Perhaps, death has had its mark on Argentine author Mariana Enríquez's life since birth.
Enríquez was born in Buenos Aires in 1973 during a period when Argentina was under military dictatorship. From 1966 to 1973, her home country saw the overthrow of the government, and the author's early adolescent years were marked by Argentina's violent Dirty War, where the military dictatorship systemically abducted and murdered nearly 30,000 of its own over opposing political views.
"In Argentina, the violence was secret. We didn't see it. There were no bodies in the streets. There were no (visible) mass killings. The military took the bodies, kidnapped them and made them disappear," Enríquez says over Zoom from Australia, where she has recently relocated to with her husband.
"You have a whole generation of people that don't have a resting place, a burial place."
For the author, it's the stories of the dead that "speak of life," she says. Paired with that curiosity and her fascination with society's difficult relationship with accepting death, the purpose of a cemetery as our final resting place and the collective political trauma cemeteries can also hold, Enríquez set out to encapsulate that in her part travelogue, part memoir, "Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave" (Hogarth, pp. 336, out now).
"What really happened that made me want to write them down in the form of this book was finding my personal connection to the cemetery as a space," she says, recalling a friend whose mother had disappeared after being killed by the military dictatorship in Argentina.
Enríquez shares that her friend's mother's remains were identified after being found in a mass grave, and "she was given her mother's bones." The author adds, "She decided to bury her in a massive ceremony. It was a very happy and emotional event; it was a closure, but not the final thing."
It made her realize, she says, that "for someone like me who grew up in a dictatorship that had the peculiarity of making bodies disappear," the idea of a tomb and of a cemetery was overshadowed by the political trauma.
"The idea of no burial, no grave, no funeral rite, that's what's traumatic for me."
In "Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave," translated by Megan McDowell, the gothic horror author with a fondness for the macabre travels through North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting Paris' catacombs, Prague's Old Jewish Cemetery, New Orleans' aboveground mausoleums in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 (home to the famous Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau), Buenos Aires' opulent Recoleta and cemeteries in Genoa, Italy, where she fell in love with these "final" resting places.
Known for her haunting fiction and political allegory – as seen in her ambitious gothic lit novel, 2019's "Our Share of the Night" – and short story collections ("A Sunny Place for Shady People," "Things We Lost in the Fire" and "The Dangers of Smoking in Bed," a finalist for the International Booker Prize), Enríquez doesn’t shy away from confronting her country's oppressive past.
"It's not just an aesthetic whim that amuses me, it's something that speaks to the relationship we have with death and burial in a society like mine, and others, I suppose, that also have the problem of mass disappearances of people," she says. (In recent years, medical officials have declared Gaza had become a mass grave for Palestinians and those trying to aid in the war, and places like Mexico have seen an estimated 6,000 clandestine graves as a result of the country's ongoing drug war.)
Enríquez's essays aren't necessarily about grief or to indulge the grieving.
"The amount of literature about grief and grieving and the conversation about grief and grieving, to me, is absolutely disproportionate," she says. "We're talking about something über traumatic and dramatic when it's always happening, it's life. And yet, there's such a denial and a very difficult relationship with the fact that we end."
The journalist-turned-fiction-writer's essays – interwoven with personal stories, interviews, myths and hauntology – are exhumations of each cemetery's history, its colonial past, its saints and ghosts, points of political pain or cultural erasure, and of course, its dead.
"Cemeteries and death are a very dynamic thing," she says. "There's a lot of history, life and vitality. They are spaces that have an appearance of … because they're a final resting place, the idea is that they're quiet spaces, but they're not. Lots of things go on there. From pagan saints to mass graves of political prisoners, there's a vast amount of history you can unravel from a cemetery about different cultures."
Still, in most of the cemeteries Enríquez visited, she says she found herself alone.
The author likens it to an oftentimes rushed grieving process intended to lessen the blow. Instead of a place where our deceased are six feet under ground and their graves not tended to, or visited, as years go by, Enríquez challenges readers to think of the cemetery as a guide, a place to discover, enjoy and to "witness your loved one."
After all, "death has no finality," she says.
"It's the end of a biological process, but it's often the beginning of a story."