Suicide is protest. Suicide is the continuation of politics by other means.

Antigone suicides to protest the decrees of Creon amid a death sentence by the very same. Suicide is the power and problem of conscience and justice, individual and family, family and society, society and state.

To protest the South Vietnamese government, the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức self-immolated in Saigon on June 11, 1963. His body was re-cremated, but his heart, miraculously, did not burn. It is currently on display.

Between 2009 and 2013, one hundred and twenty Tibetans self-immolated in protest of Chinese occupation and repression. China views these acts as terrorism.[1]

The New York Times reports that thirty-nine Chinese farmers, women and men, suicided over a period of five years. Their protest is the confiscation and clearing of farmland set for urban development. Suicide is by immolation, suicide by steamroller, and suicide by bulldozer. [2]

In ancient China, during the third century BCE, the poet and statesman Qu Yuan composed the poem, “Lament for Ying,” and waded into the Miluo River weighted down by a rock. His protest was the corruption of the state.

In “Gendered Endings: Narratives of Male and Female Suicides in the South African Lowveld,” Isak Niehaus uses Bourdieu’s concepts of “symbolic violence” and “masculine domination” to analyze fifty-two suicides — thirty-nine by men and thirteen by women — in Bushbuckridge, South Africa.

For Niehaus, complexity of suicidal circumstance and motivation may be understood according to an overriding concern: gender constructed lives. For men, the construction is masculine domination, and in particular the crushing domination of the imperative to dominate.

Marital and sexual failures, loss of a job, financial debt, mental or physical illness are understood by individual and society as the failure to dominate one’s world, within and without. Suicide is the thwarting of manhood. It is shame and social stigma, which is real even if it is imagined.

In turn, Niehaus writes: “Narratives of women’s suicides emphasise the miserable consequences of subordination to parents, lovers, husbands and affines.” The suicidal misery is circumstantial: parental domination, unwanted pregnancy, failed love affairs, rape, domestic violence, or a cheating husband. And it is the thwarting of hope.

He continues:

Young women also committed suicide when they failed to establish stable relationships with male lovers, and when their aspirations of being wives with supportive husbands, mothers with their own children, and to having their own home, seemed to have no realistic chance of fulfilment.

With female suicides Niehaus discerns “themes of protest.” These were no mere escapes. They “aimed at dramatizing the culpability of domineering parents, neglectful boyfriends, disrespectful affines, and abusive husbands.” They were highly visible, expressive, and violent.

Of the thirteen women, seven self-immolated and one swallowed broken glass. A suicide positioned herself in a field where all could see, or in the yard where the neighbors notice, or in her living room where she would be found hanging, or in the home of an employer, “with blood running from her mouth.” Some suicides uttered accusations and imprecations.

“Before Rina Ngobeni burnt herself, she reportedly asked her sister to look after her baby, and said, ‘Her father does not want [the baby]. He is a polygamist who fucks everywhere.’”[3]

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[1] Pasang Yangkyi, “Tibetan Man Self-Immolates in China,” Voice of America (December 04, 2013); VAO News, Buddhist Monk Self-Immolates in Tibet Protest, Voice of America (November 11, 2013).
[2] Ian Johnson, “Picking Death Over Eviction,” New York Times (September 8, 2013).
[3] Isak Niehaus, “Gendered Endings: Narratives of Male and Female Suicide in the South African Lowveld,” Culture, Medicine and Society 36, no. 2 (2012): 327-47.