Day of the Dead
SA / 2019
SA / 2019
In Mexico, November 1st is a day of celebration in which the people remember friends and family members who have died and, perhaps, recall also their Aztec past, prior to European colonisation, allowing them the opportunity to decorate their homes with marigolds and loosen the aura of necessity surrounding categories of the present in which only life is sanctified.
Watching over events is the goddess Mictēcacihuātl, queen of the underworld, who renders the flesh and washes the bones of the dead; she who threatens to one day swallow all the stars in the heavens above.
Meanwhile, in grey-skied Essex, one sad-looking crow sits on a wire-mesh fence overlooking the train tracks and unlovely Romford landscape where, in a sense, every day is given over to death and there seems to hover a doom so dark one feels as if one might lose one's mind.
"Then I say to myself: Am I also dead? Is that the truth?"*
"Then I say to myself: Am I also dead? Is that the truth?"*
* D. H. Lawrence, 'We die together', Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 544.
