Ghostly Apparitions Seeking Ghostly Desires
Arabic translation available here
The door ahead has been left ajar. A quick peek through isn’t enough to tell what I’m really looking at. Too dark, maybe a table, definitely some chairs. My flashlight doesn’t have much give, but it’s the best chance I have. Slapping the back end of the stick repositions the batteries to let loose a faint beam of light. It’s definitely a dining table, or what used to be one. The head of the table looks ransacked, cloth pushed back to make space for mangled wires and a laptop with a second monitor attached. It’s on, the humming of its processor makes itself known. Whoever sat in front of it made short work of their seat, its back support frayed and bent. The desk is littered with trash: chocolate wrappers, plastic cups with liquid residue at its bottom, dead skin, and … are those… markings? Cat scratch? Too uniform, no animal fur, plenty of wild hair.
Ahead the hallway is short but along the wall on my right are cabinets that encircle the room and turn the corner, and straight ahead of me, where a door should be. There’s a small opening right by it. Each one is filled with books I’ve never heard of in a language I don’t understand, protected by glass. Some look holy, I can assure you of that. A massive photograph of a married couple catches my flash as my eyes soon follow between two shelves. The groom is smiling ear to ear. The bride is staring at me. Sullen? The bookshelf at the very end of the hallway draws me nearer. More happy grooms and distraught wives. There’s a door to my right and just as I walk out I peer into the space behind the book shelf. There’s a bed and no one’s sleeping in it. I grip my flash tighter as I enter the next room. Everything here is so much lower to the ground. The visibility is markedly improved as cyan light from outside pours through the windows, but I have to leave. I make my way past a set of couches. Right above them are more pictures. No, paintings. Birds in cages with no opening. This room is massive, it’s too much. My vision is frantic but I think I can make up a door at the end of it. This is the only chance I’ve got.
What does a ghost desire? Or rather, what does the presence of a ghost signify to those it haunts? The easiest way to talk about ghosts and other apparitions is to start by recounting one’s own experience with them, and then coming to terms, or not, with the fact that you live in a haunted house. My grandmother’s home is haunted by a particular presence that I have come to understand as my Khallo Mohamed from here on. I’m not so sure of what had caused his passing, and I don’t care much to ask. What I do know is that somehow he found his way back to his sister’s home, and has taken residence there. Truth be told, I’m not so sure if anyone else is aware of his presence, yet he is certainly aware of ours. In the eight years of living at my teta’s I had observed many instances where he would try to make himself known, all in the hours after everyone had fallen asleep: a silhouette that appears in the dark, a sensation of being watched, almost to the point where his beady eyes would flash in the space between door frames. It feels like I am being hunted just as much as I am being haunted. And while hunting is an expression of desire I am neither food nor game nor plaything, just an unfortunate roommate. Moreover, he is no malevolent spirit. So what does he want?
In the realms of the virtual and the actual ghosts are the entities who linger between both, not physically here yet somehow acting upon it. Mark Fisher writes on hauntology as “the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but that which acts without (physically) existing.” While hauntology privileges the spectre as a historical metaphor, the presence of a ghost in the flesh merits its own investigation, and what better place to hunt for ghosts than haunted homes. Rather, it’s time to sunset haunted homes, any home will do just fine. I do not want to make universalizing claims on what invites a ghost back to a particular home, unfinished business aside, yet it seems to me that our grandparent’s homes make great paranormal dwellings. I’ve had many conversations over the years with friends and family alike in regards to them, and there seems to be a general agreement that something is off in these homes. Cold, ruinous, godless. Spend any time after midnight and those living in the walls come out to play. I think the allure here is in part to the violence that is baked into the floorboards and concrete, the very land they’re built on, and exacerbated by the people who have and do reside in them. It is a slow lurching violence that doesn’t start with the nuclear family of neoliberal hegemony, patriarchal control of women’s autonomy, or the transformation of children into property. Peel back the layers of abstraction and you end up with one of our first institutions: private property. Extraction of resources and the accruing of capital transferred through patrilineal inheritance set the terms and conditions for the dead to find a place to stay (restless, in fact). Perhaps this is why ghosts linger in abandoned homes often, aristocratic ones. And as information continues to be privatized in the digital realm, so too do they find themselves there, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Khallo Mohamad’s ghost is not an anomalous figure. His appearance does not seem to me as arbitrary, but rather brought on by the violence of my maternal family. The presence of the ghost signifies symptomatic behavior to a certain traumatic event, yet to be in the presence of the ghost, a paranormal encounter, is to have the rupture addressed.