2023-08-29 21:23:00
“Psychopompe”, published on August 15, 2023, reveals the gang rape that Amélie Nothomb suffered in Bangladesh when she was 12 years old. “I put a lot, a lot of my intimacy into this book. I have the impression of putting myself in danger”, assures the Belgian novelist to AFP. The rape by four men took place in the late 1970s in the Indian Ocean off Cox’s Bazar, a beach in Bangladesh where she had gone swimming.
This Monday morning at the microphone of Léa Salamé, Amélie Nothomb returned to this trauma to which she devotes two pages in her new book, emphasizing dissociation, this psychological defense mechanism common to many victims of rape. “I was there, but I wasn’t there.” It was his mother who managed to scare away his attackers. “I really thought I was going to die, but what won was the terror, it took me a century to scream, my mother came running, which made them flee”, she once told Elle magazine.
“I didn’t see my attackers. I barely knew what was going on.”
Her mother had then pronounced these words: “poor little one”. Essential words, which can “seem ridiculous”, to get out of your torpor and express your pain. “If my mother had not said those two words, the silence would have been absolute. It was another era, it was the 70s…”, tells the author to Léa Salamé. “I wouldn’t have believed myself. As there was no comment, no one, no follow-up of any kind, I could very well have thought that I had completely delirious, that I had invented this absolutely abominable episode of my life. Thanks to the two words spoken by my mother, I knew that it had really happened.”
Writing about this drama, with Psychopompe, was a kind of therapy for Amélie Nothomb. “I wanted to say my point of view. I did not see my attackers. I barely knew what was going on. I felt it, I remember this feeling very well, she concludes, tears in her eyes and sobs in her voice. I cannot describe more…”
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