Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead for they still live in the memories of the living who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many ... can be recalled by name. But they are not the living dead. There is a difference.

-- James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me

For My Dad

When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled across a desert of living sand.

It would happen in a matter of days or weeks. They would gather together in the clearing around the monument [in a park], however many thousands of them there were, and they would stand, shoulder to shoulder. They would listen to each other’s voices, and they would breathe each other’s breath. And they would wait for that power that would pull them like a chain into whatever came next, into that distant world where broken souls are wrenched out of their histories.