From Myna Trustram

In the Orivesi graveyard

Myna Trustram (m.trustram@mmu.ac.uk)

 

I walked through the Orivesi graveyard yesterday evening on my way to swim in the lake. The lives of 178 men who died in the Second World War are recorded by plaques in ten neat rows, each plaque gives a name, date of birth, date of death. Beside each plaque is a white fuschia; a repetition of plaque, plant, plaque, plant, plaque, plant, along the rows. The other graves are equally neat, many have the same bright red begonia that will die if left out in the Finnish winter. This tidyness is unlike anything in an English graveyard with their dead cellophaned flowers, toppled headstones, children’s windmills.

 

The place resonated with some of the ideas I had taken earlier in the day from the work of Alia Zapparova in Study Circle Seven and Elizabeth Povinelli’s lecture. The seemingly ‘non-living’ are very present in this graveyard; they are ordered in a kind of open-air waiting-room where time has stopped. We need to keep the human dead close by and in place. In a graveyard humans are both living and non-living beings; in a graveyard the dead are described as only sleeping. And yet we conceive of the non-living as quite distinct from the living.

 

Through burial these humans have been ‘fully actualised’: named, dated, recorded.  We know they lived, especially the soldiers for no-one can become more actualised than a fighter.  They have now spent their potency. We can bear death if the grieved-for life is fully lived and recorded. The un-grievable (Butler 2009) are those others for whom there is no need of a record.

 

At the lake my living body broke the surface of the water