Blog comment is optional on this. Focus only on the later sections, "Apocalypse and the Religion of American Zombies" and "Zombies, Messiahs, and Race." For class discussion: relate these ideas to I Am Legend and/or The Walking Dead.
Suggested viewing ahead of next week's class: I Am Legend and The Walking Dead (any season/episode, though we will be viewing excerpts from I Am Legend in the first session and Season One, "TS-19" in the second session next week.)
Slaves, Cannibals, and
Infected Hyper-Whites:
The Race and Religion
of Zombies
Published in Anthropological Quarterly (2012) (available through Stevenson Library)
Elizabeth McAlister
Wesleyan University
Abstract
The first decade of the new millennium saw renewed interest in popular
culture featuring zombies. This essay shows that a comparative analysis
of nightmares can be a productive method for analyzing salient themes
in the imaginative products and practices of cultures in close contact. It
is argued that zombies, as the first modern monster, are embedded in a
set of deeply symbolic structures that are a matter of religious thought.
The author draws from her ethnographic work in Haiti to argue that the
zonbi is at once part of the mystical arts that developed there since the
colonial period, and comprises a form of mythmaking that represents, responds
to, and mystifies the fear of slavery, collusion with it, and rebellion
against it. In turn, some elements of the Haitian zonbi figure can be found
in patterns that haunt recent American zombie films. Zombies in these
films are read as figures in a parable about whiteness and death-dealing
consumption. This essay suggests that the messianic mood surrounding
the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama was consistent with a pattern
in zombie films since the 1960s where many zombie-killing heroes
are figured as black American males. Zombies are used in both ethnographic
and film contexts to think through the conditions of embodiment,
the boundaries between life and death, repression and freedom, and the
racialized ways in which humans consume other humans.
After shaking hands with Barack Obama at the conclusion of the last US
presidential debate, John McCain started to head the wrong way off the
stage before realizing his mistake and reversing course. As he fell in step
behind his opponent, he acknowledged his error with an extravagant
full-body grimace. His grotesque pose was frozen by photographers and
instantly uploaded onto the Internet with the caption “Zombie McCain.”
Other zombie-themed captions for the image proliferated, including one
on PoliticalHumor.com that read: “Obama: cool enough to just ignore
zombies” (see Figure 1).1
The fact that McCain’s clumsiness figured him as a zombie in contradistinction
to Barack Obama’s unflappable “cool” reflects the widespread
fascination with zombies in US media and culture—consider the recent
success of the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) or the sudden
currency of the term zombie bank. It also indexes markers in US popular
culture of racial whiteness and blackness. As Robert Farris Thompson
(1973:41) points out in his classic essay, “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” the
concept of “cool” in many African-derived cultures is a metaphor for the
aesthetic and moral value of remaining composed under pressure, and is
ultimately a marker of “transcendental balance.”2 The juxtaposition of this
“cool” black presidential candidate—lithe and poised—with a stumbling
and staggering white “zombie” candidate is emblematic, I will suggest, of
a wider form of mythmaking about race currently at work in US culture.3
This essay shows that a “comparative analysis of nightmares”
(Wilson 1951:313) can be a productive method for analyzing salient
themes in the imaginative products and practices of cultures in close
contact. I pair ethnographic interpretation of work on the zonbi in
Haitian religious thought and art with a religious studies reading of key
films about zombies made in the US.4 I run a finger along several conceptual
strands from Haitian religious arts that remain to haunt zombie
representations in US popular culture. Like the Haitian zonbi, the US
film zombie must be understood as being embedded in a set of deeply
symbolic structures that are a matter of religious thought. In both contexts,
zombie narratives and rituals interrogate the boundary between
life and death, elucidate the complex relations between freedom and
slavery, and highlight the overlap between capitalism and cannibalism.
What I want to stress especially is that in each context, race is the
pivot on which these dynamics articulate themselves.
