We Buried a Banana Trunk and Left Her Body to the Dogs

In the Bible, when some is cursed, they are cursed to the forth generation. The unlucky ones are cursed to the thousandth generation. In my village, we hold somewhat of a similar believe. We believe that the ancestral land can absorb curses and pass them quietly to every generation born of that land. We also believe that when someone dies, a grave must be dug and it cannot be left empty otherwise the spirits become restless and begin looking for someone to fill what was made for them. And you cannot burry an empty casket.

In cases where the body is unavailable, families cut a banana trunk exactly three days before burial, wrap it in white cloth, to bury in the person’s place. It must be kept somewhere warm for those three days so it begins to rot slightly. It is believed that a rotting banana trunk holds the same spiritual weight as a human corpse making it an acceptable trade-off.

There is also another tradition, harder to speak about. Sometimes a family refuses to bring their dead home at all. They believe certain people carry curses so deep that burying them on family land is to invite those curses in permanently. These people are taken to the forest in the cover of darkness, buried shallow, and left to become wandering spirits.

Vee was my childhood best friend, and she was always a free spirit. In many ways, she was considered too much — too loud, too free with herself, too luxurious, too comfortable taking space. She loved everything the world had to offer and lapped it up without any reservations; and the world loved offering itself to her. When she left for college, her family could no longer hold her and after her twelve-year-old sister came home one holiday with a lower back tattoo she had gotten on a trip to visit Vee, her parents cut her off completely.

Vee died from alcohol poisoning in her second year in college. I was the one who got the call from one of her ‘boyfriends’ who had found her stone cold on the bathroom floor lying on her own pile of vomit. I sat with her body for a few minutes while we waited for the paramedics. Then I called her mother. The moment I broke the news, she hung up. I called back three times before she stayed on the line, and when she finally did, she said she would not bury that curse in her land.

I convinced her to hold a funeral, for the siblings, for the rest of the family. She agreed, but she would not bring the body home. She hired the school grounds for the service, went to her farm, cut a banana trunk herself and had it placed in the casket wrapped in white cloth and sealed shut. She conducted the whole funeral with the composure of a woman doing what she believed was right.

Only I and seven others knew that what we lowered into the grave was a banana trunk. Vee’s body spent the funeral in the boot of her father’s car inside a black polythene bag.

At 1:00 am, her father came to fetch me alongside three of her male cousins equipped with spades and bright torches and we drove to Utune forest. One of the cousins threw Vee’s body over his shoulder and we walked until the trees thinned into something older and quieter. I chose the spot — next to a pine tree that had no business being there among the shrubs, isolated and slightly out of place. It reminded me of Vee.

The ground was dry and unforgiving and we could only dig about two feet before the first grey light of the daybreak began threatening the horizon. None of us wanted the shame of what we were doing to follow us into the day. We placed her in the shallow grave with the black bag still around her. I wished I had brought a white cloth to cover her with. I picked a flower from a nearby shrub and laid it over the grave.

I knew that within two days, the dogs would find her.

Photo by Kostiantyn Usatenko on Unsplash