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All Saints Day

There are always candles. On the graves, next to statues of dead worthies, on sections of pavement where someone once died, in packets in the supermarkets next to the fabric softeners and other non-perishable housework goods. They are a variation on the same basic design: the candle is encased in a glass container and covered with a perforated tin lid. Often the glass is embossed with a sacred heart motif; coloured and bigger more expensive candles have ornate metal ends and odd shapes. Today there is an endless sea of candles covering the stalls it is the first of November, All Saints Day. Róża and her mother select a variety of candles for their relatives. Róża and I clumsily hold a large number of small, simple, different coloured candles, and one large heart shaped one that she is buying for her

great-grandmother’s grave, as the stall owner decides how much to charge us. Róża is responsible for dressing her great-grandmother’s grave today and Róża’s mother laments that she has not picked the monotone colour scheme favoured by most families when dressing their relatives’

graves. Róża is insistent and thinks it is right that the graves should be colourful. As we clear the leaves off her great-grandmother’s grave and pour water over the stone to wash off stray lumps of clay I ask Róża what the candles mean. We are speaking in English as she has previously lived in England, but she tells me she does not understand what I am asking, and I attempt to clarify: ‘Why do you light them?’

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‘To remember the dead’

‘But why remember them this way, with candles? Is there a special meaning of them, a ritual meaning of them, a symbolic one?’

‘I think there is something to do with the soul going to heaven… and the light has some meaning relating to the soul… and the path it travels. I don’t really know. Candles are used to remember the dead. We know that, we do it, I don’t know if they need a meaning.’

I continued to ask about the candles whenever I could. I was told that candles were associated with Easter and therefore with resurrection. I was told that candles represent something about the soul after death. Many people stated simply that they did not know. To paraphrase Bourdieu, what made graves worth the candle (1998)?⁶ Time and time again I was told that what mattered was what you did with the candles, that you placed it on the grave to mark that you remembered the dead person, and that they looked beautiful. The use of candles, it seemed, was part of the habitus of death. This denotes that laying out candles, as a memorial practice, was itself the meaning of candles, as any previous meaning was no longer accessible (Bourdieu 1977). The candles were part of a set of practices associated with the dead, embedded in the bodies of those who set out the candles and in society that encompassed them and their dead.

6 ‘Illusio is the fact of being caught up in and by the game, of believing the game is “worth the candle,” or, more simply, that playing is worth the effort.’ (Bourdieu 1998, 76)

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I talked in the introduction about materiality and embodiment. The body is delicately entangled with the material objects that make up the environment within which it is active and actively shaping (Merleau-Ponty 1962). Here I want to add another layer to this discussion, by looking at how the dead body, the non-feeling body, comes to play a role in its

environment. I have always felt that Bourdieu’s ‘body’ is a very sterile body, a neat physical entity that is moulded and moulds without its physical processes intruding on any social process (1977). Perhaps then the dead body, the decaying, messy body, and the material objects associated and used by them can present us with another way of seeing the world of habitus.

Grave Dressing

We have finished cleaning the grave of Róża’s Great-grandmother. Carefully Róża places a small candle on the each of the four points of the rectangular stone slab and stands back.

‘Where shall I put the big candle?’ We decide on the top centre, in front of some old plastic flowers that have discoloured slightly. Róża takes the wreath of plastic and fabric red roses she bought earlier and places it at the bottom, in the centre. We are in the Orthodox graveyard in the large town near Kościół. Róża and her mother are Catholic, but Róża’s grandmother was a convert from Orthodoxy. Róża tells me all this as we dress the grave; of all her relatives she is most animated talking about this woman, an immigrant, perhaps a Russian or Slovenian, the wife of a general who travelled widely for her time. Róża uses the word ‘independent’

constantly in the history of her great-grandmother, and acknowledges that she looks for parallels in their lives, which she romanticises as ‘lives of adventure’. When she was away from Poland Róża tells me she felt very distant from her family, this woman included. As she

interacts with the final resting place of a woman she never knew Róża builds a relationship between them regardless of the boundaries of time and death and even religious difference (the manner of dressing the graves is identical for Catholics, Greek Catholics, and Orthodox).

