The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Peter Hitchcock

It is a truism that the defeat of nefarious political hegemony, the dissolution of repressive power, the disarticulation of class control, and the redistribution of power and surplus all pivot on the concept of sacrifice. Struggle, in all its variegations, requires giving up on the comparative safety of homeostasis, or normative subjection, for the challenge of transformation. An initial and obvious problem is that hegemony also exacts sacrifice, it pursues it, it derives consensus from its rhetoric (“Ask not what your country can do for you,” etc.), so the logic of sacrifice is at stake in its specificity rather than in its general principle. It is this logic that interests me, which I read as a political, cultural, and even (or especially) an aesthetic problematic that here can only exist as a preliminary commentary. At its most crude, I would suggest the contemporary geography of power elicits a prescient dialectical image of sacrifice and that justice and revolution might usefully attend to cultural imagination, but precisely to immolation in its understanding of crisis, a point where the literary can provide a provocative corollary.

One must immediately ask whether sacrifice, as such, and immolation in particular, is a human right. Sacrifice as a principle rather than as a specific act (i.e., a sacrificial rite) would not obviously require legal sanction or an official, collective guarantee, but giving one’s life to a cause greater than individual substance is a complicated prospect. State sovereignty, for instance, pivots on the right to demand sacrifice even if the form of sacrifice (social, political) generally falls short of death (exceptions abound, not least of which are the demands of military service). Clearly, while a state might wish its rights to be a logical extension of a universal human compact, the determination of human rights themselves are a sign of shortfall in such desire. Immolation touches on this, the discourse of ultimate sacrifice, and the fraught ethics of the right to die in general, around which immolation is a spectacular affirmation. Nevertheless, my focus here is less about arguing the case of immolation as a right and more about understanding the grounds of its political necessity, the sort of materiality in sacrifice that makes human rights both imaginable and often, necessarily, impossible.

The Arab uprisings of North Africa and West Asia in 2011 evince a complex of causes: some based on the banalization of authoritarianism in a world no longer pinned to Cold War geopolitics (particularly after the invasion of Kuwait) or even the short American century; some found in the socioeconomic contradictions of global capital that reward corruption in the service of value extraction, producing vast swathes of dead labor rather than redistribution; and some originating in an authentic desire to wrest the future from the pathos of passivity, to assert a common voice so often ventriloquated by institutional fiat. The constellation itself is still very much in the making, the present and the past conjoined in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the dialectical image but not yet in a manner in which its event can be adequately cognized. The moment of danger is here, hence my invocation of sacrifice, but the flash of memory and the concreteness of its past seem very much in flux. Is immolation the key to such concretization or is it some fantastic attachment, a monstrous metonym that might order a history but at the cost of losing a past that hurts, the real in its moment, and thus the paradox of historical change as such?

Immolation marks a controversial site of conflict, a struggle over struggle, the exercise of a right on behalf of rights, a violence about violence, redolent in the meaning of the word and its practice. The Latin immolare, the sprinkling of sacrificial meal, is consonant with its theological underpinnings, sacrifice and the sacred, across many religions including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity, but historically denotes a fraught space between absolute belief and a veritable alibi for institutionalized murder (the association of immolation with burning is a relatively recent phenomenon, even if burning and sacrifice are longstanding in their imbrication). To ask who or what is being sacrificed is at once a question of its political moment, the social structure of its instant, with a concomitant ontology of time. The qualifying term, “self-immolation,” is meant to separate off a somewhat determined and robust institutional desire from the realm of personal dedication, autocremation as a conscious decision (this is particularly noticeable in the ongoing crisis in Tibet, where Tibetan monks and laypeople have used the practice to mark precisely the difference between state subjugation and an autonomous Tibetan self). Such divided subjecthood recalls Lacan’s “objet petit a,” that remainder split off from the self intended to secure it, but finding instead a founding ambivalence in the subject and its propositional faith, its desire. Indeed, from this perspective, self-immolation, the sacrifice of self, is less about individual volition than the regime of the self and a history of the subject per se. I use immolation to assert this paradigmatic crisis, that the problem of will, decision, and selfhood should not be assumed to fold into the confines of subjective desire, devotion, and conviction. Immolation itself stages this difference and revolution depends on such difference.

