Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

by Alastair Bonnett

  North Cemetery, Manila

  14° 37′ 53″ N, 120° 59′ 20″ E

  Who is more off the map, the living or the dead? Most of our streets, towns, buildings, and nations are the creations of the dead and carry their names. The living parade in their kingdom like ghosts. In an era that mythologizes the living as go-getting gods, able to reshape and revolutionize everything we touch, it is an uncomfortable situation. It’s this mismatch, this discomfort, between our self-regard and our sneaking sense of watery insubstantiality, that explains much about our horror of the dead. We resent the power that the dead have over us, their effortless capacity to reduce us to shadows.

  One way to rid ourselves of this tomb envy is to come to an accommodation with the deceased. We’ll stop being frightened of them if they give us access to their places of rest. The living have a lot to gain from the arrangement, since it could result in a lot less fear and a lot more housing space. This brings me to North Cemetery in Manila, the densely packed megacity that is the capital of the Philippines. North Cemetery represents a new kind of urban environment, the lived-in graveyard, and has between three thousand and six thousand living residents, many of whom live in and around its substantial family tombs. High city rents make the free space of the cemetery an attractive option for the poor, but this is more than just another story about destitution. It’s also about a realignment of people’s spatial relationship with the dead.

  With the growth of the world’s population and the mounting challenges of making a living from the countryside, cities around the world have been getting bigger and fuller. As demand has increased, rental prices have become too expensive for many ordinary people. Cemetery living is one of the solutions to this problem. It’s not as visible in the United States or Europe but it still happens. I used to have a colleague who lived for years in a camper van in a graveyard in northern England. He found the right patch of ground and got by on very little. But his housing choice remained an eccentric one.

  You have to go east to find whole communities living in graveyards. There are numerous reports of cemetery living from India, Pakistan, Chechnya, and more recently in Libya, where nearly two hundred families have moved into the Al-Ghuraba cemetery in Tripoli. Like many cemetery dwellers they are very poor, with nowhere else to go. But the best-known and certainly the biggest living cemetery, Cairo’s City of the Dead, proves that these places can be far more than repositories of the desperate. Given time, they can establish themselves as thriving and diverse economies. In the five cemeteries that make up the City of the Dead, about fifty thousand live within tombs and another half million in houses put up between tombs. If this were only a field of slab headstones, no such community would have arisen. In the West substantial tombs are a rarity, being the preserve of wealthy dynasties; the rest of us get little more than a boot scraper. But Egyptian cemeteries were never designed only for the dead. Traditionally in Egypt it was expected that mourners—a role given to female relatives—would live with the deceased for forty days. So the family tomb was constructed as a complex, with additional rooms and a courtyard. Egypt also has an ancient tradition of seeing cemeteries as places where the living and dead come together. In fact, the City of the Dead is better seen as just another urban district. It has its own shops, schools, and a clinic with a maternity wing, as well as electricity and running water. Since the City of the Dead began to be permanently occupied in the 1950s, several generations have been born there, often sharing the same tomb with their parents and grandparents. The Italian anthropologist Anna Tozzi di Marco, who has studied and lived in the City, refutes the idea that it is a place of desperation. Instead, she offers a portrait of a place with its own class structure, a city within a city, in which people can make a success of urban living, rent-free.

  The City of the Dead is a fully formed inner-city suburb. By comparison, North Cemetery in Manila is smaller and more specialized. Like the City of the Dead, it too started to be occupied from the 1950s and also offers living spaces in tombs, although they are not nearly as palatial as some of those in Cairo. Having grown for sixty years, the Manila cemetery also has its own neighborhoods, some of which have long been just as self-sufficient as, and certainly safer than, the slums outside. It also has amenities, such as several mini-markets, a restaurant, and sports facilities. Electricity is illegally cabled in from beyond the cemetery. However, while the City of the Dead seems to fit into and grow out of Egyptian culture, North Cemetery is a far more pioneering, transgressive place. Catholic Manila has no equivalent of Cairo’s Islamic and pre-Islamic traditions of extended live-in mourning, and as a result the residents here see themselves as overstayers and as out of place. They go to great lengths to make themselves useful to the everyday life of the cemetery, caretaking family tombs and undertaking tasks such as carrying coffins and sealing up crypts. They get out of the way and live somewhere else on November 1 and 2, the Days of the Dead, when many Filipinos come and visit their ancestors. Behaving like a closed community of guardians, the cemetery residents have worked out a respectful if rather nervous relationship with both the living and the dead.

  One resident, Bobby Jimenez, explained to a roving journalist, Kit Gillet, “We do occasionally go outside the walls—to walk the streets—but mostly we stay inside.” He went on to describe the precarious nature of life in North Cemetery: “Sometimes we have police raids, so it is important to try to get approval of the family owners of the tombs. If you have a piece of paper or a deed from the family saying you have a right to stay there it is OK.” Even someone like Clare Ventura, who was born in the cemetery and brought up her three children within its walls, said, “I’ve had to teach myself to like living here.” As she explained to an interviewer on National Public Radio, “This is where I have a chance to earn a little bit. You get used to it, and it’s a lot safer here than most places outside.” Other tomb dwellers, like Boyet Zapata, complain that the restless spirits of the newly dead can interfere with their lives, taking over their bodies.

