This was an experience of cultural incongruity – delightful cultural incongruity.
On November 30th, my partner and I visited the National Museum of Singapore. There, we were surprised to discover an installation called Magic Migrations, which had been on display throughout November. We’d arrived just in time because this was the final day it could be viewed. Magic Migrations was set up in the museum with the help of the local Mexican Embassy and the Mexican Association of Singapore and was about Mexico’s famous Day of the Dead – Dia de Muertos – holiday that takes every year on November 1st and 2nd. As a nearby information panel explained, Day of the Dead “is a time to remember family, friends and ancestors who are no longer with us, thereby celebrating the connection between life and death.”
Filling a whole room, the installation featured all the items you’d expect with Day of the Dead. There were altars, candles and flowers (especially marigolds); offerings of bread (pan de muerto), fruit and, for the souls of departed children, toys; fancy, flowery garlands and head-dresses; and, of course, lots of cartoonish skeletons and ornately-decorated skulls. One skull even reminded me a bit of Albert Steptoe.
What made Magic Migrations so interesting was the emphasis it gave to another aspect of the holiday – the arrival of migrating monarch butterflies in central Mexico in October and November, which concludes a 4800-kilometre journey from Canada and the North-Eastern USA. Quoting the information panel again, Mexico’s “Purépecha and… Mazahua communities consider the butterflies as ‘the souls of the departed’ and interpret their arrival as the signal of the visit of deceased relatives and friends on the 1st and 2nd of November.” For that reason, the installation was phantasmagorically shrouded in a drizzle of dangling paper flowers and monarch butterflies.
I’ve been fascinated by Day of the Dead for a long time – ever since the early 1990s when, at a loose end one day in London, I wandered into Mayfair’s Museum of Mankind (which sadly closed in 1997) and discovered an extensive exhibition about the holiday. I like how it combines the serious and emotional business of mourning and remembering the souls of the departed with a jocularity and irreverence towards death itself. This suggests that death isn’t something to be feared and dreaded, not spoken of and treated as a taboo subject, but something to be accepted as an intrinsic component of life itself. After all, it’s what puts life in context.
Incidentally, my partner’s family live in San Antonio in Texas, about 150 miles north of the Mexican border, and several years ago we went to visit them in mid-October. Not only were the local shops then full of merchandising for the upcoming Halloween festivities on October 31st, but they contained an equal amount of stuff for the upcoming Dia de Meurtos festivities during the two days after that. I bought a lot of the latter items as souvenirs of my time in Texas and they now occupy a prominent corner of my desk. (Disclaimer: my partner would like it to be known that she and her family are Californians, and they only live in Texas because of her father’s work circumstances. So don’t assume she’s Texan.)
Also, the plot of one of my all-time favourite novels, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), unfurls against the backdrop of the Day of the Dead celebrations in the Mexican city of Quauhnahuac. And as a James Bond fan, it’s never long before I point out that by far the best part of the 2015 Bond movie Spectre was the long, tense and stylish chase / action sequence at the beginning, set during a Dia de Muertos parade in Mexico City. For part of this sequence, Bond, played by Daniel Craig, was attired in a natty-looking outfit of top hat, skull mask and skeleton-patterned white-on-black suit. In fact, Craig’s outfit impressed me so much that, a few years later, when my workplace at the time held its end-of-year party, picked ‘carnival’ as its theme, and asked attendees to come in fancy dress appropriate for the carnival theme, I turned up at the party wearing my own, home-made attempt to replicate it.
Here’s a photo from the party and a still from Spectre. You’ll never be able to tell which one is Daniel Craig and which one is me.
© Eon Productions
For some reason, I’d expected the National Museum of Singapore to be a bit stuffy and formal, but I actually found its exhibitions personable and engaging… But they’ll be the topic of future blog-posts.