Forever haunted (if all goes well)

This piece was inspired by the book Ghostly Matters by Avery Gordon. I actually wrote it as a response paper for my Culture, Difference and Inequality course. It's not complete; however, I haven't posted much lately, and I figured I need to keep people glancing my direction from time to time.

The book is about the hauntings of social science, of the way sociology-as-sciences misses almost the whole of humanity and that we feel ghost stories with the potential to remind us of their presence, even though our epistemologies and methodologies as they stand will never bring about their resurrection. The ghost, in the vein A Christmas Carol, is past, present, and future. Hauntings are the unfinished spirits of history and understanding, those figures erased by the powerful, but embedded and stubborn and consequential. They are not Ghosts; they are ghosts, and they are real. The piece is perhaps more blatant with the metaphor than I would like, but I hope you will hunt for ghosts in my future work.

A Ghost Story: or, when the dead are alive and the living are dead.

New Orleans is full of spirit. And full of spirits. I imagined this before traveling to the city for the first time. I knew that Voodoo marked its culture in a pretend sort of way, vanquished by the French and the Catholics and then manufactured by the tourist industry. I had never been to New Orleans, but I knew all these things about the city, commercialized specters that hummed outside our van as we touched.

It was my first year of graduate school, and I traveled to a sociology conference with the monsters of an awkward present: The baldest and ugliest siren who constantly theorized the dullest song, the spiky-haired brute, that lanky trickster with the personality of a slippery fish, the bitter and burdened hag. In a world of operationalization, they were graduate students, but in my dislocation, I felt only a terror.

Home hollowed a space in the van just at the edge of my skin. Home was a graveyard, a place I remembered the lost, a place that one visits from time to time, a place I somehow never manage to leave. When I think about my death, I find myself asking how much time I laid in my grave, waiting to live but encased by the ethereal walls of friendly bodies and solid headstones. The world I now inhabited wiped itself clean of ghosts, or at least it stowed them away with the Ouija, brought about at appropriate times but never taken seriously.

Living in a graveyard is life itself, the grounds watered in our blood and fertilized by our bodies; the soil is our soil. I loved the dead because the dead don’t have to comprehend the world around them; they comprehend without intention. Once you’re dead, you’re dead for the sake of death. The dead live in the graveyard.

I belonged dead in the graveyard.

Academic life is in many ways like taking the dead outside of the grave. Jarring settled specters into the land of cold, pale skinned monsters. I now dwelled in a world of plain tile flooring and cinderblock walls, of clean rented vans and sterile thoughts. In social science, we refuse to recognize the translucence or even transparency of the dead until they come to their senses and civilize and shape up into the opaque form we need them to be. In a sense, we bring the dead to life; we parade their decomposing bodies in celebration of our necromantic skills. We disrupt the graveyard, mangle the bodies of the dead and explain the spirit away.

The city of New Orleans was full of spirits. I could feel them dangling from gothic eves and filling the walls of French architecture. The stores expanded with the bodies of the living and the dead. The “haunted tours” that solicited tourists from their graveyards were redundant and ironic and patronizing to the dead, like reality television to the living. The cobblestone streets of the French Quarter were filled with people, though the living might be away.

“New Orleans,” I said “is the type of city where you could get chased by a dog.” The pause was pregnant with my own insanity. The trickster snickered. “No no, let me finish,” I pleaded. “It’s the type of city where you could get chased by a dog into an alley. You’d duck into some backalley shop, where you’d meet a strange woman who would give you something magical that did…something.”

For a moment, I was alone, except I was in the graveyard, speaking to the grave of my best friend and feeling, for a moment, a little less alive.

“What kind of sociologist are you?” asked the trickster. And the monsters all laughed. I breathed in the clear definition of life.

******

When the trickster and the hag posed my characterization of the graveyard to its dead, I was vindicated. I did not need to be alive to know other graveyards. I could be dead amongst the living.

******

Of one thing I am sure: it’s not that the ghosts don’t exist.

The theme of the conference was Diaspora, and we attended presentations on the racialized demography of the urban cityscape, of migratory patterns of refugees, of social dislocation and the importance of place. None of this was the beating heart of the city I had seen, the spirits sold in French Quarter stores and employed for minimum wage. I knew less the New Orleans graveyard than the haunted house at Halloween.

Yet while the exorcists spoke of the real graveyard, they could not bring themselves to call it by name. They described the headstones without their inscription; they flowered the grounds with polyester pedals. So I took a ride to the Ninth Ward to see this graveyard for myself.

Graverobbers had stolen the ghouls.

And the exorcist had said, “There’s progress. It’s not all wasteland. There’s bad rubble and there’s good rubble. Spirits are high.”

But I saw no spirits. I saw only myself and the monsters in the van and those back at the hotel giving lectures, making the living out of the dead, giving them bodies. I thought back to my own graveyard, to my resting place and considered how I excavated my own grave, leaving holes in the ground where my familiar ghosts could rise from their plots and lament my passing to the world of the living. I yearned for that graveyard, and I cried that the ghosts of this place had been driven away, their headstones cracked in a thousand haunted shards, not a body or spirit to be found but us monsters, lurking and taking in their fear, structuring their despair. I wondered in my naiveté if the spirits were together in a new resting place, if their new graves read R.I.P.

I thought back again to my own graveyard, looked down at my own green skin, claws and fangs and knew their spirits roamed the earth still, parched and alone, scattered by a living storm, both powerful and complacent, and knew they would wander until they wandered home.

I think this book might have changed my life.

-Mike