  But the residents have reached an understanding with the departed, based on reciprocal respect and care: they look after the dead’s resting places, and in return the spirits of the dead, for the most part, leave them be. Over recent years it is not the dead but an influx of squatters, including alcoholics and drug addicts, that is disturbing residents’ peace of mind in North Cemetery. These interlopers misuse the tombs, hassle mourners for money, and disrupt burials. Their behavior shatters the special kind of patience that is required to make North Cemetery a place that works for both the living and the dead. This influx of undesirables has also stung the city authorities into threatening to clear out the entire community. To be swept out into the hostile world would be a terrible injustice to the people who, for generations, have cared for this place, but even if this happens, they and others like them would soon find a way back in. With city rents staying stubbornly high, for many people coming to an accommodation with the dead is one of the few viable ways to sustain life in the city.

  North Sentinel Island

  11° 33′ 20″ N, 92° 14′ 77″ E

  Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various home-made weapons are making two or three wooden boats. Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.

  This radio distress call was received at the Regent Shipping Company in Hong Kong on August 5, 1981. It was from the captain of the MV Primrose, a cargo ship heading to Australia through the Bay of Bengal. The ship had struck a coral reef and was grounded some one hundred meters away from dense forest. The Primrose had run onto the shore of the only island in the world entirely occupied by an “uncontacted” indigenous people. There are roughly a hundred inhabitants, and their language, religion, and customs remain unknown. The outside world calls them the Sentinelese, and they live on a round isle that is five miles across, North Sentinel, one of the necklace of 361 islands that make up the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a Union Territory of India that lies about eight hund
red miles to the east of India.

  The captain had good reason to worry. The usual response of the Sentinelese to intruders is a hail of arrows. But this time the seas were rough enough to keep their canoes at bay, and their unfletched arrows, which have a range of only forty meters, fell into the water. A long week passed before the crew of thirty-three were lifted off their vessel by civilian helicopters.

  DNA results from related tribal groups in the Andamans indicate that the ancestors of the Sentinelese migrated to the islands from Africa some sixty thousand years ago. North Sentinel is the last redoubt of an ancient community. The island has no natural harbors and is surrounded by reefs and year-round rough seas. It is a fortress against the world. For many years all attempts to approach the island were met with the same level of hostility. In 1974 a film director had received an arrow in his thigh while laying out a selection of ingratiating gifts on the beach: pots, pans, a live piglet, and toys. However, in the 1980s and early 1990s the Indian authorities began a concerted effort to win the islanders over. Anthropologists and local officials made regular forays to the shoreline, always bearing gifts. After numerous hesitant and unsuccessful efforts came the breakthrough. On January 8, 1991, the front page of the Andaman newspaper, the Daily Telegrams, declared FIRST FRIENDLY CONTACT WITH SENTINELESE. The story told how, having left the usual offering on the shore—in this case a bag of coconuts—and retreated to their motor launch, officials had witnessed the Sentinelese coming out of the forest to collect them. The sensation was that this time they came unarmed. In the afternoon the Indians went back and found more than two dozen native people waiting for them. The visitors observed a small but telling incident: a young woman walked over to a young man who was pointing his loaded bow at the strangers and with her hand she pushed his arrow down. The man then buried the weapon in the sand. Pleased with the way things were going, one of the officials, the director of tribal welfare, decided to celebrate by throwing numerous coconuts to the assembled crowd. These seem to have been well received. The only person who can claim even superficial knowledge of the Sentinelese, the Indian anthropologist T. N. Pandit, explained to a reporter in 1993, “They may not have chiefs but a decision had obviously been taken by the Sentinelese to be friendly towards us. We still don’t know how or why.”

  The nascent relationship didn’t last long. In 1996 trips to North Sentinel came to a stop, and since then the islanders have been left alone. The Indian policy of noncontact was bolstered the following year by a bad experience with another previously uncontacted and once hostile tribe, the Jarawa, on the island of Main Andaman. The “Jarawa crisis” started in late 1997 when, having been encouraged to come out of their forest seclusion, the Jarawa upset local mores by wandering naked into villages and taking whatever goods they wished. They also became prey to sexual exploitation and measles, a disease that today threatens the tribe with extinction. Contact with the Jarawa had created a headache that the authorities didn’t want again.

