Rohith Vemula Case: The clarity of a suicide note

These lines by Brecht, from his poem on the German Jewish philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, tell you a person committing suicide has one terrible advantage at his disposal: his clarity. In Benjamin’s case, it was not simply clarity about his personal situation, being unable to cross through the border check posts and fearing he would be turned over to the Nazis. It was also the darkened vision of a future Benjamin carried before his eyes, for a racist regime was ruling his country and hope had receded beyond the horizon. In Vladimir Mayakovsky’s last poem, ‘Past One O’Clock’, written two nights before he shot himself, the clarity is equally chilling, caught between a Stalinist regime discrediting his poetry and a failed love affair. Paul Celan was driven to the same fate also for more reasons than one, a mediocre poet’s wife accusing him of plagiarism, and his psychiatric treatment. But the poet might also have been referring to the larger web of desolation of being Jewish in post-War Europe, when he wrote two months before he jumped into the Seine: “They have healed me to pieces.”


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