Suicide is poetical protest. Suicide dramatizes discontent and dissent.
Julie Billaud’s, “Suicidal Performances: Voicing Discontent in a Girls’ Dormitory in Kabul,” may be read alongside Niehaus’ study, “Gendered Endings,” in South Africa.
The stage they share is one of domination and oppression, where women are set upon from many sides. And they share the decisive response of suicide as an action and as an event with profound meaning.
The South African suicides are not merely private escapes. They are public demonstrations. Moreover, Niehaus observes that the suicides of women “dramatize culpability.” They were highly visible, expressive, and violent.
Billaud navigates the realm of poetics as it runs through society, history, and culture. She writes:
In countries like Afghanistan, where two-thirds of the population is illiterate, oral poetry has been traditionally used as a channel for commenting on society and politics. Poetic composition and performances structure social relations and provide individuals with a form of political expression and persuasion.
Billaud specifically notes the “centrality of poetry in mediating relations between men and women.” This world is in flux, both hardened and disintegrating: time-tested hegemony as the complex of relationships, traditions, and discourses; a post-Taliban reality, in 2007 — the year of Billaurd’s study —; the international military and political presence — viewed as liberation and imperialism; and an emerging environment of feminism, as evidenced by the National Women’s Dormitory on Kabul University campus, the site of her study.
What then of suicide as poetics and protest? The suicide of women, especially through self-immolation, is poetry in that it speaks to women. It is communication from within and an education of the highest order.* In the protected space of the dormitory, suicide was an intense topic of conversation.
Billaud writes: “the vivacity with which girls talked about female suicide was not the mere product of excitement provoked by discussions about illicit or socially repressed acts. Suicide talked to them in a much deeper and meaningful way.” In the background, she notes, is the refrain by the Afghan poet Majrouh, in Songs of War and Love: “her suicide and her song.”
The enaction of each becomes complex yet again. Suicide is the song, the voice and the protest. And, it concedes and transgresses the limit of mere voice, mere speech, when a woman would not otherwise be listened to.
The self-immolation of Buddhist monk, Thích Quảng Đức, serves as the first model. Majrouh writes of female suicide: “By eliminating herself in such an accursed way, a woman thus tragically proclaims her hatred of the community’s law.”
And there is the threat of suicide. In 2007, rape and the demand for justice became a national issue. Billaud writes: “We saw on television and in newspapers reports of mothers threatening to commit collective suicide if criminals were not prosecuted.”
Words promised a deed, the promised deed an instrument of demand and negotiation, as force deployed in a precision attack and as a broadside: directed at the perpetrators, the family structure, government and social institutions, and culture.
Billaud notes that these protestor-performers displayed seemingly stereotypical hysteria: the tears, the fainting, the crying out. These performances were no mere theatrics, however, nor a reminder that the name of women is frailty.
Billaud cites the following, in a study of ritual expression in Inner Mani, Greece:
During these rituals, women’s expression of pain through lamentations and screams allows them to obtain some form of collective validation … [The] women’s capacity to receive such a validation is due to the almost legal value that pain assumes in the Inner Mani ethical code … To ‘witness,’ ‘to suffer for’ and ‘to come out as representative for’ are narrative devices in laments that fuse jural notions of reciprocity and truth claiming with the emotional nuances of pain.
In between speech-emotion and burning oneself to death there are those who proceed, perhaps never truly hoping to die.
Billaud recounts the suicide attempts of sisters Khadija and Fawzia. Khadija is a musician and singer who went into artistic hiding under the Taliban regime and under the regime of her father. When her father discovered her music he destroyed it and threatened to imprison her at home. She swallowed a “cocktail of tablets” and barely survived.
Five days later, Fawzia did the very same. Her job as a teacher, her success as an athlete, her clothing and lifestyle, also came under threat by her father. Billaud does not wish to question the sincerity of these attempts. But she also offers an insight.
They should not be considered failed attempts, but rather attempts at success. They were performances akin to the protests on rape; an effort to “claim the last word.”
Living a double life, each sister had reached the limit of what words could do to close the divide. The deed itself, then, had to speak for her. Yet, neither hoped for existential nothingness. Neither hoped to become a ghost.
Instead, each brought together the many elements of Antigone: the tragic heroine herself — actor and accuser for whom death is made to speak for itself —; the chorus as commentator and judge; and Sophocles, the one who would fashion the tale, see it performed, in order to witness recognition on Creon’s human face, and to survey the audience as it finally registers with them. Thus to live to enjoy a world made possible by suicide as protest, protest as poetics, and the poetry of suicide.
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Isak Niehaus, “Gendered Endings: Narratives of Male and Female Suicide in the South African Lowveld.”
Julie Billaud’s, “Suicidal Performances: Voicing Discontent in a Girls’ Dormitory in Kabul,” Culture, Medicine and Society 36, no. 2 (2012): 264-85.
*Akin to Gramsci’s conception of education, which aligns with Billaud’s emphasis on hegemony.