Suicide Through Magical Realism: How Did the Colombian Amazons Soothe the Epidemic of the Ropes?

How can we understand suicide and the ways communities address it when neither the word “suicide” nor the anatomical-physiological body exists in their languages and worldviews? From modernity and its colonial power, this has entailed an epistemic imposition that names as suicide what is not, intervenes upon a nonexistent body, and delegitimizes knowledges outside Eurocentric suicidology. Here, I seek to unsettle the epistemic violence of modernity and its coloniality in order to listen, learn, and sentipensar (feel-think) other corporealities and relationships with human and nonhuman suffering that invoke el mal morir, or what is called the “epidemic of the ropes” in the Colombian Amazon. I propose re-thinking and re-sensing other ways of addressing suffering, life, and death beyond Eurocentrism. I discuss suicide through the real-magical and the Andean-Amazonian sentipensar of indigenized communities that soothed this epidemic through ancestral knowledges.