  Stephen Corry, the director of the indigenous rights charity Survival, estimated in 2007 that there are 107 “largely uncontacted tribes in the world.” But, he adds, “they remain separate because they choose to, and with good reason.” Although hidden tribes are usually associated with the Amazon jungles, nearly half of the world’s known uncontacted groups are in West Papua, on the island of New Guinea. Many of these people are in flight or in hiding from the army and settlers from Indonesia, which treats West Papua like a colonial fiefdom. The result of contact for these hidden peoples would, at the very best, be cultural decay, but another probable outcome would be death through disease and assault. Another likely fate is for these peoples to become the object of touristic curiosity. “First contact for cash” is one of the holiday options adventuresome tourists in West Papua can opt for. Clients are taken deep into the jungle and often allowed to freely mix with “uncontacted” and “absolutely primitive cultures.” A BBC interview with a “first contact” expedition leader in 2006 allowed him to make his pitch and to provide an ethical justification. Anyone and everyone, he says, should “have the right to see these kind of people.” Given the tragic history of such contact, it’s a grotesque kind of right. No one knows if the Sentinelese are aware of other indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands or what has happened to them. Today such groups make up no more than 1 percent of the population. The names of the many dead tribes form a litany of lost sounds: Aka-Bea, Akar-Bale, A-Pucikwar, Aka-Kol, Aka-Kede, Oko-Juwoi, Aka-Jeru, Aka-Kora, Aka-Cari, Aka-Bo.

  The fact that the Sentinelese don’t care for strangers was driven home again in 2006 when they killed two fishermen. Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari had anchored offshore but during the night their open-topped boat drifted onto the beach. In the early morning other fishermen shouted to them, to try to wake them, but got no response—reports later suggested that they were “probably drunk.” It was also rumored that later that day the two fishermen had been eaten, but when an Indian coast guard helicopter hovered over the beach, a more mundane reality was revealed. The draft from the rotor blades exposed the bodies of the men buried in shallow graves. As this discovery was made, the Sentinelese were shooting arrows up at the helicopter, so no attempt was made to recover the corpses. The Andaman Islands police chief later claimed that “once these tribals move to the island’s other end we will sneak in and bring back the bodies.” But to date they remain on North Sentinel.

  Should the murder of these two innocent men go unpunished? Why is it so obvious, as it was to the two men’s relatives, that prosecuting the tribe members wouldn’t be an act of justice? North Sentinel isn’t part of our modern world and it doesn’t ask anything of us except to leave it alone. An officious-sounding government document, the Master Plan 1991–2021 for Welfare of Primitive Tribes of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, published in the Andaman capital, Port Blair, in 1990, turns out to make a lot of sense. It concludes that “the Sentinelese do not require the benevolence of the modern civilization,” adding that “if at all they require anything, it is non-interference.” The Master Plan proposes a policy of stay clear. “What right does modern man have to interfere in the totally isolated tribal life of the Sentinelese? What right has he got to decide unilaterally to impose his ‘friendship’ on the Sentinelese who have been vehemently resisting it?”

  So no more gifts are allowed, no more toys and coconuts, only an occasional observation from what the Plan calls a “respectable distance, say 50 meters from the shore.” For the past fifteen years or so this approach has been enforced. No one is allowed near. One day almost everything the Sentinelese know and value will disappear, as it has for every other once uncontacted community. But for the time being North Sentinel Island is theirs and theirs alone.

  Between Border Posts (Guinea and Senegal)

  12° 40′ 26″ N, 13° 33′ 32″ W (border point)

  “No man’s land” is a term that, to the modern ear, can sound like stepping onto a battlefield. In fact, the phrase refers back to the idea of unclaimed land (recorded as “namesmaneslande” in the Domesday survey of England of 1086) and still carries an echo of perennial hopes for free land, for places beyond the control of others. Ordinary places become extraordinary in no man’s land. Such in-between places remind us how dependent we are on borders—that our sense of order and certainty draws deeply from the knowledge that we are in governed territory. No man’s lands may be vast stretches of unclaimed land or tiny scraps left over from the planning of cities, though the uncertainty of the no man’s land is especially keenly felt in places that the outside world refuses to recognize or that appear to be between borders. The notion that places might slip down between borders led me on a geographical quest. I went looking for the farthest possible distance between the border posts of two contiguous nations, to see how far they could be stretched apart.

  Most border posts face each other. A change of signage, a different flag, a line on the road, all combine to signal that no sooner have you stepped out of one country than yo
u have arrived in another. But what happens if you keep on opening up that space? A few years ago, with the help of hours spent blinking at the tiny fonts favored on travelers’ Internet chat forums, I found what I was looking for. Along a road between Senegal and Guinea in West Africa the distance between border posts is 27 kilometers. It is not the world’s only attenuated border area. The Sani Pass, which runs up to the mountainous kingdom of Lesotho from South Africa, is the most famous. It’s a rough road, although much visited by tourists in 4 x 4s seeking out the highest pub in Africa, which sits near the top of the pass. The drama of the trip is heightened by the thrill that comes from learning that this is no man’s land. The South Africa border control, complete with “Welcome to South Africa” signs, is 5.6 kilometers away from the Lesotho border office. Another specimen is to be found in the mountainous zone between border posts on the Torugart Pass that connects China and Kyrgyzstan. Central America also has a nice example in Paso Canoas, a town that can appear to be between Panama and Costa Rica. It is habitually described as no man’s land because, having left through one border post, you can go into the town without passing through immigration to enter the other country. Some visitors relish the impression that the town around them is beyond borders. Partly as a result, Paso Canoas has developed a darkly carnival atmosphere, as if it were some kind of escaped or twilight place.