Ten years before I was born, at 4:40 a.m. on November 10, 1971, my mother and another woman sat “yogi-style” on a kitchen floor in Ann Arbor, Michigan. , and lit up. They were just a few blocks from the University of Michigan campus, where my mother had studied. She had just turned 20. Police tracked the smell of burning hair to find the women sitting on the ground, face to face, screaming.
“They weren’t doing anything to put out the fire,” Police Chief Walter Krasny told the Ann Arbor News. “We don’t know why they would do something like that. They didn’t use gasoline or anything. We assume that they were dressed entirely in street clothes and simply set themselves on fire.
My mother’s self-immolation was the prologue of my life. Every time another case of self-immolation occurs, as happened earlier this month outside a New York courthouse, I wonder about people and their position in the line of law. The inevitable reflections after a high-profile self-immolation often sound the same, because what can you say? It’s an incredibly contextual act. It’s personal and political. The act is the message, and vice versa. You can’t understand what that means without knowing the person’s story. And sometimes not even.
I have always been reluctant to associate my mother’s story with any form of protest. It seemed both sensational and inaccurate to situate his suicide attempt within the political history of self-immolation. Because of our cultural tendency toward binary thinking, people are quick to choose one label to understand this act: protest or illness. Accepting an act of protest does not deny or imply mental illness. Both things could be true at the same time, and other factors could be at play. To suggest that mental illness prevents one from taking a stand is infantilizing.
Many were quick to conclude that mental illness had driven an American aviator, Aaron Bushnell, commit suicide in February. He set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington. However, Bushnell announced on social media that he was going to kill himself in protest and shouted “Free Palestine” as he lashed out.
If a person offers an explanation, I have always been inclined to accept their statement at face value. When this is not the case, things are trickier. My mother, who died in 2005, only spoke to me about her decision once, when I was 12 years old. Looking back on his adult story, I believe mental illness was a factor. But she also told me that she was drawn to the student activism that was sweeping the country at that time. I never found any of these explanations sufficiently complete.
The year my mother and the woman with her were burned, 1971, marked the end of a series of self-immolations by Vietnamese monks after the burning of Thích Quảng Đức at a Saigon intersection. It was a time of protests, student unrest, spiritual awakening, and the bigotry that often accompanies the loss of faith in institutions. Martyrdom and protests, deep grief and psychological anguish were present – as they are today. This month in New York, as a man set himself on fire in the protest zone outside Donald Trump’s trial, uptown students demonstrated for a free Palestine. I can’t help but feel the nagging sensation that in moving forward, we have also traveled backward. Now I wonder if my mother and the other woman were somehow tapping into a cultural trend of the early 70s. Channeling it.
In a 1965 letter to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Vietnamese monk Thích Nhất Hạnh wrote how difficult it is for the Western Christian conscience to understand the self-immolation of Vietnamese monks. He explained that these actions were neither suicide nor protest, but were acts of devotion: “During the ordination ceremony, as practiced in the Mahayana (Buddhist) tradition, the candidate monk must burn one or several small spots on his body. by making a vow to observe the 250 rules of a bhikshu, to live the life of a monk, to achieve enlightenment and to devote one’s life to the salvation of all beings… The important thing is not to commit suicide, but to burn. What he really aims for is the expression of his will and determination, not death. »
According to reports, in the ambulance on the way to the University of Michigan Burn Center, my mother or the woman she burned with whispered, “It’s nice to die together.” At no time that night, nor in the months that followed, as my mother recovered and the other woman eventually died in the hospital, did they ever make a statement to the police. They declined to say more about their intentions. As such, their case was almost anomalous: resisting efforts to be categorized as a protest or an illness.
For a long time, I thought his burning had no place in this larger sociopolitical context, but the more I see it refracted through today’s prism, the more I understand that even without stated intent, an act self-arson is inherently political. All over the world, people have self-immolated because of job loss or an oppressive family or cultural environment. They burned to protest against political regimes and to denounce imperialism. They burned, as the monks did, to express their will. Whatever the impetus, perhaps no other act has illustrated the personal as well as the political dimension.. And perhaps it’s no coincidence that “the personal is political” was coined by feminists in 1970 – the year before my mother’s suicide attempt, when people were fighting for many of the rights civic rights now removed, state by state.
What does an individual act of self-immolation mean? This question can be difficult to answer, but what is clear to me is that these actions have meaning, and that meaning is often multifaceted. They might transmit pain into themselves, into their families, or into the larger systems in which we work, love, and live. Whether due to illness, protest, or both, or for other reasons, they express their “will and determination.” With their bodies they say “look here now”. If burning yourself is a way of expressing yourself, we oversimplify or sensationalize the act at our peril.
Nina St. Pierre, a cultural writer and essayist in New York, is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Love is a burning thing.”
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This story was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.
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