Visiting Grave Sites, Imagining Worlds
The killing of five British soldiers on Tuesday at a checkpoint in Helmand Province by one of the Afghan police officers they were training was a reminder of how lonely death is in a foreign place and how intractable this part of the world has been for outsiders passing through. In Kabul there is a British cemetery, which in truth has only a few visible British headstones these days and mostly is filled with Europeans, but it stands as a statement of how poorly the West has done in this part of the world.
The cemetery was founded in the 1870s as the resting place for British soldiers who died fighting the Afghans in the second Afghan War. More than 2,500 British died, but far fewer than the more than 16,000 who perished in the Afghan wars of 1839-1942. It is a dilapidated place and in this fall season, mostly brown and gray; a few withered blooms on the rich rose bushes are still pink and red although the petals have shriveled. There is a small grape arbor and some birch trees. It is a peaceful place.
An old man, who does not know his age, but reckons he is about 80, looks after the cemetery as he has for 30 years. He said the Taliban came to look at it when they were in power, but did not disturb the graves. There are no fresh flowers on any headstones, a reminder that everyone here was far from home, from mourners, from loved ones. It’s funny how much a grave can make you imagine a whole world.
The gravestone that struck me the most was for John Charles Elcoate, 24, and Margaret Mills, 21, “Both of Sheffield University. Shot near Shahjui, August 1971.” Shahjui is near the Kabul-Kandahar road in Zabol Province, a dangerous place now; a dangerous place in 2002, too, when I was robbed near there at dusk at gunpoint by bandits who then shot out my tires; a dangerous place in 1880, when there was a British-Afghan battle there. The inscription could have been the first line of a novel: Who were they? Why were they traveling there? Why were they killed? Were they anthropology students researching local tribes? Hippies? Trekkers taking their chances on a cross-country trip? I looked them up on the Internet but found no reference except by other journalists who, like me, had been struck by their gravestone.
A Canadian television journalist who was in the graveyard the same afternoon I was there was struck by something closer to her home. On the walls surrounding the cemetery are lists of the dead since 2001. Plaques for the fallen British; for Americans; a few for Germans and for Canadians.
The plaque for the Canadian dead with the country’s emblem, the maple leaf, etched in the middle, lists only those who had died through the end of 2006 as if Canadians soldiers had not died after that. The 30 Canadian troops killed in 2007, the 32 killed in 2008 and the 27 killed so far this year have no marker of their passing. She turned and said, “I called our embassy, it’s terrible; they haven’t added any names since 2006.” She wasn’t a journalist at that moment; she was a Canadian on foreign soil. We are most patriotic when we are far from home; the possibility of our own mortality, most present.
I looked fruitlessly for the old graves of British soldiers from the Afghan wars of the 1870s and 1880s, but they were gone — the stones worn away or buried under the earth.
From The New York Times, 6th November 2009.
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It isn’t about visiting graveyards that hooked me on to this article. What struck a chord with me is the issue of being away from home, possibly away from your family and closed friends.
When you visit a graveyard and find a tombstone of someone in relation to you by citizenship, that would probably leave you walking away with thoughts of curiosity that centres around the topic of “How did that fellow citizen pass on in this country- a foreign land miles from home? And why?” And then you’ll start ruminating about whether it was a good choice to be abroad, what’s going on in your motherland, with flashbacks of the good times that give the warm feeling of comfort in the place of cold loneliness.
On my 2nd day in Chiangmai, as much as I enjoyed all the delicacies, cheap finds and places of interests, I couldn’t help but miss my home a little (which lead me to declare it on my Facebook status). And I could vividly remember back in 2007, as I strolled down the busy, neon lighted streets of Tokyo, I felt quite “uncomfortable” – in the sense that I couldn’t relate much to what the city offered. During that time I was still illiterate in the Japanese language and culture, maybe that’s one reason why I got home sick in the homogeneous Japanese society.
I’ve heard numerous stories of local students abroad finding delight in gatherings with fellow local students where it allowed them to be themselves – be Singaporean, with all the “lahs & lors” in their conversations. The basis of commonality- evoking a sense of patriotism away from home (verbal defensiveness), strengthens that sense of belonging and even love for your home country. It’s an irony that when you are home, you often dream of greener pastures, but as you seek for the desired pastures, you find yourself dreaming of home.
It is often said that we are all global citizens in this whole world of undefined boundaries. But what’s the point of this global citizenship when deep in our hearts, home is where the heart is?
With all that said, I hope I won’t miss home overly for my fortnight’s getaway.
Especially when I should be home, during the season of giving.