Yet to remove the qualification in the term may be read to perform a conceptual violence by erasing an individual’s commitment to suicide on behalf of a collective cause. My point is that the qualification risks obfuscating the collective cause before the individual commitment. This does not negate the possibility of epistemic violence but frames the political meanings of its register. Not all acts of self-immolation capture its collective meaning but all immolation in the present necessitates the consumption of self. Put another way, self-immolation has a specific function bordering on the ideological, at least in the way it is re-presented – it is often pathologized, for instance – yet immolation puts a more complex and contradictory event in play replete with the social force of sacrifice. But immolation is murder, surely, or at best sanctioned execution, whereas self-immolation is suicide, a spectacular event undertaken for its associative effects, its protest, its solidarity? Again, the separation is more than the moment of consciousness in which it is precipitate; the rhetoric of division attempts to suppress the historical conditions of its emergence, the dialectical image that is indeed its spectacular now. Rather than fetishize the actual image of immolation that often exists as a highly mediated hallucination (in contrast to the suicide bomber whose body is always already lost to dreamy association), I want to ponder further its revolutionary import not simply as a moment of dissent, but as a disjunction in the order of political and literary time.

In Gayatri Spivak’s justly famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” she undoes (among several undoings) the epistemic violence of British colonialism’s banning of sati, or widow sacrifice, using the formulation, “White men are saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak and Morris 2010: 48). The immolation of widows under Hinduism was not widely practiced, but sufficient enough for the colonizer to exercise his hypocrisy by legislating other people’s violence. Here the woman as object in her self-immolation is at least doubly dominated even as the act is fought over as a freedom, the freedom from death and the freedom to choose death. I have no space to detail the genuflections of the argument here, but the materialist feminism of the intervention is salutary, especially as it relates to the politics of asymmetry in immolation. Indeed, immolation is constitutively asymmetric not just with respect to power but also regarding the cultural symbolic of the act itself (as a note on resistance Spivak remarks that the root words are the same between widow sacrifice and Gandhi’s interpretation of the hunger strike). Another lesson from Spivak’s critique is that sati’s insistence on sacrifice as self-immolation is an alibi for speaking the subjects of history rather than problematizing the history of subjection itself. And thus we must ask, in the immolation that begins the Arab uprising in 2010: does the subaltern speak?

I want to approach the problem in two ways: first, by considering whether immolation is constitutive of subalternity, not literally, but because it presses the limits of representational subjectivity as such; second, I want to suggest that the literary reflexively replays the quandary of subaltern representation: by attempting to depict the subject of immolation it actively demonstrates a certain speechlessness that can provoke more than itself for aesthetic and political completion. At this level, immolation is not in itself a dialectical image but the grounds for it taking place or, to use the word most often associated with the beginning of the Arab Spring, it provides its “spark.”

Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, immolated before the governor’s office of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010. The circumstances of his sacrifice are by now documented, although not beyond dispute and often vary dependent upon the source. For Foreign Policy magazine, for instance, he was simply a “repressed entrepreneur”; for the BBC, the official who harassed him was “just as much a victim” and his suicide would not have meant much but for the Internet prowess of a student who, having the same name, published his own poetry and grievances on the web that were then assumed to be the words of the immolator (a confirmation, perhaps, of the postcolonial point that the subaltern is always already spoken). Transnational media, like CNN, predictably asserted the “legacy of Bouazizi still burns.” Bouazizi was not unlike many young Arab men in the region, struggling to make a living in a climate of high unemployment, little job creation, crass authoritarianism, and systemic corruption. The Arab precariat had lived this way for a number of years but economic conditions worsened appreciably as quantitative easing and currency manipulation in light of the 2007–8 global financial crisis forced up the prices of basic commodities dramatically. Yet these are circumstantial details that inform the decisive moment without explaining it. Bouazizi had been harassed before over where and when he could sell his produce but finally he determined he could not suffer such immiseration any longer. When officials at the town hall would not hear his complaints he immediately purchased a can of paint thinner, doused himself, and lit a match. Why immolation?

