BEWARE HER FURY

In this graphic novel by French cartoonist Malle, a survivor of sexual assault finds power and support from her therapy group.

Clémence is always angry. A 30-year-old survivor of sexual assault, she’s fed up with a system she describes as being rigged against women. Consumed by rage, Clémence admits to her therapist that her other emotions are merely performative, not genuine. Malle’s illustrations punctuate Clémence’s pain by zooming in on parts of her face without showing the whole, even covering up her eyes with speech bubbles, effectively conveying Clémence as fragmented. She joins a therapy group at CALACS, a real sexual assault support center in Quebec, where the other members are introduced with similarly cropped visuals, as juxtaposed with the social workers, who are drawn whole. Other survivors of sexual assault are drawn in a variety of skin colors and ages. During her time with the group, Clémence meets Imane, a lesbian with tattoos on her light brown skin, and the two begin dating. Despite trauma triggers, Clémence and Imane’s relationship is full of warmth as they connect over shared experiences and tattoos. When Imane facilitates dance therapy with Clémence, Malle’s illustrations are squiggly and full of motion, emphasizing Imane’s teachings that therapy is about the feelings, not the aesthetic, so that survivors can safely reconnect the mind to the body. Clémence and other survivors never go into detail about their assaults. Malle instead thoughtfully centers the emotional weight of their trauma and focuses on the growth and change the characters facilitate over the narrative. And as characters journey toward agency, and as Clémence learns to find value in her anger, Malle expands the scope of her framing, showing characters as more whole. Emotions are drawn as wobbly and messy, full of tears and scrunched faces that lay a character’s experiences bare to the reader.

An evocative and raw comic that offers solidarity for survivors of sexual trauma.