Making an Exit

by Sarah Murray

  Rudyard Kipling was disdainful of this show of sepulchral stone. “They must have been afraid of their friends rising up before the due time that they weighted them with such cruel mounds of masonry,” he wrote of the cemetery in “The City of Dreadful Night,” part of a series of 1888 articles.

  Today, the mounds of masonry don’t look so cruel. Time, decay, and dappled sunlight soften hard edges and fill the place with an air of romantic melancholy. With pathways, moss-covered tombs, and marble gravestones—many shipped out from Liverpool as ballast—the South Park Street Cemetery conjures up images of that “corner of a foreign field, that is for ever England,” of Rupert Brooke’s famous First World War poem “The Soldier.”

  But is it really forever England? Outside the cemetery walls lies Kipling’s “City of Dreadful Night,” a place where poverty, pollution, heat, and noise assault the senses. Government House—a creamy neoclassical mansion modeled on Kedelston Hall in Derbyshire—still stands in Dalhousie Square. But Dalhousie Square has been renamed Binoy-Badal-Dinesh Bagh and the neoclassical mansion is now the residence of Gopalkrishna Gandhi, governor of West Bengal and grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who freed India from British rule. Majestic colonial domes still shape the skyline, but from the porte-cochères of Victorian villas and the Gothic arches of the High Court, small livelihoods stream out onto sidewalks like rivers with no banks to limit their flow—chai sellers, shoeshine boys, knife grinders. The buildings are there, but the Brits have gone.

  The irrepressible energy of the new India may eventually triumph at South Park Street Cemetery, too. In some ways, it already feels like a place under siege. Just outside its high walls, traffic thunders down Lower Circular Road. Ugly tower blocks peer down into its tranquil terrain. Meanwhile, year after year, monsoon rains attack the crumbling surface of the colonial stones while pollution, heat, and humidity slowly undermine their foundations. A charity looks after the cemetery, but it says extra funds are needed to maintain it. Martha and her compatriots rest here in the city that was their home—but for how long?

  * * *

  In the months before he died, my father clearly made a mental transition. From seeing his remains as “organic matter” to be disposed of hygienically, he started considering them as a part of him, a part he wanted left somewhere—or at least that’s what his final instructions imply. As to what took him on this intellectual journey, I can only speculate. However, when it came to deciding where his remains should be left, the answer was easy—in the “beautiful Dorset landscape.”

  West Dorset was not his birthplace, but he’d lived there for more than a quarter of a century. It’s one of the most beautiful parts of England. Ancient woodlands cluster around the base of rolling hills. Tiny churches and thatched cottages sit comfortably in verdant valleys. Yet the countryside has a grandeur that puts it beyond the realms of the picturesque. Ambitious Roman roads cut through rural curves in dead-straight lines—reminders of a long-departed foreign superpower—and a Jurassic coast marked by strange cliff formations adds a note of drama. Fa knew every hillock, lane, and pebble beach of this particular corner of England. He made friends with all the farmers, raised two daughters there. It was his home and the natural choice as a location for his remains.

  But what will his West Dorset landscape look like hundreds of years from now? The hill and the little churchyard of St. Mary Magdalene, where he requested to have his ashes scattered, lie within a couple of miles of the coast—so it’s possible that as global warming pushes up the level of the oceans, his fleeting wish for a sea burial could actually be fulfilled.

  We think of grave sites as sanctified grounds, places that should be left untouched. But the world moves on, often with little heed to the homes of the dead, many of whom now lie beneath skyscrapers, shops, highways, playing fields, hospitals, and military facilities.

  Sometimes we stumble upon them—as happened in 1991 in Lower Manhattan, when work on the foundations of a federal office tower uncovered a burial ground where archaeologists and historians think up to twenty thousand people of African descent were buried in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A memorial now marks what was the graveyard. Also in Manhattan, Bryant Park and the Waldorf-Astoria both stand on old burial grounds. (Since 1852, however, no Manhattanite has had the option of being buried “at home.” Fearing the spread of epidemics, the Common Council of New York City passed a law banning all burials on the island.)

