![]() ![]() ![]() From a distance, the cemetery resembled a dazzling miniature city with a skyline formed from the layered angles of crosses and stupa spires. Though they themselves lived in drab boxes of brick and thatch, they enshrined their dead in tombs painted peach and celadon and gold, with eaves that curled heavenward like lotus petals. Here, the living looked after the departed. ![]() The local people’s council would occasionally petition for the graves to be exhumed and their contents relocated so that the valuable acreage could be converted into more farmland, but they were never successful. But the widest, evenest expanse of land-just west of Ia Kare, the small and unremarkable town to which it belonged-was occupied by the cemetery. Their slopes were horizontally striped with rows of coffee plants and staked peppercorn vines, and in the flat stretches between the hills farmers also tended patchy plantations of durian, lychee, cashew, and avocado trees. Twelve hours north of saigon by bus and fifteen by motorbike, low red hills covered the land like a maculopapular rash. She has lived in Da Lat and Saigon in Vietnam, and currently resides in the United States. Kupersmith is the author of the short story collection The Frangipani Hotel. The following is excerpted from Violet Kupersmith's debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body, about the fates of two women who are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |