Oblique Wounds

I read Sad Tiger recently and felt a terrible sense of guilt for finding it an amazingly well-written book. To think that I would have that response instead of any other given the subject matter was deeply confusing. It got me thinking about why I felt the way I did. We have been societally conditioned to believe that people who have been through horrific abuse like Neige Sinno have are destined to be fragile and cannot be treated as equals to anyone who has not had similiar experience. To that end for her to be a fantastic writer is me choosing to deprive her of her manifest fragility. In a few more days of thinking about that reaction, I came to see the absurdity of it. 

Her memoir Sad Tiger is about surviving incest and the impossibility of finding language adequate to the worst experiences in life. At one point she writes that fiction helped her more than theory ever could  because it "offers only oblique, tangential responses based on stories that aren't real." It is one of the most precise descriptions of what art is actually for that I have encountered. Reading that book was exceptionally difficult and worthwhile at once. I was not thinking about Metallica when I read it but after a while, there seemed to be a connection that brought that music to mind in the first place.

James Hetfield's mother died of cancer while he was a teenager. It was a death she chose over medical treatment on religious grounds, which he watched happen and was powerless to prevent. Kirk Hammett has spoken about being sexually abused as a child. Hetfield has described a childhood defined by abandonment and control, living with relatives who did not want him, learning early that the adults responsible for his safety were operating according to rules that had nothing to do with his wellbeing. These are the forces that likely shaped the voice and sound of the band.

"Enter Sandman" is the song that came to mind while reading Sad Tiger. It is a bedtime song that becomes about the invasion of that space, the threshold where a child's world is handed over to something it cannot control. This is what the music shares with Sinno's descent into the hell that her step-father dragged her into and she became the victim with absolutely no recourse.  Yet, she refuses the redemption arc, the therapeutic resolution, the survivor's triumphant emergence into clarity. These are all the conventions culture has prepared for stories like hers. Metallica, at their best, made the same refusal. Through their lyrics wounds were held open rather than closed doing exactly what Sinno describes, just with music instead of words.