This week in the Chronic we look at death in the Diaspora and the rituals of homecoming.

In Homeless in the Afterlife, Florence Madenga recalls the way back home. Death in the diaspora remains a difficult part of the immigrant experience. Myriad and alienating bureaucratic procedures often delay the passing of souls in a tortuous passing of time.

“On the morning of 3 December 2012, Winlaw Muzirwa walked into the Tinicum police station in Essington, Pennsylvania in bloodstained clothes and asked to be handcuffed for killing his Zimbabwean wife. Daisy Jambawo had been shot while her 15-year-old stepdaughter, 14-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son were at school.

For Christine Sabvute, the couple’s Zimbabwean pastor, 3 December was the beginning of a long stay in a hotel with three frightened children who were waiting to go back to their home on Third Street. Sabvute couldn’t go back to her own home in Frederick, Maryland as planned; every night for the first week she had to wash her only set of clothes. Her husband took care of their four children at home and could only bring her clean clothes over the weekend.

Three weeks after the murder, once the police had finished combing the house on Third Street for evidence, Sabvute took the children back there for the sake of closure.

“All the police did was rip up the carpet and cut the walls,” she recalled. “They left the house just like that.”

• Read the rest here

Sudirman Adi Makmur spends an inordinate amount of time alone or in the company of strangers no longer living. It’s a waiting game, with myriad rules and regulations, in which the deceased, otherwise tagged as baggage, is not often the winner. The dead need more than the living.

“You would think it would be a simple matter, that the deceased would have fewer demands than the living. This is never the case. The dead have their own demands: a death certificate and a letter of permission from the Ministry of Health to transport the body; a letter confirming the authorisation of whomever is collecting the body as acting on behalf of the closest living relative; a letter from the Foreign Affairs Ministry providing permission for the body to enter the country of destination.

There are also rules regulating the body. The dead must be: (a) properly embalmed and placed in the casket; (b) cremated; or (c) accompanied by a permit issued by the funeral director. The casket itself comes with its own set of laws: airtight, impervious to external influence. Some countries require metal-to-metal solder – everything hermetically sealed and ready for transport – to prevent re-entry of micro-organisms or other forms of contamination. In reality, all materials are permeable, hence specifications define acceptable levels of hermeticity and these too differ from country to country. Borders are always too porous or too open, too easy to cross or too resistant, closed off or impossible to escape. What is sealed in one place may be wide open in another context.

Sometimes all these arrangements amount to nothing. The deceased carry their own baggage: a complex of morals, values and relationships; various relations between different individuals and bodies, between disorderly bodies and disciplinary regimes, between communities, governments and industries. Global lives are fragmented, souls are split open.”

• Read I Travel with the Dead

There are many ways back home. In South African novelist Niq Mhlongo‘s recently published book, Way Back Home, it’s a journey through public and private space, mourning and memory, tradition and modernity, set in a post Apartheid world haunted by the ghosts of liberation, exile and freedom.

In his article by the same name, published in the April 2013 edition of the Chronic, it’s an investigation into the complexities of death, burial and life after death in the place he calls home. Part memoir, part call to action, Mhlongo details the challenges of home and homeland, love, loss and belonging.

• Read Way Back Home

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