Fèt Gede falls on 1 and 2 November, coinciding with All Saints and All Souls, and it is the largest Vodou observance of the year. Cemeteries fill — the Grand Cimetière in Port-au-Prince above all — and the first cross, Bawon's, is dressed. People wear black and purple. The Gede arrive in numbers, mounting many people at once, and behave accordingly: they drink kleren steeped with scotch bonnet peppers, rub it in their eyes and on their genitals to demonstrate that the body they are using is not their own, dance the banda with explicit sexual movement, wear phallic props, and direct obscene commentary at everyone present, including the bereaved, the clergy and any visiting foreigners. It is simultaneously a national day of the dead, a carnival, and a religious festival, and its comedy in a country with Haiti's mortality rate is not accidental.