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.

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The human head is the seat of government you know, said the lead examiner as he walked toward the head resting on the table in the corner of the room. Randolph and Randolph followed in close formation.

We can tell so much from what the head tells us about what it tells itself about itself.

The first characteristics we notice on this head are the slanty eyes and ching chong teeth, said the lead examiner, and he wrote it down on the palm of his hand with a felt marker, like so:

slanty eyes
ching chong teeth

Importantly, he added, we don’t make assumptions of these kinds since these have little to do with anything concerning suicide.

No, assured the lead examiner. We simply document particular facts that go to the case, continued the lead examiner, as his hand with the writing on it pointed and traced the empirical contours, first of the slant of the eyes, and then of the ching chong of the teeth. 

And ultimately, we let the story that needs telling and the words that do tell dictate the life that was lived and that died by its own hand, said the lead examiner, displaying his own hand. 

To get at the story we usually sever the head for dedicated and thorough inspection. The head becomes the object of its own distinct study as the government of the people. Randolph pointed to the severed head. Check, he motioned. 

This is also a way to separate the witnesses, as it were, to ensure that corroboration is objective and not fabricated. We don’t want one part of the corpse to get together with the others to concoct some impenetrable and wholly misleading fib. This takes us down a rabbit hole and we may never find our way back.

Let us go to work, said the lead examiner, and Randolph and Randolph stood ready to go.

We hollow out the head with an ice cream scoop to get at the brains of the operation. The eyeballs are extracted from the eye slits with chopsticks, which is mere coincidence in this case, he chuckled.  Chopsticks are just very useful instruments for picking up food and other things. A fork would do, as well, he emphasized.

Next we mix the brain matter with a good horse-piece of body fat.  You see our friend here had a little tummy, pointing to the corpse still hanging upside down.  Not a big tummy. A little tummy. But a tummy nonetheless. This is all the better.  Randolph, if you please, said the lead examiner.

Randolph stepped to the corpse and with a cleaver and in one clean heave hewed off a slab of fat from the tumnal area.  The pièce de cheval fell into a plastic tub awaiting on the tile floor below. The corpse now swayed gently revealing a hint of muscle and rib.

Randolph picked up the plastic tray and carried it to a long and heavy wooden table chipped and marred and dented with time.  The patina was warm and smooth and pained with an autumn palette.

Randolph flipped the tub onto the table to resemble a cloche poised to reveal a surprise dish. Hasenpfeffer, perhaps? Alas, non. He lifted the tub to present the shimmering slab of fat with flecks of blood and sinew. Randolf was holding the pan of brains and now emptied the contents into a pile on the table next to the fat.

Facing each other from opposite sides of the table together Randolph and Randolph began to push and knead the mounds together. The movements began as distinct and individual without shared rhythm or rhyme. Pushing and kneading here, kneading and pushing there, each to his own effort and tempo.

But quickly they fell into duet. One would push fat and brain toward the other in time and into a large mound at the center of the table, the other would return thoughtfully and tenderly. With nothing but intuition Randolph and Randolph, now as one and with hands lifted to meet at the line that divides us all, pushed through the matter as their palms press together and squeeze out the newly melded alloy. Again and again they push and squeeze and knead and flow into each other as fat and brain flow and bind according to the very same.

The lead examiner looked on with approval. We now have fine fuel to light the lamp of knowledge, he announced. Randolph and Randolph stepped back from the table to survey their good works.

Next we feed the golden fuel into this frontier lamp that I bought at an antique store, said the lead examiner as he held up the lamp with pride.  Sometimes I imagine this little lamp of mine shining through a dark winter night in a little house on a vast prairie.  And now, we are doing the same.  Randolph, the head please.

Randolph lifted the head, which was back to resting on the table in the corner of the room, and proceeded slowly to the long wooden table. He held the head in the ready as an attendant waits to pass the crown to the archbishop to lower onto the head of the king. The head is the seat of government as you know. The archon tasked with presiding over anarchy otherwise, if you will.

Now we light the wick of the lamp and lower the glass globe over it. Now we lower the hollowed out head over the lamp that we just lit. Or, more precisely, the head is now the lamp! Or, more precisely, our lamp lights the headlamp to cast true light on this story of suicide.

We are sure to bore a small hole in the back of the head to draw air to feed the flame. We also bore a large hole at the top of the head for obvious reasons. Sometimes gunshots will take care of one or both.  In this case we made our own, pointing to a hand drill resting on the corner table with a selection of augur drill bits.

Now light flickers from the eyes fed by pure mind and body, and thus pure memory casts onto a white wall in a now darkened room. 

Here we bring out the puppets. And with that, the lead examiner motioned to Randolph and Randolph who brought out the puppets. The puppets were really just long black tube socks hiked up to the elbows, so four in total. The toe of each the sock was stuffed up into the palm of the hand which clamped down on it and the resulting crease gave the impression of a mouth so the spirit could speak in its own voice about its own thoughts experiences and memories. 

This is the method of animating the unknown and frankly unknowable, explained Randolph.  We call it the Via Puppetis. We don’t know what characters will emerge when the play begins, though hopefully there are no more than four for obvious reasons. We have found that the black tube sock is the best On Sale item to start the story with a clean slate. 

The puppets looked like eyeless tadpoles with gaping mouths.  It would be weird if voices had no mouths, assured Randolph, by way of another puppet.  

As they approached the white wall where the lamp casted its light the puppets were activated by a series of warmups:

— I was sad, said one tadpole in profile to the wall while making a sad face.

— I was mad, said another tadpole in profile while scrunching up being mad.

— I was bad, said a third tadpole, stomping around to show just how bad he was.

— I’m glad, said the fourth tadpole, smiling happily as if all cares were now set free.

Now warm the tadpoles looked to the lead examiner, who stood directly behind the lamp to gain the best viewing. Foxy had taken up position off to the right and behind the camera. Randolph and Randolph nodded in unison through the tadpoles which had now really taken on lives of their owns. The lead examiner nodded back.

The tadpoles held their places between the light and the shadows on the wall.  All was quiet. All was still. Now act.

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