Read Online Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett - Free Book Online Page B

east to find whole communities living in graveyards. There are numerous reports of cemetery living from India, Pakistan, Chechnya, and more recently in Libya, where nearly two hundred families have moved into the Al-Ghuraba cemetery in Tripoli. Like many cemetery dwellers they are very poor, with nowhere else to go. But the best-known and certainly the biggest living cemetery, Cairo’s City of the Dead, proves that these places can be far more than repositories of the desperate. Given time, they can establish themselves as thriving and diverse economies. In the five cemeteries that make up the City of the Dead, about fifty thousand live within tombs and another half million in houses put up between tombs. If this were only a field of slab headstones, no such community would have arisen. In the West substantial tombs are a rarity, being the preserve of wealthy dynasties; the rest of us get little more than a boot scraper. But Egyptian cemeteries were never designed only for the dead. Traditionally in Egypt it was expected that mourners—a role given to female relatives—would live with the deceased for forty days. So the family tomb was constructed as a complex, with additional rooms and a courtyard. Egypt also has an ancient tradition of seeing cemeteries as places where the living and dead come together. In fact, the City of the Dead is better seen as just another urban district. It has its own shops, schools, and a clinic with a maternity wing, as well as electricity and running water. Since the City of the Dead began to be permanently occupied in the 1950s, several generations have been born there, often sharing the same tomb with their parents and grandparents. The Italian anthropologist Anna Tozzi di Marco, who has studied and lived in the City, refutes the idea that it is a place of desperation. Instead, she offers a portrait of a place with its own class structure, a city within a city, in which people can make a success of urban living, rent-free.
    The City of the Dead is a fully formed inner-city suburb. By comparison, North Cemetery in Manila is smaller and more specialized. Like the City of the Dead, it too started to be occupied from the 1950s and also offers living spaces in tombs, although they are not nearly as palatial as some of those in Cairo. Having grown for sixty years, the Manila cemetery also has its own neighborhoods, some of which have long been just as self-sufficient as, and certainly safer than, the slums outside. It also has amenities, such as several mini-markets, a restaurant, and sports facilities. Electricity is illegally cabled in from beyond the cemetery. However, while the City of the Dead seems to fit into and grow out of Egyptian culture, North Cemetery is a far more pioneering, transgressive place. Catholic Manila has no equivalent of Cairo’s Islamic and pre-Islamic traditions of extended live-in mourning, and as a result the residents here see themselves as overstayers and as out of place. They go to great lengths to make themselves useful to the everyday life of the cemetery, caretaking family tombs and undertaking tasks such as carrying coffins and sealing up crypts. They get out of the way and live somewhere else on November 1 and 2, the Days of the Dead, when many Filipinos come and visit their ancestors. Behaving like a closed community of guardians, the cemetery residents have worked out a respectful if rather nervous relationship with both the living and the dead.
    One resident, Bobby Jimenez, explained to a roving journalist, Kit Gillet, “We do occasionally go outside the walls—to walk the streets—but mostly we stay inside.” He went on to describe the precarious nature of life in North Cemetery: “Sometimes we have police raids, so it is important to try to get approval of the family owners of the tombs. If you have a piece of paper or a deed from the family saying you have a right to stay there it is OK.” Even someone like Clare Ventura, who was born in the