In a study of almost 40 years of immolation, Michael Biggs could not find one record of immolation by fire in North Africa. Whereas there is substantial evidence of immolation of this kind in India, South Korea, and Vietnam, especially in relation to interpretations of Hinduism and Buddhism, sacrifice or protest in this vein has no obvious genealogy in Arab or Muslim culture. Martyrdom is a distinct correlative (including that of the aforementioned suicide bomber, although this is no less controversial) and, while the religious imprimatur is clearly in much dispute, it has not taken this form until relatively recently. Of course, before Bouazizi, the most famous instance of fiery sacrifice as protest was that of Quang Duc, a South Vietnamese Buddhist monk, who, in 1963, offered himself as “a donation to the struggle,” in response to the suppression of Buddhism by a Catholic-centered and pro-American government. His immolation was meticulously planned. Monks and nuns formed human barriers to prevent fire engines from reaching the scene and global news media were invited to witness the event (and were provided with an English-language handout with Quang Duc’s final declaration). Quang Duc’s death was videotaped and photographed and suddenly the whole question of the fate of South Vietnam was visible and problematized. It is at this point that immolation as sacrifice became synonymous with death by fire and as a form of spectacular political intervention. There were a lot of reasons President Diem was deposed by a coup at the end of 1963, but few doubt the critical place of immolation in that moment. Indeed, death by fire not only continued to occur as a protest against American presence in Vietnam (Biggs found records of 13 incidents in 1 week in 1966) but also became a prominent act of political resistance in crises marked by acute asymmetries of power. In 1969, for instance, Jan Palach immolated to protest the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia (in a warning to the Russians, he called himself Torch Number One). But important variations in the practice also become evident – for example, suicide by fire without political demands now became discernible. Even protest from above, like the immolation of high caste students in India in 1990 against government proposals to favor lower castes for university places, recognized the potential for political impact from the practice (interestingly, this is one of the few events where survivors were questioned to produce a psychological profile – the subaltern subject may not speak, but the Brahmin, metonymically, is assumed to fulfill that capacity).

The late twentieth-century effulgence of protest by fiery sacrifice is a complex measure of asymmetry and technology (in terms of both media dissemination and flammability – the age of immolation is also the age of oil). There were plenty of protests against repressive regimes in North Africa and West Asia before Bouazizi’s intervention and there have been many immolations since (over a hundred in Tunisia alone, like the jobless man, Adel Khadri in Tunis, March 12, 2013) without the corresponding mass movement that it catalyzed. Laryssa Chomiak usefully details the systemic causes of Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution,” not just in terms of the economic plight of Bouazizi’s generation but through the logic of authoritarianism and the minimizing of civil society. The deeper historical meanings of the “Arab Spring” remain to be elaborated because of its proximity (some have already questioned the name since what happened in Prague and Beijing do not quite match the desired outcome), and because it is increasingly evident that the forces of reaction in regional geopolitics should not be underestimated. Yet this clearly puts pressure on the ways in which we conceive of political time and the power of the instant. There have already been several attempts to read the uprisings, and indeed Bouazizi’s death, biopolitically, and one can sense immediately how the critique can unfold. The familiar terms of thanopolitics, necropolitics, and homo sacer provide a useful heuristic for at least some of the theoretical concepts in play – a point, however, where I would urge greater sensitivity to the ambivalence of sovereign memory in postcolonial critique. Whatever Bouazizi’s questioning of former President Ben Ali’s power over life and death, the Tunisian revolution so far has reproduced a sovereign state. True, the future of Tunisia’s uprising will not depend solely on Moody’s BB rating of the country’s sovereign debt, but how the state cleaves to transnational logics of identity is no less a symptom than Bouazizi’s “bare life.” Indeed, the insistence that Bouazizi’s immolation is proof of exceptional bareness may be understood as part of a similar discourse, one that connects a speculative downgrade with a spectacular degradation. The point here is not to dismiss the possibility of a revolutionary coupure or break in more general social transformation, but to beware the leap from immolation’s image to a form that belies its content. Here the provocation of time in the dialectical image becomes acute.