  The grave sites we know about constitute a fraction of those that have existed. Around the world, tens of thousands of burial grounds go undiscovered, leaving most of the world’s dead voiceless, silenced by the pavements and fields on which we walk.

  Sometimes, it’s remarkable how long graves have remained undisturbed. In the Persian Gulf, the kingdom of Bahrain is home to thousands of Bronze Age burial mounds dating from about 2,500 BC to AD 500. Here, bodies of an ancient civilization were buried in the fetal position along with possessions such as knives, personal seals, and ceramic pots. Today, however, pressure for this oil-rich state to develop its land is threatening these resting places. Many were lost in recent decades, as petrodollars powered high-rise urban developments. The question is whether conservationists can win the battle to preserve the rest.

  Just as places move on, so do people. Newark, New Jersey, was once home to the nation’s fourth largest Jewish community. Immigrants started to settle in Newark in the 1840s; by the middle of the century about sixty families, mainly from Germany, had put down roots there. “Most of them were peddlers, who carried their goods in baskets or bundles from house to house and often went far out into the surrounding country,” write the authors of A History of the City of Newark, published in 1913.

  By that time, around fifty thousand Jews were living in Newark, with many from Eastern Europe and more than half coming from Russia. As they prospered, they erected homes, shops, Hebrew schools, hospitals, synagogues, temples—and burial grounds.

  Newark’s graveyards dramatize the story of these early Jewish communities. They’re arranged in sections grouping congregations, health and welfare societies, and Landsmanshaftn—benefit societies with names such as Linitzer, Gombiner, and Robeshower that sprang up in the 1880s to support immigrants from the same town or region. Marsha Dubrow, a local cantor and musicologist whose family came to Newark from Odessa, describes the cemeteries as “patchwork quilts” of different subcommunities. “This is a walkway of the diaspora from Eastern European and Russia,” says Dubrow, as she and I wander through one of the cemeteries on Grove Street.

  However, that diaspora has moved on. As the Jewish communities became more affluent, they relocated to suburbs such as Clinton Hill, Weequahic, Irvington, and Ivy Hill—leaving their dead behind them. As a result, the cemeteries fell into disrepair, their lawns left unmown, trash accumulating, stones falling over with no one to reerect them, and the small gates to each community section leaning more alarmingly as each year went by.

  Today, a few efforts are underway to reverse the damage, and Dubrow is among the most passionate about this mission. With the money given to her by an uncle, she established a fund that recently reerected about seventy headstones in one section, and she hopes to raise more to help restore the cemeteries in their entirety. “It’s gotten better—but this upsets me,” she says, gesturing toward some fallen stones and picking up an empty plastic bottle lying near the graves of her husband’s parents.

  Yet it’s not only neglect that has left the cemeteries in an altered state. The surroundings have changed, too. What was once rolling countryside (Jewish cemeteries were typically located on the outskirts of cities) is now an urban sprawl that’s home to communities that are largely African-American, not Jewish. While trees and bushes once clustered around the cemeteries, the burial grounds now rub shoulders with the Aisha Hair Braiding salon, the Sand Pit BBQ Bar, and the Heaven Belongs to You Ministries.

  At its lowest point in the 1960s, the area was plagued by poverty, unemployment, corrupti
on, crime, racial tensions, and police brutality. The tension came to a head in the summer of 1967, when riots erupted. In one week of violence, twenty-six people were killed, hundreds were injured, and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of property was destroyed. The cemeteries did not escape unscathed.

  Things have improved dramatically since then, with a wave of urban regeneration sweeping through the area. However, on High Holy Days when a diminishing band of relatives returns to the cemeteries to pay respects, recite the mourners’ kaddish, and place stones on the graves, local officers from the Newark Police Department are still deputized to provide security and reassure visitors who remain wary of setting foot in a district they now feel is foreign to them.

