Somebody is Walking on Your Grave
What we do with our dead says a lot about the living. The reveres or detachment in which we handle the body is all determined by the body’s relationship to the living. Who gets a beautiful mausoleum? Who gets tossed into a mass grave? Does it even matter what we do with the dead? After all, they’re gone. That life that was cherished, loved, or even hated isn’t housed in the body anymore. It’s empty. Do the dead care what happens to their body? The living certainly do.
Somebody is Walking on Your Grave My Cemetery Journeys is about cemeteries, which of course means it’s about the history of all the bodies that are and aren’t housed in those cemeteries. Mariana Enriquez walks us through multiple cemeteries around the world from Europe to Latin America to the U.S. These cemeteries are her foundation; she uses them to build a house of stories, rooms with the dead walking through walls and poking their heads around corners to tell us a bit of their history. We are guided through these cemeteries as if by a newly hired tour guide, who just learned the history in recent training and wants us to keep it moving.
From the bodies with headstones to bodies with elaborate statues marking their resting point. Enriquez tells the story of those who are remembered and those who are forgotten. Sprinkled into the textbook like prose of each cemetery, she drops herself into the narrative, like a ghost herself vaguely shaping the narrative but not concrete enough to say I learned anything about her except that she loves cemeteries. Enriquez, however, is not the only one in her book or outside her book who’s in love with cemeteries.
What struck me the most was the tourism of it all. Enriquez wasn’t the only one visiting many of these cemeteries. When I think of travel and tourism, it’s about people going somewhere to explore, indulge, and be removed from their everyday lives for a moment. Well, I know that Death Tourism is a thing, but I failed to think about the implications of it all. Tourism on its own has its problems, Hawaiian natives being pushed out of their homes and entire neighborhoods in Cancun, Mexico, being entirely unlivable for residents. Enriquez and the many other people wanting to take pictures at the St. Louis Cemetery No.1 and Holt and Lafayette Cemetery No.1in New Orleans are not just tourists, but part of Dark Tourism. The flock of living people are eager to commune with the dead, to supposedly learn about the dead and some of the dark history. The overwhelming hordes of fans visiting Highgate Cemetery and needing to take pictures with the graves that inspired the names in the Harry Potter series.
Then, there was Enriquez herself, taking a bone from the Holy Innocents Cemetery in France, which she had to sneak into because it was closed off to the public. There was a detachment to her writing, to the act of stealing a bone and transporting it from its home to her home that caught me off guard. Perhaps I believed that a woman in love with death would understand the importance of respecting it. While the act of taking such drastic steps to secure a bone from this beloved cemetery may be read as an act of love. A love that drove her to need to claim a part of this place she so longed to visit, the lack of personal connection within the writing prevented me from agreeing with this interpretation. Instead, to me, this action, like the action of many other Dark Tourists who need not to visit these places, but invade them, is an act of dehumanization. The dehumanization, perhaps not of the owner of the bone who has long since passed, but of the community she is visiting, the very alive people who have a great attachment and a deep connection, that she has visitor does not.
For most of the book, I was confused about the title, not the first part. Somebody is Walking on Your Grave is apt title for a book that really showcases the tourism of death, but the second part of the title, My Cemetery Journeys, because there was hardly anything about her at all. Of course, there were the descriptions of her actual journey to each cemetery, but seeing her struggle to get to these places because of the recurring theme that she doesn’t have a car wasn’t exactly entertaining. Apart from that, she was a goth kid and now a goth adult there isn’t much to clue the reader in on why she loves cemeteries so much, so much would steal a bone.
Throughout the book, I keep looking at the tourists snapping pictures rather than the dead. I kept thinking of the times I’ve myself have participated in Dark Tourism. Unlike Enriquez, I didn’t visit cemeteries, though. I thought about the time I visited Alcatraz and the Titanic Exhibition. I couldn’t stop looking, not at the horrors around me but at the mothers taking pictures of their kids. As I see Enriquez taking photo after photo, risking her life at times to gawk at these graves, rather than truly sitting with the context that led to the graves, all I could picture was those families. Perhaps Enriquez truly does care, but I didn’t feel it in her writing. Instead, this reminded me of a scene I witnessed at the Titanic Museum. Right in front of the reconstructed head of the Titanic, clips of the last words before hundreds of people died were projected on the screen, but my friend and I were the only ones reading them. There were kids standing there, smiling and saying cheese for their parents to snap a picture and many people in line to do the same.
Without looking up author interviews about the book and her talking about the book, which I’m sure are available, I have to ask what was the purpose of this book? What was I made to take away? All I understood was that people can make the time and use their money to visit these cemeteries, to supposedly pay respect to those buried there, but it seems as if the dead are an afterthought. Enriquez does take the time to learn about the history of the places to some degree, and yet I learn nothing about how these histories impact her. Unfortunately, many people don’t even stop to read about the history on the plaques or to ask their tour guides follow-up questions before they’re quick to turn away from those dying around them to gawk at the merch, the beautiful view, everything but the reality of the graves around them. Nothing about these trips makes them stop to think about their own implications or how they prevent history from repeating itself.
We visit these sites. We learn the dark history. We take pretty pictures with horrors as backdrops. We write books about stumbling around cemeteries, taking pictures, and getting annoyed when certain sections aren’t available to you as if you’re entitled to access. Yet, this fascination with death, pain, and crime never seems to extend to your neighbor or your neighbor’s neighbor. It never leads to real morning or reflection. There’s no drive to help the living stay living longer. No thought to learning more about the world and how it leads to preventable deaths and suffering. It is hallowed, empty fascination.
