And after the fire, a still small voice.
I Kings
Most of us have trouble taking hold of certain difficult subjects. Yesterday’s news of the immolation of two Tibetan women brings the total to 24 over the past year. I don’t want to write about this subject and you may not wish to read it. There are reasons for both of us to continue on with this topic, even so.
On the social and political level, people act out to gain attention, to mobilize the public. History is saturated with group actions we can generally call “demonstrations.”
In the infamous 1968 “Spock Trial,” baby expert Dr. Benjamin Spock and two others were found guilty of conspiring to help people dodge the military draft. In those days the US draft resistance movement was comparable to the Occupy movement now – it was a crossroads for various political causes, and it also served as a social and cultural focus for young people.
I was living in Philadelphia at the time. The Philadelphia Draft Resistance reacted to the Spock verdict by sending people out in the dead of night to patriotic statues around the city. They put gags over the mouths of famous Revolutionary-era figures. Early the next morning, they notified the newspapers.
The resulting front-page photos of gagged patriot heroes created a sensation. The images told the whole story from the draft resistance point of view and created enormous sympathy for the defendants. The convictions were overturned the next year.
The media still serve the needs of demonstrators by showing us pictures of people holding signs, or tents in parks, or a long list of other tactics that get our attention. An inventory of actions to focus awareness would move up from the gags through massive demonstrations to hunger strikes. For me, the ultimate demonstration is when people go into a public space and set themselves on fire.
This is a horrendous, shocking image to keep in one’s head. I remember a deep burn on my leg from a hot motorcycle exhaust pipe. I try to think of what that would feel like all over my body at once. That someone would deliberately do this brings up the thought, “They must be crazy.”
For many people, our encounter with self-immolation started in 1963 when Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, set himself on fire on the streets of Saigon, and an American photographer sent the image of his burning body around the world. Venerable Quang Duc died just before I started college, and he moved the war in Viet Nam from the fuzzy center of my consciousness to the forefront – I spent much of my freshman year as a full time anti-war activist, and my involvement in college led me to work on peace and draft issues full time after graduation. My entire 45-year work career was spent working for social change non-profits and foundations. It began with that man’s death.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t feel good about the monk’s self-immolation. I was horrified. I had nightmares. I obsessed over the image of his burning body. I wrote and wrote about it, trying to put myself into the mind and feelings of a thoughtful, educated and gentle man who had come to do such a ghastly thing. I couldn’t join the hefty number of people who condemned what he did, or called this distant person crazy – or worse.
Ven. Quang Duc’s act inspired other Vietnamese to follow suit. A surprising number of Americans reframed these acts by casting them in racist terms, using memes of the day about Asians not feeling pain or valuing life the way “we” do – echoes of what was said about slaves over a hundred years earlier.
Less than two years after Thich Quang Duc’s death, 82-year-old Alice Herz set herself on fire in Chicago. The next year a 35-year-old Quaker father and husband named Norman Morrison sat down under the office window of the Secretary of Defense and died the same way.
Herz and Morrison and the others that followed in the US and Viet Nam forced the war into the public’s attention. By then I was working for the Quakers full time, and there was an intense internal debate about Norman Morrison, because of what some saw as the inherent violence of his action.
Two years ago, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire and is credited with starting the Tunisian revolution and perhaps mass movements elsewhere in the Arab sphere. Others followed his example, bringing the act of self-burning back into American minds.
Now let’s return to Tibet.
Like any political movement, the struggle in Tibet is historical, complex, and nuanced – notwithstanding all the “Free Tibet” bumper stickers on Volvos in Whole Foods parking lots. Like many people around the world, excepting in China, I find the harsh repression and murder of Tibetans by the Chinese military to rank high on a list of crimes against humanity.
The two women who died over the weekend – one a 32-year-old mother of three, the other a 19-year-old student – were the first laywomen to die this way. Realizing that people in Tibet are burning themselves to death once every two weeks, it's time to focus on what they are telling us.
After thinking about immolation for my entire adult life, I’ve come to think it’s not my job to evaluate these actions, to decide about the mental health of those who have made that choice, or the degree of violence or other ethical nit-picking that permits us to skirt the central meaning of what’s occurred.
Instead, I think we are invited to accept into our lives a minute portion of the pain. The image of a 19-year old girl on fire grabs my gut, it jams Tibet’s suffering to the front of my life for a moment. These acts are not representations or simulations like gags on statues, nor are they mediated by interpretation.
Instead, these deaths are direct and immediate communication from one human being – a women in Tibet – to me. It’s conveyance of the greatest desperation; it’s a pleading created by a person enduring painful death in the hope of having me shift my attention from a secure life to a distant land with very foreign people. Honestly, it’s a gift.
I have nothing to lose by just accepting these suicides, taking at face value what is given to me and not trying for understanding, but rather for appropriate action. I already know that conditions in Tibet are terrible for so many people. What can I do, how can I make some tiny difference?
As it turns out, the significance of these public deaths isn't found in the immolations themselves, but in what the rest of us do in response. The choice to die a painful death in public is a question asked of the rest of us. Our decision to do something – or not – will be the answer.