It is this question of timing, the temporal coordinates of subaltern protest, that the Moroccan writer, Tahar Ben Jelloun, accentuates in his thinking about the Arab Spring, both in his non-fiction, “L’étincelle” (“The Spark”) (2013a) and in his terse novella on Bouazizi, “Par le feu” (“By Fire”) (2013b). From Ben Jelloun’s perspective, the Arab intellectual has been wrongly characterized as a bystander or as passive before the machinations of despotic authoritarianism. In part, this recalls the time of Ben Jelloun’s own most spirited resistance in the 1960s when he was imprisoned for his efforts. “The Spark” is deeply critical of Ben Ali and Mubarak, although it should be noted it is somewhat taciturn on the substance of the Moroccan monarchy’s relationship to democracy and protest. The effect is to demonstrate a displacement and disjunction in the order of time and perhaps a generational distance between the revered North African writer and the revolutionary youth of the region. How Ben Jelloun is interpellated as an Arab public intellectual remains a vexing issue irrespective of Ben Jelloun’s self-identification. Indeed, such a logic, the impulse in the “subaltern must be spoken,” troubles the instant of speech, the event of timely intervention. I am remarking upon two levels of “reaction formation” here, overdetermined by both transnational mediatization and by the relationship of the global writer to his subject. This is less about the lag between the “spark” (Bouazizi’s immolation) and its dialectical image, and more about representability itself. The conditions of the latter not only allow for Ben Jelloun’s commentary but also, I would argue, the persistence of authoritarianism. In the space of “to be represented,” the dictators or their surrogates can also be represented again. Does Ben Jelloun’s literary evocation of Bouazizi fight the constraints of the void Bouazizi is read to fill and the reemergence of repression that contains it?

Briefly, “By Fire” offers a Mohamed (the lack of surname underlines the fictiveness of the account and not just its intimacy) in the third person who breaks under the strain of personal and familial responsibility. It is loosely based on Bouazizi’s life, not necessarily to idealize his character (although the case can be made), but to focus on the ordinariness of daily repression: “Pauvreté, le manque, une résignation vague assuraient à sa vie une tristesse devenue avec le temps naturelle” (“Poverty, lack, and a vague resignation to a life of sadness had become natural over time” [Ben Jelloun 2013b: 9]). Ben Jelloun’s story emphasizes the normalization of hopelessness, made all the more galling because Mohamed has a degree in history, a level of qualification for which there are no jobs (Bouazizi himself did not finish high school, which is not unusual given the dire financial situation of the family). In a book of only 50 pages (written for the most part while Ben Jelloun was hospitalized), the writer struggles to imagine the inner life that chooses death by fire. If there is a decision, Ben Jelloun suggests an accumulation of misfortune to mark its moment. With his fruit and vegetable cart finally confiscated and thus his means of livelihood confiscated with it, Mohamed washes, prays, then borrows his brother’s motorbike and fills a bottle with gasoline. He tries to get his cart back but is once more beaten by the police. In the only moment of first-person narration, Mohamed says, “Si j’avais une arme, je viderais tout le chargeur sur ces salauds. Je n’ai pas d’arme mais j’ai encore mon corps, ma vie, ma foutue vie, c’est ça mon arme … .” (“If I had a gun I would empty the clip into these bastards. I don’t have a gun but I still have my body, my life, my lousy life, this is my weapon” [Ben Jelloun 2013b: 45]). Well, he has the gasoline and fire-bombing does have a history in the region (particularly during the anticolonial struggles). When Mohamed is once more refused an audience with the Mayor, he doesn’t throw the gasoline at symbols of authority, however, but pours it over himself and lights it. “Mohamed se transformait en torche” (Ben Jelloun 2013b: 47).

