The Age of Skin by Dubrakva Ugresic

Author:Dubrakva Ugresic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

2.

And while we’re on the subject, Nederlands Uitvaart Museum Tot Zover, the Amsterdam National Museum of Funeral History, is an unusual place where the visitor can learn about the funereal practices of various peoples. There I learned that the Surinamese put a little bag in the coffin with the deceased, and, in it, a piece of candy, a coin, and a length of white thread; the Chinese put in food, a wok for preparing the food, a transistor, and so forth, all of them made of paper. The Chinese, apparently, favor cremation.

What brought me to the museum, however, was a June 2015 exhibition dedicated to the suicides brought on by the 2008–2013 financial crisis. Aside from photographs on a wall of shame, the show was filled with copies of a single book. The book is reminiscent of a monumental dictionary, its cloth cover is red and black, and the black pages are printed with white letters. The Complete Lexicon of Crisis-Related Suicides 2008–2013 is the work of graphic designer Richard Sluijs. It is 712 pages long and weighs some four pounds. Each page is designed like a death notice, a paper tombstone with the name of the suicide victim, the date when the person killed themselves, what provoked them to take their life, and how they did it. The book grew into a paper burial ground, on the left, drawn with white lines, are the gravesite, name, age, nationality, and a symbol for the way the person took his life, on the right is the death notice with explanation. Sluijs designed symbols for jumping, hanging, gunshot, suffocation, overdose (medications, drugs, etc.), knife, poison, drowning, vehicular impact, self-immolation, explosion, and “method unknown.” The book states that this is only Volume One; the author wishes to make it clear that the book does not include every single suicide that happened the world over after the financial crisis, nor are the victims fully commemorated on its pages. It’s merely drawing attention to this frightening trend. In his introduction, Sluijs provides shocking numbers for the upsurge in suicides due to the recession in many countries. Equally horrifying is the fact that for every “successful” suicide there have been twenty failed attempts. The book serves as a cemetery with some six hundred graves. Here lies Franco D’Argenio (58), a forestry worker from Campania in Italy, who committed suicide by drowning in a water tank after he wasn’t paid for seventeen months. Here lies Parang Tanna (34) and his pregnant wife Neha. Parang Tanna first suffocated his wife with a pillow and then hanged himself, after realizing he would not be able to support himself and his family. Here also lies Filipo Arena (30) from the town of Mazara del Vallo, Italy, unemployed, condemned to live with his retired parents … And so on and so forth …

Richard Sluijs’s book will not become a bestseller. It speaks about little guys who were and continue to be devastated by the financial crisis, about people whose deaths no longer touch anybody.

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