The Day of the Dead

Inspired by the James Bond movie Sceptre, Mexico City tipped a sombrero to Hollywood and holds their own Day of the Dead parade. The Mexican parade, while spectacular, is all Disney, a tourist temptation. To experience the real thing, you need to go to a cemetery.

Nowhere is the fusion of Christian tradition and local culture more symbiotic than in Haiti where, according to legend, Haitians are 60% Catholic, 39% Protestant and 100% Vodou. Haitians traditionally celebrate the Day of the Dead much like anywhere else, by visiting their family tombs, offering gifts to the departed and remembering those that they have lost. But Vodou adds spice to the soup.

On the 1st November, a public holiday in Haiti, the people of downtown Port-au-Prince descend on the single square kilometer of a housing estate built for the dead, not far from the football stadium.

Stallholders and hawkers clog the road between the stadium and the cemetery, taking advantage of the crowds. A tinny voice blares from loudspeakers on top of a pickup truck, vainly competing for attention amongst a cacophony of konpa music that blasts from every stall. Closer to the cemetery a bass beat from speakers near the entrance shakes the ground and drives air from the lungs of the revelers. The crowd roars, encouraging a half-dressed woman onstage, who is gyrating hypnotically to the music, thrusting herself at the crowds and rolling her possessed eyes until only the whites stare blankly out.

People jostle across the bridge that crosses the river of garbage into the cemetery itself. White-clad mourners move quietly to their family tombs, the only island of calm amidst a sea of drunken revelers. Rum flows; people shout, spill, stagger, and canon about on random trajectories. A line of crones sits on a low wall eating from tin bowls, their faces smeared with the lumpy beige gruel that drips to the ground at their feet. Further along, a knot of gawkers surrounds a small ceremony targeted more at the watchers than the dead. Two human skulls lie haphazardly atop a pile of bones littered with burning candles and offerings of coffee, food and rum.

The tombs that fill the cemetery are as grand as the relatives of the departed could afford; offering them, in death, a house that they might only have dreamed of in life. The coffins are not buried, but are placed in crypts built into the tombs, secured by locked steel doors. The locks are no match for the grave robbers, who raid the coffins for whatever lies within: trinkets for the thieves or perhaps bones for the Vodou priests.

Broken locks, doors smashed from their hinges suggest that the dead have little rest. Many of the desecrated crypts are empty; others are strewn with rubble and garbage. Inside one of them, a coffin bears scars from a crowbar, a corner bent down for easier access. Nearby another coffin lies open, lined with yellowing lace. There is no trace of the former resident. An overgrown patch is littered with rib bones and vertebrae. A tibia (or is it a fibula?) protrudes from the detritus. A few meters away lie a bundle of pinstripe rags; bones spill from the bundle, a suit than can no longer contain its owner. One crypt still bears token remains of the previous occupant; a small scapula hints at a younger victim. And all around the revelers keep reveling, staggering about, swilling rum and pulling on joints: dancing, swirling, laughing, shouting and singing.

Back at the bridge, a group of drinkers dribbles offerings of rum onto the sticky ground and chugs the rest. The dark rum flows like blood into the gutters. A man walks by, gnawing on a chicken bone, turning something ordinary into the macabre. The beat from the band outside the cemetery swells to a heart-stopping crescendo. The woman is more naked now than clothed. Her black dress hangs from her shoulders and her breasts, unfettered, sway to the music. Her pants are around her knees as she rubs fresh chilies onto her genitals proving to any doubters that the spirits really do possess her and that she feels no pain.

It’s nice to have a parade. But if you want a raw and real Day of the Dead, Haiti’s the place to be.