  Once inside, the cemeteries have a warm, familial atmosphere, with their “patchwork quilts” of communities. The stones tell poignant stories, too, of lives that started in one far-off country and ended in another; of lives cut short, with severed tree trunk gravestones symbolizing deaths of those “young in years.” Through granite and marble, they send us messages across time—memories that refuse to die. In places, graves are packed closely together, for the cemeteries were developed when money to purchase real estate was in short supply. Today, however, looking in from outside, the proximity of the stones seems to reflect something else—the need to huddle together for protection against the unfamiliar world that now surrounds them.

  * * *

  “If one who attains honor and wealth never returns to his original place,” runs one Chinese proverb, “he is like a finely dressed person walking in the dark.” This is particularly true for the Chinese dead, whose spirits cannot reach the afterlife until their bodies have been returned home, where relatives can visit them on grave-sweeping days such as Qing Ming.

  It appears that in China at one time, professional corpse walkers were employed to walk bodies back home for funerals. In his interview with the retired professional mourner Li Changgeng, Liao Yiwu says he’s heard that these corpse walkers were paid to travel hundreds of miles in order to deliver the dead back to their homes. Liao wants to know if this is true. “Correct,” begins Li. He explains that they traveled in pairs at night, one in front, the other at the back, with the body suspended on the walker’s shoulders by its arms, its feet trailing the ground. “Like carrying a sedan chair, they pulled the body to walk along, as fast as the wind,” says Li. “They would utter in unison, ‘Yo, ho, yo, ho.’”

  Of course, being walked back to your homeland is not an option when there’s an ocean in the way. In the nineteenth century, as Chinese immigrants poured into America, this worried them greatly. During the gold rush, one of the first things Chinese workers would do on arrival at “Gold Mountain,” as they called California, was to make arrangements for the twenty-thousand-mile passage home in the event of their death. They did have one advantage—the fact that their death rites included exhumation and secondary burial of the bones. They could therefore be buried in America and sent home once funding for the passage could be arranged.

  So bodies were interred in shallow graves, giving them more exposure to air, which speeded up the process of decay. When sufficient time had passed for the flesh to fall away, individuals with titles such as “Chief scraper and gatherer of the bones of dead Chinamen,” as one account records it, would exhume the remains. The bones would be cleaned and counted, sealed in a zinc-lined box, and put on a ship bound for the Far East.

  Organizations such as the Sam Yup Benevolent Association used membership dues to cover the costs of repatriating the bones of deceased compatriots who’d been interred on “foreign soil.” Tracking down the remains could be a challenge. When in the 1870s, the association set out on a mission to rescue the remains of dozens of fellow citizens, the account records how, in search of a Mr. Wong Sei, who was buried near Idaho’s Salmon River, the exhumation team “had to hire horses and mules to take them there. They traveled by day and rested by night, sleeping outdoors in the wild, risking attack by wild beasts. The whole trip took them more than fifty days.”

  In Hawaii’s Manoa Valley, the Lin Yee Chung Society Chinese Cemetery was established not only to ensure that Chinese burial rites were adhered to but also as a temporary resting place for the bones of migrant workers who came to Hawaii in the nineteenth century. A building on the cemetery’s ground still contains jars, suitcases, and boxes of remains that never made it home.

  For Native Americans, it’s legal rather than logistical battles that have been fought in order to return ancestors to their homelands for burial—ancestors whose remains (tens of thousands of them) have been stuck in the cabinets, drawers, and display cases of museums around the United States.

  The struggle to control ancestral remains emerged at a politically charged moment in the history of the American Indian civil-rights movement. In the 1960s, prominent individuals started to put American Indian concerns in the spotlight. In 1969, Vine Deloria, Jr., a writer and activist and son of a distinguished Sioux family, published Custer Died for Your Sins, in which he attacked everyone from government bureaucrats and missionaries to members of Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He reserved his most searing criticism for the “anthros,” whom he accused of reinforcing racial stereotypes and of treating Indian people as objects of observation, “like so many chessmen available for anyone to play with.”