Zombies: A Brief History
What intrigues me as a scholar of Afro-Caribbean religion is that the
mythmaking comprising and surrounding the zombie in America originates
from sensationalized descriptions of a set of Afro-Caribbean mystical
arts. The word zonbi appears in writing as far back as colonial Saint-
Domingue, glossed by travel writer Moreau de Saint-Méry (1797) as the
slaves’ belief in a returned soul, a revenant. 20th century reports describe
not a returned soul but a returned body—a person bodily raised from
the grave and turned into a slave worker. As a spirit or a slave, complex
spiritual formulae separate body and soul, and compel one or the other
to work. These entities—especially the invisible zonbi astral (astral zombies)—
continue to be fairly common inhabitants of the unseen mystical
world of Haitian Vodouists.
A very different kind of zombie populates US film and television: a ghoul
who lumbers around trying to eat people. George Romero’s “Living Dead”
films exemplify this concept of the zombie in the popular imagination. The
idea refers, of course, to dead people who are still alive, and driven to
kill and cannibalize the living. These monsters made an appearance in
Michael Jackson’s smash hit music video “Thriller,” and now star in the
more recent I am Legend, 28 Days Later, and others. In this first decade
of the new millennium, the walking dead and their cannibalistic appetites
seem to be everywhere. We hear a lot lately about “zombie banks”—
banks whose debts are greater than their assets—which drain bailout
money from the government but don’t facilitate more lending in turn.5
Zombies show up in pop songs and are stock characters in comic books
and graphic novels. They appear in video games such as the Resident
Evil series and in the Resident Evil movie spin-offs. Since 2000, about
100 movies and scores of video games have featured undead, cannibal
zombies. Zombie-like creatures called inferi make an appearance in the
sixth book of the Harry Potter series. Zombies have even earned a special
place in the academy: the philosopher David Chalmers (1996), in order to
elaborate various ethical questions, has posited the “philosophical zombie,”
or p-zombie, a human body without consciousness that behaves like
a human with consciousness.6
Mel Brooks’s son, Max Brooks, wrote the bestselling Zombie Survival
Guide (2003), a tongue-in-cheek manual for surviving a widespread zombie
attack, and he packs lecture halls when he speaks about the impending
zombie apocalypse. Especially intriguing are the “zombie walks” in many
US cities, where ordinary people dress up like zombies from all walks of
life—construction workers, doctors, nuns—and lumber through the parks
and streets. Zombie flash mobs move through downtown spaces, having
read rules for play on the internet. In 2007, a zombie flash mob invaded
a San Francisco Apple Store to stage an anticonsumerist performance
piece where zombies pretended to eat the computers on display. Pride
and Prejudice and Zombies (2009)—the Jane Austen novel “mashed up”
with a zombie plotline—soared to the top of numerous bestseller lists.
The 2010 television series The Walking Dead, on the cable channel AMC
is set in a zombie post-apocalypse and won a Golden Globe Award for
best drama. Zombies are all around us. Americans have brought to life—
or death, if you prefer—a proliferation of monsters who are doing a fair
amount of cultural work.
What if we highlight this fact about zombies: the zombie is the one stock
horror character that does not have a genealogy in European tradition or
much presence in Gothic fiction, as do the ghost, vampire, werewolf, and
Frankenstein (Ellis 2000). Rather, the zombie originates in Afro-Haitian religious
thought and practice, and is traceable (in part) to colonial-era Kongo
religion from Central Africa. Deleuze and Guattari (1983:335) assert that
“the only modern myth is the myth of zombies” and this is quite true in any
number of ways. The zombie came into being (as it were) in the plantation
society of colonial Saint Domingue, and I will argue here that its figure, its
story, its mythology are at once part of the mystical arts that have developed
since that time, and comprise a form of mythmaking that effects the
mystification of slavery and ongoing political repression.
That is, the zombie represents, responds to, and mystifies fear of slavery, collusion with it,
and rebellion against it. The zombie was born (so to speak) in what Michael
Taussig (1987) terms the colonial “space of death” and is inextricable from
the “culture of terror” of the plantation. This modern monster is a complex
and polyvalent Other that points us to art and thought produced out of the
nightmarish aspects of modernity. In particular, this monster refers and
responds to the nexus of capitalism, race, and religion.
