Where public bodily assembly—as an act of protest to reclaim one’s indefeasible right to bodily self-determination and autonomy—is denied, is the only form of resistance left the annihilation of the body itself? Where collective resistance is impossible, and individual resistance is only a form of suicide, why not ‘go out’ with a spark and hope for some consolation, perhaps igniting some change however small or at least a minuscule personal victory in spectacularly daring to exercise agency and individual autonomy when such things are forbidden? 

If hunger strikes are considered an apt response to forcible restriction and confinement to spaces in various prisons—an embodied form of disobedience to the reigning notions of the political that takes place through literally and metaphorically signifying the precarity of the body—then how is suicide any less favourable? In both instances bodily performativity takes center stage; the body is transformed into an indexical expression, an illocutionary force demanding the uptake of an audience, saying: it is this vulnerable body that is suffering; it is this body that would rather starve and perish than be subordinated. Both are performed as a last resort where occupying public spaces is no longer an option. Both come at the cost of the performer’s suffering, hunger strikes arguably more so if we acknowledge that some forms of existences are better off, all things considered, not continued. Starvation or suicide, at any rate, a prisoner’s last hope for emancipation when there is, quite literally, no alternative. 

If my right to exist as who I am is denied to me, forced to live as a shackled prisoner outcasted to the peripheries of everyday social life, an enemy of the state and society, a stranger masquerading to be who I am not, exiled to the shadows as a voiceless, ontologically dead, un-person; do I really exist? This isn't a kind of solipsistic exercise but I only mean to say that a meaningful existence necessitates uptake and recognition from others, for what is identity but an assertion of one’s existence in a congress of other fellow existences?

A barred window to one’s identity reduces one to inorganic nature, which is per se undeath, unable to individuate oneself beyond an amorphous surrounding. To be undead denotes more than just social death, depersonalisation or dehumanisation. It is to be an objectified thing crushed by the dark weight of living things; stripped of individual sovereignty, of creaturely life; alive in an altogether unliveable state while knowing of a not-yet life that belongs to me, is my right to claim in an objective present yet always out of reach, always suspended in a future not for me to enjoy. Tomorrow, the day after, next year, but life never arrives. Everyday is a reminder of a life not lived and everyday is suicide postponed by a blind and hopeful optimism for its arrival in an endlessly sorrowful procession. 

After all, how does one “have” a life when the tyranny of the majority becomes so unendurable. When one is loathed by family and community, by closest “friends” and foes alike; seen as an always already Other, a traitor to nation and creed, a contemptible sinner, a threat to the social order and the Holy moral codes, a walking abomination to be condemned to Hell by the Decree of God, a farcical joke of the pure human image as it was intended to be in their minds, either pitied or pathologised with the only sure “cure”, short of repentance, incarceration or death. 

I am Oedipus incarnate, foreshadowing the fall of humanity. A remnant of the condemned cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. That who has been warned about by the Prophets eons ago. A portent of the nearness of Judgment Day. Why are you on this earth, you who are the most monstrous being in history; an infidel of the most evil kind; an ontological misfortune; the beast of the apocalypse that God cautioned us from; why do you choose to bring shame upon our community? For this, we condemn you to an undead life so long as you remain silent, and if you so speak, death by stoning is your remedy. 

What have I to say to all this? That I have not chosen this hellscape of a life? That it was indeed your God that saw it fit to create me a sinner by nature? That I am just like all of you and want to live peacefully among you because, despite everything, I still love you and long to be accepted by you? How can I even begin to hate you; you are my childhood, my idiosyncrasies, my past dreams and hopes, my memories of a time where my heart was open wide to you, a time before an overly reflexive mind betrayed me. I am able to rehearse these answers but it is one of those moments where doing nothing or doing something are both accompanied by an equally extreme fate of disaffection. Nothing good will ever come of these conciliating remarks.

So, if conciliation is not an option, what is left of a philosophy of defiance under such conditions? If not defiance then what, resigned fatalism? Admitting defeat and prostrating before a hateful community who I once belonged to? Could I not muster an attitude of indifference, some sort of serene, imperturbable disdain of “looking the other way”; or spiritually retreating into myself, try to create inwardly that external world which fate denied me of and which I so wished to be part of?

No, I cannot bear it; that is no way to for a human to live and a sure route to madness. I do not have right to the public square is not mine, I do not have that right as others do. If I have depleted all forms of nonviolent resistance and civil disobediences I have at my disposal, which are practically none. What is next for political struggle? What form of praxis can my resistance take? Are there any alternatives, save submitting to mob rule? At least one thing seems clear; it were better to live incarcerated, and to die so, than to subordinate and pledge allegiance to a community that demands one’s undeath. To die, to die and die! Death, whatever it may be, than live as an undead unperson.

Oscillating between hope for nothing and despair for everything, consumed with love and hatred for everyone … my thoughts … keep … returning … back … to … suicide. Martyrdom, not out of altruism, but as an only recourse to an unlivable existence. Since the public square is inaccessible, my body remains to me as the only spatial object of protest, the only means for some semblance of coverage and register. Any other forms of resistance which are readily available to those considered legitimate—publicly positing my existence, speaking of it, showing signs of sympathy towards it—apart from obvious inefficacy, would all effectively result in a net negative, the diminishment of my wellbeing, suffering, and worst of all, pointlessness; not moving any point forward, no progress made, not for myself nor for others in my place; only making everything worse altogether. 

But suicide? Suicide done right? Self-immolation and martyrdom for the just cause? It can work, if done correctly. Under the appropriate conditions, setting, appropriate paraphernalia, placed in the appropriate places, involve the appropriate people, appropriate broadcasting, and let the message be heard, loud and clear: this is my body which I own to my last breath, my site of protest. If I’m predetermined to everlasting hellfire, why not accelerate the inevitable? Why not claim some agency over the process? I, and I alone, get to decide when to go. My symbol is the flame of death, to be reborn again as a spark of a revolution of precarity, resistant to all forms of authority. Cast me into a flaming cauldron; set me ablaze; let the fetid smell of the gasoline and charred flesh fill the air, as the flames swallow me alive, the glorious flames of a final act of defiance, crying out a savage, suffocated scream that this ignited body is mine.