I have recently read three novels—two of them autofiction—that deal with child sexual abuse. In all three, the abuser was an adult male and the victim was a girl or teenager.
Before I go any further, I must warn you that I was not looking for books dealing with this topic, but that they came to me by chance; in fact, if you only read their titles it is very difficult to know what they are about. This leads me to think that, unfortunately, sexual abuse against minors is a crime that occurs, almost always with total impunity, throughout the world, but that more women, sometimes until they reach adulthood and fully understand what happened to them, are reporting it. And that is always a good thing, because the search for justice is the first step towards healing.
I will write about each of them as they arrive: the first one is called Why did you come back every summer? (2018, Lumen; 2022, Palindrome), and in it its author, the Argentine Belén López Peiró (Buenos Aires, 1992) recounts those terrible summer holidays during which, from the age of 13 to 17, her uncle-in-law abused her when he came to visit, as well as the legal battle she had to undertake to prove that, although he only penetrated her with his fingers, what her uncle - who by the way was a policeman - was doing to her was raping her. It is a text in which the author changes her narrative voice (sometimes in the first person, other times using different narrators who tell their own version of the events) and also uses transcriptions of the testimonies of the witnesses in the court file to weave the plot of the crime that marked her adolescence and her relationships with men for some time.
In the second novel, The girl from the ice floe (Anagrama, 2021), the French actress and writer Adélaïde Bon (Paris, 1981) tells how for years she mistreated her body with blows, painful masturbation, alcohol and drug use until she was able to unlock from her subconscious the sexual abuse she suffered as a seven-year-old girl by an unknown adult. The stairs of the building in an upper-class neighborhood in Paris where she lived with her family were the scene of the abuse in which a middle-aged Italian immigrant who posed as someone who was going to fix his neighbor's bicycle forced her to perform oral sex on him and inserted his fingers into her vagina. Bon tells how the trial against this man, with the girls who, like her, were his victims now being adult women, helped her heal and stop punishing her body.
Finally, it came into my hands The summer of the snake (Alfaguara, 2022), the only one of the three novels that I will comment on in this space that is not autofiction, but pure and simple literary fiction, even with some fantasy, but that does not make it any less shocking or deal with the issue of sexual abuse any less seriously. The author, the narrator, essayist, poet and academic Cecilia Eudave (Guadalajara, 1953), uses both the images of the snake and of a female ghost to tell the story of a summer in 1977, when a little girl, Ana, was abused by a neighbor, who asked her to caress his penis while making her believe that it was a boa that “got up” because it was happy with his caresses, and that the “white poison” it released would not hurt her.
When a minor suffers sexual abuse, he or she needs a lot of therapy, care and attention to try to heal, as far as possible, the wound that an event of this nature leaves in the body, in self-esteem, in the psyche and therefore in the way of relating to others. As I wrote at the beginning of this text, I am glad that more and more women are reporting. And that literature, as a timely reflection of what happens in each era with humanity, is recording this.
If you want to read more texts by Irma Gallo visit: Irma's notebook
You may be interested in: Latin American literature to come in 2022