From here, the story races to revolution in a few lines, punctuated by a declaration from his sisters:

L’histoire de Mohamed n’appartient à personne; c’est l’histoire d’un homme simple, comme il y en a des millions, qui, à force d’être écrasé, humilié, nié dans sa vie, a fini par devenir l’étincelle qui embrase le monde. Jamais personne ne lui volera sa mort.

The story of Mohamed belongs to no one; it’s the story of an ordinary man, like millions of others who, after being crushed, humiliated, and denied in life, in the end became the spark that set the world on fire. No one can ever steal his death.

(Ben Jelloun 2013b: 50)

The text can only mark its insufficiency (and ironically so, since it bears the author’s copyright, it “belongs”), but what would its meaning be for subaltern immolation? Immolation is aporetic to the extent that its representation confounds the inexpressibility in its essence. The asymmetry of the act is that between the moment and its image, its symbolic. Ben Jelloun’s text manages to intimate this space without bridging it, which is less a measure of aesthetic perspicacity and more about the impasse of signifying potential itself. The not-seen of immolation is a corollary of the unspoken of subalternity. It is the kind of self (and selflessness) that makes selfhood possible.

The breach posed by Bouazizi’s immolation reveals the difficulties in the abstruse form of sacrifice for contemporary politics. Bouazizi did not plot the symbolic function of his act. If he wanted the attention of the municipal government that had refused to hear his grievance, his public praxis did not follow Quang Duc’s lead. This may explain why, despite the fervent desire of transnational media to have the subaltern “speak” in the image of his demise, they have not produced photos of the immolation (interestingly, it is often photos of immolations inspired by Bouazizi’s that now represent his act). Indeed, it has been claimed it was the Internet dissemination of video of protesters in Sidi Bouzid supporting Bouazizi in the days following his immolation that galvanized the challenge to Ben Ali. It is the constellation rather than visuality as such that underpins the force of the dialectical image, but surely it is the image rather than its absence that dominates the symbolic valence of immolation? The absolute negation of the body, which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri read as the undoing of the absolute authority of sovereign power, requires a temporal concept to fathom the logic of its instant, its act. Similarly, while Jacques Rancière’s sense of dissensus understands the paradox of right in protest, it is the distillation of time that marks immolation as intervention. In the moment of sacrifice, a history of oppression has been rendered now, and the extent of its effect is mediated through the past that is its possibility. Hegemony knows the power of the spectacular (e.g., “shock and awe”) as well as the challenge it represents. Immolation, in this respect, is sacrifice in the form of a question, not an answer, an interrogative mode that opens a dialogue among the oppressed about its collective memory and not simply the event that spurs it.

It would be reductive to state that immolation exists only as a mnemonic device, yet it does facilitate a cartographic memory of inequities to be resolved, rights to be gained, a geography of power, if you will. Yet the politics of the act as dialectical image suggests change exists not in witnessing the spectacle but in coming to terms with the time and timeliness of sacrifice, a point where the literary marks its representational difference as Darstellung from Vertretung even as it replays its founding impasse. Spectacular selflessness obviously lends itself to re-presentation but often, in the aftermath of Bouazizi’s immolation, can also produce noisy indifference or confusion about immolation’s time. The invocation of subalternity here is not intended to transpose immolation onto what it is not but is rather to accentuate that the problem of immolation partakes of subaltern alterity, especially and whenever asymmetries of power reduce self to nonidentity. Bouazizi’s immolation names a predicament as question that continues to inform North African and West Asian rebellion. It does not need to be given voice for the sake of speaking, which is perhaps Ben Jelloun’s predilection, but requires understanding in its moment, in the logic of awakening itself.