Physical Address
Indirizzo: Via Mario Greco 60, Buttigliera Alta, 10090, Torino, Italy
In a territory never named, where female emancipation comes up against a wall of patriarchal coercions, amenorrhea, the last novel by Sarah Haïdar, arises as a cry of revolt. Posted by Éditions Barzakh and at Blast (France), this third title in French strikes with its audacity and its lucidity. Anticipation borders on the real, denouncing head -on the phallocratic and totalitarian systems.
In this Orwellian regime, the body of women is only a control territory. Abortion is punishable by capital punishment, musel -free thought and any form of mercilessly repressed rebellion. The slightest embodiment, in the eyes of the established order, becomes subversion. It is there that Sarah Haïdar places a figure of resistance in the heart of her story, that of a childhood, seed of rebellion. Through it, it is therefore a whole illegal feminist insurrection, which takes shape, scored not by slogans, but by flesh, memories and trauma, “as many living archives” that the regime can no longer gag.
Sarah Haïdar thus composes a real gallery of colorful and deeply striking characters. We come across the protagonist, both beneficial and sadistic, whose influence, as previously underlined, extends far beyond her medical role. Around her revolve several beings of equally singular papers, including her daughter with unrealed inclinations, a bruised assistant who has become avenging, a disillusioned psychologist, as well as an infiltrated geek, the figure of the shadows. There are many prefects, including the husband of the birthday. All, whether they are executioners or victims, sail blindly in the troubled waters of a totalitarian power where religious morality serves as a pretext for generalized surveillance and where progressivism is only a cracked varnish concealing the brutality of the regime.
In this regard, the reader guesses that some have the truth and draw the strings from a system which they claim to master. But others, especially women awakened to the absurdity of the world who suffocates them, decide, despite themselves, to break the chains and to disobey.
A literary cry against the patriarchal order
What seizes in “Amenorrhea” is as much the strength of denunciation as the way in which it unfolds, is fully embodied over the sharp thread of words. His style? Vibrant, dislocated, inhabited by an incantatory emergency. This tension manifests itself, notably, in interior monologues and narrations, where words seem to slip into a sort of “lucid verbal trance”. His writing oscillates finely between poetry and dissection, where each sentence seems extracted from a still lively wound.
The omnipresent female body becomes the theater of an “eternal war”, reduced to its reproductive, controlled, monitored, pillory functions. As for sexuality, as described, page after page, it is torn from any desire from decor, aesthetics, many nausea, raw, almost objectified. From this point of view, Sarah Haïdar dares, of course, saying aloud what many think very low. In contrast to a “merchant” voyeurism, sex becomes a “battlefield”, undermined field where Eros and Thanatos, analgesic versus dispossession are clarified.
Amenorrhea shakes up. Shaken. Claw. Nothing here is attked. The scenes of violence are of revolting intensity, the dialogues stretched like strings ready to break and the images, of an incredible symbolic power. Notwithstanding, the violence is never free, the latter is, in fact, a tool of unveiling, of awakening. Literature, in Sarah Haïdar, is a torch in the night, not a superficial ornament.
In this same incisive vein, the novel denounces violence against women-physical, symbolic, conjugal-and highlights the dangerous illegality of abortion, the questioning of maternal assignment by revealing the constraints, the injunctions and the ravages of postpartum depression.
At the crossroads of fiction and commitment, this novel asks questions as urgent and legitimate. By denouncing the trivialization of misogyny, the author confronts the reader with “the reality of feminicides”, especially since the story ends on this tragic note. Sarah Haïdar thus questions the social, cultural and judicial structures that allow these crimes to continue. In this sexist system, justice applies its rules with variable geometry: while men can be forgiven, women are implacably sanctioned.
A punch work, between lucidity and revolt
Although abortion is illegal in this story, this practice takes place clandestinely, with the consent of the women concerned. The prohibition is therefore not enough to make this choice disappear; She simply makes her more dangerous. Childfare is, moreover, never presented as a gesture ranging from self. Far from being biological evidence or a natural vocation, the act of giving birth to becomes a very problematic issue.
The novel does not offer magic solutions. He does not fall asleep with uto-pies. Sarah Haïdar opts for lucidity, speaking to look at the enemy without wounding. And yet, in this oppressive night, a light persists, rightly, it is that of feminists who never abdicate. Despite the whole madness of the world and the perpetual return of the same, their struggle, necessarily remains permanent.
One of the great merits of the novel is to avoid Manichean shortcuts. Men are not reduced to caricatures. All, in their own way, are caught up in the gear of a sprawling patriarchy, which grinds them as much as he alienates. Besides, this novel sprays ambient masculine rhetoric. It shows how “hollow”, “brutal” and “style of style”. It also reveals the toxic reversal of certain men, who feeling threatened or injured, adopt an even more violent posture.
Amenorrhea is also a roundly philosophical novel. Through an analysis of the authoritarian grip dynamics and the spoliation of the body of women, the reader wonders about the aberration of totalitarian control pushed to its climax. Sarah Haïdar also explores the darkest areas of the human experience to extract its absurdity. Psychotherapy, for its part, has not escaped criticism. His presence seems to be used more to emphasize the emptiness or ineffectiveness of “abstract or professional” speeches in the face of human distress. The circular time, recurring motif, works as an allegory of oppression, of the repetition of cycles of domination inflicted on women.
With amenorrhea, Sarah Haïdar is not content to write, she contrasts, she exhumes, she makes the masks fall. His novel is forcefully enrolled in a tradition of “combat literature”, activist, which has nothing to do with the comfort of the reader. It does not seek consensus or membership. It demands. She disturbs. By refusing any form of softness, it reminds of this chilling sentence of Voltairine de Cleyre, famous anarchist theorist: “The earth is a prison, the conjugal bed is a cell, the women are the prisoners and you [les hommes] are the guards ”. But Sarah Haïdar is not limited to this assertion, she stages it, makes her tangible, then turns her against those who would like to make it inevitable.
“Everything was written in the blood, by blood […] The street is red of women ”. “Amenorrhea” is a poem. Anger. A mutiny. It is a novel that leaves no escape. He forces to think, to feel, to face. And in this arena where the words bleed, the muffled voices make the task of oil. A shock novel? Yes. But above all, a necessary work.