A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations

Contemporary Suicide Protests by Fire and Their Resonances in Culture

Grzegorz Zió?kowski, Jan Szel?giewicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429602221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations investigates contemporary protest self-burnings and their echoes across culture.

The book provides a conceptual frame for the phenomenon and an annotated, comprehensive timeline of suicide protests by fire, supplemented with notes on artworks inspired by or devoted to individual cases. The core of the publication consists of six case studies of these ultimate acts, augmented with analyses and interpretations hailing from the visual arts, film, theatre, architecture, and literature. By examining responses to these events within an interdisciplinary frame, Zió?kowski highlights the phenomenon's global reach and creates a broad, yet in-depth, exploration of the problems that most often prompt these self-burnings, such as religious discrimination and harassment, war and its horrors, the brutality and indoctrination of authoritarian regimes and the apathy they produce, as well as the exploitation of the so-called "subalterns" and their exclusion from mainstream economic systems.

Of interest to scholars from an array of fields, from theatre and performance, to visual art, to religion and politics, A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations offers a unique look at voluntary, demonstrative, and radical performances of shock and subversion.

Part I

Mapping suicide protests by fire

Figure PI.1 Piotr Wyrzykowski Self-Immolation (2014).

Protest self-burnings as suicide protests

Can protest self-burnings be considered suicides if death is, in their case, only a means rather than an end in itself? Naturally, it would be fairly easy to fit them into a number of suicidological concepts which prioritise awareness of the possibility of death and its acceptance as distinguishing characteristics of suicide, while marginalising suicidal intent (Hołyst 81–82). In this particular context, however, it bears repeating that many self-burners themselves firmly rejected the notion that their acts, performed for supra-individual reasons, could be labelled suicide.¹

The question of taxonomy is crucial here, as seemingly interchangeable terms can carry wildly different implications and thus affect the broader reception of the acts themselves. Probing that particular issue, political theorist Banu Bargu emphasised that in politics, the term suicide used to denote self-annihilation practices pursued for collective cause has

the rhetorical function of assigning responsibility solely to the actor who performs the act of self-killing, thereby individualizing the action, obfuscating its political message, and even working against the very purpose of action. … the choice of vocabulary defining the act clearly shows that the nominal operation is cryptonormative, incorporating a judgement of the cause for which the self-destructive act is performed. (18)

Hence, her coinage of the neutral term necroresistance which, stripped of any negative connotations, refers to acts of protest self-destruction performed for political reasons.

The term is a viable alternative for the phrase suicide protest, popularised by Michael Biggs, sociologist and author of a number of influential essays on demonstrative self-burnings (“Dying”; “How”; “Self-Immolation”). I ultimately adopted the latter phrase because it emphasises the affinity between practices of altruistic self-annihilation and suicide, and while preserving the possibility of drawing on the vast body of scientific discourse on the subject, it also shifts the underlying meaning from a deliberate, self-inflicted death towards an expression of resistance. Additionally, it allows us to finally retire the term altruistic suicide, which underpinned the typology first introduced by Émile Durkheim in his seminal 1897 volume Le Suicide (Suicide), and was once widely used to refer to protest self-burnings and self-immolations. The term itself is too generic and, as demonstrated by Polish health sociologist Adam Czabański, can stand in for any kind of suicidal act with a pro-community slant, essentially indicating any such act aimed at “improving the quality of life of other people, a specific group, or the entire society (nation)” (Czabański 58). As a result, the term covers protest self-burnings, suicide terror attacks driven by ideological fanaticism or even egoism (for example, when the attack is perpetrated in the hope of being rewarded with entry to paradise), as well as suicides and suicide attempts undertaken by “the elderly and the sick who wanted to relieve the burden to their loved ones,” and the extended suicides in which “the perpetrators, intent on shielding their families from hypothetical suffering, humiliation or poverty, first kill their loved ones and then themselves” (Czabański 61).