Hallam and Hockey suggest that objects ‘are able to condense different times through their aesthetic, sensual or material properties’ (2001, 51), and the plastic flowers and candles do just that. Every year Róża comes here with the same objects, and lovingly and carefully dresses the grave of her great-grandmother, disrupting the temporal space between them.

The bundling of the various meanings and materialities of the candles and the flowers is apparent in all of this (Manning & Meneley 2008). These are objects simultaneously at work in many different fields and roles. Their use by Róża brings certain aspects of their existence as social, material, and meaningful actors into focus. It also endows them with a secondary agency, and allows them to act upon the environment and the perception of the environment

as much as it acts upon them. To say all of this might seem redundant, like running in

intellectual circles of shaping and being shaped. However, the focus on material objects does more than tie us up in tautologies. It allows us access into the felt-world, the sensory world, the embodied exercise of being in and of the world. Here then we can say that not only are material objects embedded in the shape and shaping of the environment and its other actors, they also productively encourage us to think about the actual processes of this shape and shaping. Kościół is more complicated than the imagined clear division of its denominations, and this is often made visible through material objects and practices. It is reflected in the following account of a winter funeral, which draws out and elaborates on several of the points made above.

A Winter Funeral

It is early December, cold but not freezing; everyone is worried that winter will be very late.

The weather is bright and windy, the temperature a nasty minus five. So I wrap up warmly before going to the cemetery for the funeral. The man who died was elderly and had been in a hospice for some time, suffering from cancer. He had converted to Catholicism to marry, and until five years ago he had been active in both the Catholic and Orthodox communities. My landlady is planning to go to the service and the grave, so I decide to go with her. The service is in the basilica and is attended by Orthodox and Catholic friends. They pray together using the same words, but different movements. The Catholics stand, sit, and kneel at all the right moments, the Orthodox bless themselves, constantly, to the right first, with three fingers. As the mass finishes the priest blesses the coffin with holy water and the guests move in

procession to the Rotunda. At the Rotunda, further prayers are said over the body and hymns are sung. We all stand tightly together: the room is barely big enough for twenty people and the massive door is swung wide open so that it is as cold within as without. The coffin is carried to the main graveyard, the drops of Holy Water frozen on its lid. My landlady remarks how light the coffin is, how fast they are able to move it; unsaid but understood is what this says of the dead body, shrunken and starved by disease. The ground was broken and dug yesterday, but the pile of earth by the plot has frozen during the night. This morning during the service at the Rotunda I could see Basyl and another man out breaking the mound with picks. There are no real flowers although everyone at the funeral has a bunch of plastic or fabric

flowers and the trees are leafless. Once the body is put in the earth and the priest has said his few words we move off to the House of Culture, where there is food and tears. The next day I return to the grave and see the flowers heaped upon it. Gaudy stems of birds of paradise, unseasonal tiger lilies, bunches of red and white roses in simultaneous full bloom, and a number of suspiciously orange daisy-like creations.

Winter finally comes in late December, bringing its yearly flurries of snow and temperatures of minus thirty. I pass the man’s grave and see the flowers poking through the layers of snow. When spring comes around, also late, the flowers are displayed again faded and a little tattered, but still there.

This practice of using fake flowers in the place of real ones raises some interesting questions. They are impervious to decay, they lack the delicate texture and gentle fragrance of the real thing, they require no care in order to prosper, and they are frozen in their moment of greatest beauty. All the things that have been used to explain the symbolic presence of flowers at gravesites seem to be missing (Goody 1993). What does remain is the role flowers play in the performance and process of mourning. This use of flowers is particularly relevant in Poland where the language of flowers is widely known and has a political aspect, involving the flower

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crosses that marked sites of government violence that were a large part of the resistance to the state during Marital Law (Klekot 2007). Rowbottom discusses the use and meanings of bringing flowers to the dead in relation to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the sea of flowers that encompassed Kensington Gardens. Carrying flowers marks you out as a mourner (1999). Flowers are associated with friendship and love, and thus the act of giving them to a dead body ‘invokes (sic) a widely understood conviction that flowers express social and emotional ties’ (Rowbottom 1999, 165). Rowbottom further notes that the flowers left in memorial were not ‘death’ flowers, but flowers Diana might have been handed on any of her official trips. Goody has noted the importance of the short life of flowers and their use on graves; the fact that they need to be constantly refreshed serves to bring people back to the graves frequently (1993, 288). However, he also notes that in Irish and Italian Catholicism bunches of flowers are not brought to the graves; rather, flowers are planted and images and rosaries used to decorate the plot (Goody 1993, 288–289). Yet, even when the goods and flowers are not perishable the families still must return to ensure that the graves remain neat (ibid).