  In 1971, anger against the “anthros” erupted when a group from the American Indian Movement disrupted a dig in Welch, Minnesota, claiming archaeologists were desecrating their ancestors’ graves. In Los Angeles, another group of Native Americans occupied the Southwest Museum in a bid to remove human remains and cultural artifacts from the museum’s displays, claiming the ancestral right to bury their dead in their homelands.

  Recognition of the rights of American Indians to control the removal of archaeological material on their land came in 1979 with the passing of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. However, it wasn’t until 1990 that they were given the kind of protection enjoyed by all Americans when it comes to the sanctity of the grave. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) stipulates that, among other things, museums receiving federal funding must return human remains and cultural items such as funerary art to their descendants.

  The issue still sparks debate. Some claim the protections offered by NAGPRA don’t go far enough, while scholars argue that research and education will be hampered by loss of these items. Others suggest that tribes may have motives beyond the spiritual, since a reclaimed object can establish rights to land. However, thousands of human bones have now been returned and reburied, and many have hailed NAGPRA as a piece of civil rights legislation.

  So how important is it where you’re buried? Friends often tell me that, as far as they’re concerned, they really don’t care. I’m not so sure. While I don’t need my body returned to my birthplace in Dorset, I still feel it’s important to end up somewhere meaningful, in a place with which I have a connection.

  Philosophers might see such a sentiment as a futile attempt on the part of humans to shape from their lives some kind of narrative, with a beginning, middle, and ending, when the reality is that none exists; life—and death—is random. My father’s view on this was similar. “One is born, one lives, and one dies,” Fa wrote at the end of the living will he asked me to sign a few years before his death. There’s nothing more, nothing less, is what he seemed to be saying.

  Well, it may be futile, delusional even, but I want my life to have a narrative—and like any good novel, that includes an appropriate ending in a suitable location. Yet my thinking is slightly different from that of the Chinese, Native Americans, and others who want to be returned to their homelands. Their choice implies a movement backward, a return to a place of origin (ashes to ashes, dust to dust). I want something else from my final resting place—a means of going forward.

  * * *

  If you’re traveling anywhere in the world and you happen to see a sign with the letters CWGC on
it, stop and have a look. Regardless of whether you’re in North Africa or Southeast Asia, whether you’re surrounded by subtropical creepers or desert sands, you’ll find a cemetery conjuring up images of an English country churchyard. The lawns will be pristine, green, and neatly clipped—unmistakably English, unmistakably England.

  CWGC stands for Commonwealth War Graves Commission, an organization that marks and maintains the graves and cenotaphs of the hundreds of thousands of individuals from Commonwealth countries (Britain and its former colonies) who died in the First and Second World Wars. Yet none of these graves rests on home turf.

  The Commonwealth War Graves Commission was founded by Sir Fabian Ware, then commander of a mobile unit of the British Red Cross, and was established by Royal Decree in 1917. While its mission was unarguably noble, its formation did not come without controversy. For a start, the commission decided to bury the war dead without a nod to rank, status, or religion, an unorthodox notion at a time when class distinctions were woven into the very fabric of British society, particularly the military.

  Also revolutionary was the practice of commemorating the dead no matter what the circumstances of their death, whether they were shot at dawn for desertion or slain heroically in battle. “We didn’t care whether you’d won the Victoria Cross or whether you fell off your bicycle drunk,” says Peter Francis, who’s worked with the commission for more than a decade. “You were still serving with the Commonwealth forces so you deserved to be commemorated.”

  Most contentious, however, was the commission’s proposal not to repatriate any of the bodies. There were practical reasons for this. The sheer numbers of dead in the First World War were overwhelming. Taken together, the death tolls for battles of the Somme and Verdun alone represented a fatality rate of nearly five men every minute. Transporting so many bodies home would have been impossible.