In itself, the phrase suicide protest in no way dismisses the altruistic motivation behind the act, and thus, altruism remains implicit in the term. It accentuates the demonstrative character of the incident and the subject’s wish to challenge the status quo and repudiate that which is considered unacceptable. Furthermore, the phrase stresses protest rather than the method used to express it; the obverse would have been true if we were to follow the lead of anthropologist Karin Andriolo and instead use its inversion, namely the term protest suicide.

Besides, as keenly pointed out by cultural scholar Joseph Shahadi, altruism implies a high degree of relatedness to society, while often enough fiery suicide protests are performed by alienated outcasts whose sacrifice is the final exemplification of their outsider status (66). Pushing the matter further, Shahadi asked rhetorically: “is it possible to commit an altruistic suicide without the implicit agreement, consent and/or encouragement of your community?” (65) and suggested we call those demonstrative acts of self-annihilation which accentuate the performer’s stance on supra-individual issues performatic suicides. In his view, they differ from both altruistic suicides and egoistic self-destructions motivated by personal problems, even though they incorporate some distinctive features of both. Like the former, they are performed in service to a cause, but differ in that they grant agency to individuals, allowing them much greater influence over the collective. On the other hand, unlike egoistic suicides, which are typically committed in detachment from the social fabric, they carry with them the potential to disrupt the social equilibrium and the flow of collective energy in the public sphere. A closer look, however, reveals a trace of egoism underlying the concept of performatic suicide, as the act presumes the imposition of will and a specific perception of reality upon a group. In my opinion, however, although Shahadi’s observations are merited, the performative aspect is implicit in the phrase suicide protest and does not warrant any further qualification.

Biggs argued that an event must meet four criteria to be considered a suicide protest. First, the individual must deliberately carry out an action which may result in their death. Second, the individual must not intend for their act to either kill or harm anyone or cause damage to any property. Third, the act must be public – either performed in a public space or accompanied by a written or otherwise recorded statement or appeal to politicians, other public figures, and/or society, in general or in part. And fourth, the act must be performed on behalf of some collective cause, rather than follow from mental illness or personal problems, such as job loss, financial trouble, adjustment difficulties, or familial misunderstandings (Biggs, “How” 407).

Needless to say, in many cases, unequivocally asserting whether a protest was undertaken for personal or supra-individual reasons is difficult, if not impossible. It is my belief, therefore, that emphasis should be placed on the public character of the act rather than the motivation behind it. That particular angle, however, is not free from ambiguity either. For example, deliberate self-burnings by desperate women from Central and South Asia – whose radical and impulsive acts are often designed to produce a sense of guilt within a specific person or group they deem responsible for the injustices inflicted upon them – are performed primarily at home, in their courtyards, or outbuildings near their houses (Aziz; Laloë; Laloë and Ganesan). However, it is restrictions on free movement that women are subject to in such traditionalist societies that may be ultimately responsible for preventing some of them at least from finding a more public venue to express their dissent, resistance, and despair.

Regardless, the definition suggested by Biggs seems the most feasible as it allows us to separate suicide protests (including demonstrative self-burnings) from (a) other types of suicides; (b) suicide attacks that claim innocent lives; (c) acts of martyrdom, wherein death is inflicted by other people (for example, in the course of protecting others); and (d) cult suicides, wherein some members of a religious group (or the entire community) commit self-murder for religious or ideological reasons (Biggs, “How” 407–408). Furthermore, the term suicide protest allows us to sidestep the seemingly irresolvable problem of whether protest self-burnings performed as part of a religious tradition (like Buddhist auto-cremations across Vietnam in the 1960s) should be seen as self-sacrificial gestures or altruistic political actions, thus enabling us to avoid ambiguous and imprecise phraseology.

Protest self-burnings situate themselves alongside other forms of protest self-annihilation, including jumping from tall structures or under trains, ingesting poison, self-inflicted shooting or throat slashing, or self-stabbing.² They are also a part of the broader spectrum of liminal protest efforts that includes hunger strikes (also indefinite ones) and subversive acts committed by radical environmentalists who chain themselves to heavy machinery or trees slated for felling, or peace activists employing similar means of non-violent resistance to halt the transfer of ordnance or arms, to name some examples.

