Shake Dem Skeleton Bones

Love and hurt is never dead and gone

When I lived in Madagascar, people would open the tombs of their dead relatives every few years, pull out the cloth-wrapped corpses of their loved ones and dance with them held aloft. They would party all night with their dead, catching the spirits up on family gossip, asking them for advice, and then wrapping their remains in new shrouds before placing them back in the tomb.

The season for death-dancing, or Famadihana, is winter, which is May to November in the Southern Hemisphere. My house had tombs on two sides of the yard, and so I got to see and hear the festivities up close. The raucous parties featured the drinking and blaring music that you’d expect from any serious throw-down.

One night, lying in bed wide awake from the noise, I thought about the relationship the people outside my window had with their ancestors. They seemed to view the line between the living and the dead as permeable. The past and present were states that intermixed. In Madagascar, it seemed, neither people nor history is ever fully dead and gone.

I became obsessed with the concept that night, and I continue to write about death-dancing in one form or another even now. I feel that our histories with those we love are never really behind us. They are part of us, whether in the form of people who are physically gone, events that are long past, or memories that mutate over time.

While the concept of digging up the dead may seem strange, I do it all the time, metaphorically. Sometimes it’s just an imagined conversation with someone who died. Or a search for the origins of old wounds. How did addiction, narcissism, wounded hearts get passed down? Why was all this trouble in the marrow of their bones, so powerful it hopped from soul to soul?

A song gets stuck in my head.

The hip bone’s connected to the back bone
The back bone’s connected to the neck bone,
The neck bone’s connected to the head bone,
Now shake dem skeleton bones!

Sometimes I want to shake them all, all those ancestors. And sometimes I want to embrace them and reminisce. I keep taking them out, to argue and to ask. And tell them how much I wish they were here for one more conversation where I wouldn’t be the only one doing the talking.

And then it’s time to wrap them up and carry them with me, because that dance is never done.