The flowers on the graves in Kościół do not simply tie the living and dead together in relationships of significance, they actively deny the capacity of death to destroy these ties. The flowers on the graves are the same ones that people use to decorate their homes. There is no need for the belongings of the dead to be only for the dead. The bundles of meanings, roles, and work that the objects carry with them impact on how we understand the dead, and affect our relation to them. Despite my contention that the corpse is the most physical of bodies, the ceremonies and practices of mourning allow it to remain social, embedded in the shape and shaping of Kościół. The man who died had many roles, and his religious background was just one aspect of his life; his funeral was a reminder of this.

If looking after graves keeps the dead active in the processes of managing identity in everyday life, what does a failure to care for a grave add to our understanding of these processes? In the next section I will consider abandoned Jewish graveyards, but first I would like to talk about other types of forgetting less traumatic and more gradual. Many of the graves on the Orthodox side of the main graveyard have been left to the elements. Families have moved away, markers have rotted, the bodies under the ground are no longer social, their souls have departed, and their physical feeling and thinking bodies decayed.

When I walked in this cemetery with Henryk, the fallen headstones and rotten wooden markers of the Orthodox graves stood in stark contrast to the corresponding Catholic graves.

When I returned to walk the graveyard on my own the landscape seemed a little different. I had already walked this space on two separate occasions with Basyl and Henryk. This time I was moving through the space alone, and at my own pace. As I hunched over a ‘forgotten’

Orthodox grave I saw more clearly that the phrase was a simplification. The cross that had once marked it had been up-rooted and left on top of the plot; in fact there was no guarantee that this cross matched this plot at all. Not that it mattered; the weather had rotted the untreated wood and no name was visible. Yet despite these initial signs of decomposition there was a bunch of red plastic Chrysanthemums, a little faded, on the top of the plot. When I looked again I realised I had been oblivious to the floral tributes on each of these graves.

People still visited these graves with flowers, they still cleared away the detritus and they still cared for them. Despite not knowing who was buried here, there was still an attempt by members of Kościół to maintain social relations with the dead.

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This becomes even clearer when looking at these burial plots in comparison to those known as the German graves, also contained in the main cemetery. There is a void, in the bottom left hand corner of the Orthodox section of the graveyard, a sudden and jarring absence of graves not even the tell-tale bump in the earth to suggest there was once graves there. This section is referred to as the ‘German Cemetery’.

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During World War II this was where the German Fascist army chose to bury their dead, when they were in control of the town. Everywhere in this region the period of German Fascist presence manifests itself through absence. In Kościół there are the empty Jewish graveyards, with missing headstones, and here the unmarked burial places of German soldiers. When the Germans were defeated and abandoned Kościół to the Russians the locals destroyed their gravestones, and left their bodies in the ground to remain nameless and to be forgotten. Many different respondents told me about this action. I wondered if the Germans could really be considered forgotten when the tale of their graves’ desecration was still so well known. The forgetting of the Germans is an on-going practice; despite the cramped conditions of the graveyard their section has never been touched. When Kościół’s Catholics ran out of space recently they consecrated the new cemetery across the road.

Image 3.13: The ‘German Cemetery’ Kościół

This performance of active forgetting offers a mirror image of the other practices discussed in this section: the efforts to remember and keep relationships alive. Together these practices highlight the ways in which people act to build social relations with the dead, or, by contrast, to deny any sort of connection. Examining the material objects and embodied performances at the centre of these relationships clarifies how these relationships are maintained and

transmitted across generations and across religious groups. In the first part of this chapter, walking through the cemeteries revealed their contested histories, and the role divisions and fissures play in identity strategies. In this section I looked at practices and performances that

suggest there is a sense of belonging that transcends these politically motivated partitions. I also explored how material objects and ceremonies offer a way of engaging in social

relationships that exist across vast temporal distances. The relationships between the living and the dead are used to produce different spaces, or to aid community attempts at place-making, thus creating sense of place that encompasses memory through a community of the dead.