This chapter follows a story of a cemetery as a place where life and death, play and loss, order and transgression, the material and the transcendent are deeply entangled. Cemeteries are more-than-human and multiply storied places, places that themselves tell stories of lives cut short, and of those who remain. They are at once adamantly material, a place of bodies, tombstones, earth and decay, and extra-ordinary, haunted by death, loss and otherworldliness. This chapter looks to the ways that cemeteries haunt, refusing the monologue of one-way storying. Cemeteries defy ideas of purity and stasis, and instead bring into focus a multi-layered, multi-directional co-storying that has the potential to make and unmake worlds differently, though always in limited, or incomplete ways. They bring into the present that which might otherwise be seen as gone, including many uncomfortable truths and unresolved violences of colonisation. In this chapter, I invite a haunting, a re-membering, through which many of the cemetery’s more-than-human beings, including its graves, memories and spirits, demand attention to their ongoing presence. They call me now and then. They insist that I listen more deeply, and live in ways that acknowledge the cycles past, those that have gone before, and the connection of earth, sea, sky, life and death.

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Haunting: Storying Lively Death

  • Sarah Wright

摘要

This chapter follows a story of a cemetery as a place where life and death, play and loss, order and transgression, the material and the transcendent are deeply entangled. Cemeteries are more-than-human and multiply storied places, places that themselves tell stories of lives cut short, and of those who remain. They are at once adamantly material, a place of bodies, tombstones, earth and decay, and extra-ordinary, haunted by death, loss and otherworldliness. This chapter looks to the ways that cemeteries haunt, refusing the monologue of one-way storying. Cemeteries defy ideas of purity and stasis, and instead bring into focus a multi-layered, multi-directional co-storying that has the potential to make and unmake worlds differently, though always in limited, or incomplete ways. They bring into the present that which might otherwise be seen as gone, including many uncomfortable truths and unresolved violences of colonisation. In this chapter, I invite a haunting, a re-membering, through which many of the cemetery’s more-than-human beings, including its graves, memories and spirits, demand attention to their ongoing presence. They call me now and then. They insist that I listen more deeply, and live in ways that acknowledge the cycles past, those that have gone before, and the connection of earth, sea, sky, life and death.