The Gede's Almanac DHR
The Gede's Almanac (DHR)
on Fèt Gede, when Haiti welcomes the dead
I.
Elsewhere, autumn is a slow undressing —
maples letting go of themselves in red,
a season measured in what falls.
Here, on the first of November,
we do not measure autumn in falling.
We measure it in return.
The gate between the living and the dead
is a crossroads swept clean with rum,
and the dead do not drift down like leaves —
they arrive like family, loud, thirsty,
wearing purple and black,
one lens missing from their sunglasses,
because Baron Samedi never cared
which eye saw the living world clearly.
II.
My grandmother used to say: the dead get hungry too.
So we feed them what we would eat ourselves —
pikliz sharp enough to wake a corpse,
griot dark as the soil they came up through,
and clairin poured straight onto the ground,
a small, deliberate offering
to those still owed a place at the table.
We do not whisper to our dead.
We shout. We laugh with them in the cemetery
the way you'd laugh with an uncle
who tells the same joke every year
and somehow it is funnier each time
because he is the one telling it,
and, for a moment, he is here.
III.
In this almanac, autumn has no orange,
no pumpkin, no cider, no children in flannel.
Autumn is violet on white crosses.
Autumn is a marching band at a graveside,
trombones arguing cheerfully with grief.
Autumn is Gede Nibo, powdering his face
the color of bone made beautiful
before it is buried.
I have read that in colder countries
they call this season a dying —
the trees performing their long undressing,
the light going thin and apologetic.
We do not disagree, exactly.
We only add what they left out:
that death can be a coat
you put back on once a year,
then wear to your own grave
where the living are waiting,
still unafraid enough to dance.
IV.
So if you ask what autumn looks like
where my family comes from —
it looks like a crossroads at dusk,
a bottle passed hand to hand,
a name spoken loud enough
for the one who owned it
to lean in from wherever the dead lean in from.
And when we call,
the answer is not silence.
It is ayibobo —
the old word crossing the distance
between the grave and the living mouth,
between the ones who left
and the ones still learning
how to stay.
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