The Grave

This essay came into being in walking, remembering, thinking, and talking about my relationship to graves. In winter 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic began, a compulsive walker, I found myself venturing further away from home in my walks. Walking in small-town America means you inevitably encounter cemeteries where the local dead rest. Indeed, cemeteries are an intrinsic part of rural and urban landscapes. As I walked, watched the landscape, and avoided cemeteries, I remembered other places and a specific grave in India. Some might say an essay on a grave was bound to emerge because at the peak of Covid-19 death raged all around us. But this writing is not about death, dying, or the dead. It is about life, about how the past enters the present in curious, sometimes material ways or how, as the late poet Michael Donaghy beautifully intones, “the past falls open anywhere.”1

Archaeology · Geography · African history and culture analysis