reader isn’t healed by finding in the pages of a book a mirror. The very idea of art, like a black-eyed Susan, growing out of this stricken soil is sickening to Sinno. She lists seven convincing points in the chapter “Reasons for not wanting to write this book” and laments her entire project’s fait accompli: if readers are drawn to her book, they’ll already be on her “side,” so “what’s the point, if we’ve been in agreement about everything since the beginning?” Why did Sinno put herself through this?
One of the lines Sinno visits and revisits is from a historian. Asked why soldiers raped during World War II, he replied, “They rape because they can.” She ultimately settles on the same reason for why she wrote Sad Tiger. Because she can. “And, like for the soldiers,” she says, “the answer shatters into an infinite series of fractals that lead to melancholy, but also to rage and to joy.” {read}