Scholars investigating forms of non-violent protest usually juxtapose self-burnings and hunger strikes as two similar methods of communication based on self-inflicted suffering. Biggs adopts a similar approach, but cautions that the majority of people undertaking hunger strikes do not intend to continue them to their death (“How” 408). Naturally, some hunger strikes do end in death,³ but that does not change the fact that they presume – and enable, given their potential duration – the possibility of negotiation and conciliation, whereas suicide protests by fire preclude dialogue. (Threats or negotiation prior to the act itself are another matter.) In the case of protest self-burnings, death is not contingent upon a change in behaviour or concessions from those at whom the protest or entreaty is aimed, as statistical data indicates that setting oneself ablaze is usually fatal – over 70% of deliberate self-incineration incidents end in death (Laloë and Ganesan 476).

Drawing on Andriolo, we may contend that protest self-burnings and hunger strikes differ in two other respects. First, in the case of the former, the individual loses control of the event and its popular reception, which is fundamentally important to both the effectiveness and the subsequent scrutiny of these types of acts (a notion I will come back to later). Second, self-burning is much more spectacular and, consequently, captures public attention to a much greater degree. As Andriolo rightly noted, “Individual hunger striking gleans scant publicity, unless the performer – as in the case of Gandhi – brings to it his own preestablished prominence” (103). Hunger strikes and fiery suicide protests are similar in that they are often undertaken to further a joint cause. In other words, one person pays the price (injury or death) so that others can reap the benefits (Biggs, “How” 408).

In such a context, self-burning can also be situated alongside aforementioned protests of environmentalists and peace activists. In these cases, we are able to assert that it is the pursuit of supra-individual causes that carries risk of injury or even death (and some have indeed been wounded or killed in the course of their action). As is the case with hunger strikes, however, the course of these actions is charted mostly in response to the reaction of the other party to the conflict, thus making them fundamentally different from protest self-burnings.

Some general remarks

Drawing on Biggs’ sociological scholarship, rooted in his systematic study of press reports from 1963 to 2002 (“Dying”), as well as my own factual research featured in the timeline section of this book (Part II), I would like to formulate some general remarks on protest self-burnings. Due to the lack of comprehensive statistical data on the phenomenon itself, these observations may carry a measure of imprecision.

Self-burning may be performed for a variety of reasons, but only some of these touch on principles widely considered fundamental, such as political repression or threats to basic liberties. In many cases, the reasons behind individual incidents can seem trivial to outsiders, or at least inadequate to warrant an act that may very well end in death. The decision to embrace that particular form of protest may be driven by a desire to preserve values seen as worth sacrificing one’s life for and/or may be a consequence of the violation of one’s dignity. These motivations may be further amplified by despair resulting from the realisation that other forms of dissent either have failed or will fail. Another motive, related to the above issues, is the desire to reclaim individual agency when it is felt to be lost, in order to demonstrate that some decisions still lie solely with the individual. Furthermore, in most cases, the decision is driven by a plethora of intertwined motivations, and it is essentially impossible to isolate the one prevailing factor that spurred the individual to embrace such violent form of dissent.⁴ Consequently, in some situations, protest self-burning becomes a mask that may conceal personal problems or even egoistic motivations, such as a desire for fame or the wish to absolve oneself of past transgressions (Biggs, “Dying” 196).

Citing Marcel Mauss’ seminal concept of the gift, Andriolo asserted that self-burnings are governed by the principles of the exchange economy. According to the logic of the gift, which emerged in pre-modern communities and continues to hold true in contemporary societies, sacrificing one’s own life demands a reaction, a response, a repayment (107). The anthropologist also posited that contemporary self-immolators see their self-burning as an offer that they hope cannot be refused (10...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Mapping suicide protests by fire
• Part II Chronology: notes and microstudies on selected protest self-burnings (1963–2017)
• Part III Selected contemporary ultimate protests by fire and their echoes across culture
• Index