
From The New Inquiry, Dan Nemser writes:
Since last July, about 20 people have killed themselves in the face of imminent eviction. These
numbers should be considered a rough estimate, due to the diversity of
circumstances and the difficulty of deciphering “causes.” Useful
resources for tracking eviction suicides are the Wikipedia page and a blog called Los desahucios matan (“Evictions kill”). Since I started writing this piece, I’ve had to update the count three or four times. At
least four hung themselves in or near their homes just hours before the
police arrived to remove them. At least six jumped from their balconies
in similar circumstances. On February 12, a married couple in their
late 60s overdosed in their home after receiving an eviction notice. The
following week, a woman walked into a bank, poured flammable liquid
over her head, and lit herself on fire yelling, “You’ve taken everything
from me!” (me lo habéis quitado todo). She held on for three months in
the hospital with severe burns covering half her body, but passed away
at the beginning of May.
Suicide is paradigmatic of subalternity. It constitutes the ultimate
limit on speech: The protagonist can no longer tell her own story,
explain the sequence of experiences that led to the decision, or
describe the hesitation of feet at the edge or the joy and terror and
speed of the fall. And yet, it is only after death that the act can be
brought to life. Only when it has been silenced can that death made
sense of, pieced together into a chain of events that says something
about the world and how it works. While Spanish activists and
politicians have sparred over how best to interpret the suicides,
therefore, the tasks of narration and emplotment belong to the writer
and historian. Perhaps this is why Talal Asad has suggested in On Suicide Bombing that suicide is intimately tied up with fiction and the desire to craft “plausible histories.”
One way to tell this story would start from the recognition that the
suicides bring into sharp relief a set of structural factors that can
otherwise be difficult to see with the naked eye. With general
unemployment currently at 26 percent — though the figure for youth is
more than double that — it isn’t hard to imagine plausible scenarios in
which spiraling interest payments converge with ever increasing
desperation. Since the financial crisis hit in 2008, foreclosures have
skyrocketed: Some 400,000 evictions have taken place, which amounts to
hundreds a day. At the same time, the most recent census data shows that
between five and six million housing units currently sit empty,
approximately 20 percent of the country’s housing stock. In this way,
crisis intensifies the structural contradictions of capitalism. The
Spanish countryside is now littered with half-built subdivisions,
carcasses of concrete, brick, and rebar, the scars of a construction
boom fueled by northern European banks.
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