There are many kinds of zombies, and many levels, if you will, of the
representation and meaning of zombies. Working from the gothic, sensationalized
travel writers’ accounts of black West Indian “superstition,”
early Hollywood produced several “zombie” films, such as White Zombie
(1932) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943). As a constellation of misunderstood
and distorted elements in early Hollywood films, these Caribbean
zombie representations might be described as a profound example of
what Toni Morrison calls “American Africanism,” that is, “the denotative
and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as
well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings
that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. As a trope, little
restraint has been attached to its uses” (1993:6-7). The films invariably
cast black sorcerers (or quack sorcerers) plotting for conquest of and control
over white women, and blackness is unmistakably linked with primitive
menace, superstition, and the diabolical.
Contemporary American zombie films have diverged quite a bit from
their Caribbean beginnings. Most zombies now are figured as racially
white, and most of the films that portray them are set in the US. As an
American horror film genre character, the zombie has come to make certain
statements about whiteness in America. Yet this inversion or inside-outness
of earlier racial associations also presents a meta-commentary on
the same subjects as do Haitian zonbi: the intersections of capitalism and
consumption, slavery and cannibalism, bodily excess and race. Whether
in Haitian religious practices, art, and cultural mythology, or in US films,
the zombie serves to index the excessive extremes of capitalism, the overlap
of capitalism and cannibalism, and the interplay between capitalism
and race in the history of the Americas (see also Sheller 2003).
Capturing, Enslaving, Feeding, and Dressing Zonbis in Haiti
I accidentally bought two zonbis in Haiti. My zonbis are not the walking
dead but rather the common, everyday spirits of the recently dead, zonbi
astral. The spirits were captured from a cemetery in a mystical ritual and
then contained in an empty rum bottle. I did not do the capturing and containing;
this feat was achieved by a man named St. Jean, who made his
living (in the face of chronically high unemployment) as a bòkò, or sorcerer,
in a neighborhood near the cemetery in downtown Port-au-Prince.7 I had
gone to interview the bòkò, and when I complimented a colorfully decorated
bottle that sat on his altar, he asked if I would like to have one like it.
In agreeing, I got much more than a decorated bottle. My encounter with
the sorcerer turned into something far more complex than the comission
of what I took to be an art object. When I returned to pick up the bottle,
St. Jean performed a complex ritual that infused human life into the bottle
and transformed the container into a living grave, housing a human-spirit
hybrid entity.
The essence of the zonbis’ spirit life emanates from shaved bits of bone
from two human skulls. The zonbis in the bottle can not properly be understood
as souls, but rather as fragments of human soul, or spirit. In Afro-
Haitian religious thought, part of the spirit goes immediately to God after
death, while another part lingers near the grave for a time. It is this portion
of the spirit that can be captured and made to work; let’s say, a form of
“raw spirit life.” The bòkò performed a spontaneous ritual, which began
when he popped a cassette tape into a player. Our soundscape was a
secret society ceremony to which he said he belonged.
He put these skull shavings into the bottle, along with the ashes from
a burned American dollar and a variety of herbs, perfumes, alcohols, and
powders. Robert Farris Thompson spelled out the logic of this sort of
“charm” in his work on minkisi (containers of spirit) from the Kongo culture,
which are surely one of the cultural sources of the zonbi:
...the nkisi is believed to live with an inner life of its own. The basis of
that life was a captured soul...The owner of the charm could direct
the spirit in the object to accomplish mystically certain things for
him, either to enhance his luck or to sharpen his business sense.
This miracle was achieved through two basic classes of medicine
within the charm, spirit-embedding medicine (earths, often from a
grave site, for cemetery earth is considered at one with the spirit of
the dead) and spirit-admonishing objects (seeds, claws, miniature
knives, stones, crystals, and so forth). (Thompson et al. 1981:37)8
In my bottle, the spirit-embedding medicine includes cemetery earth,
but also more to the point, the skull shavings. At some previous time,
St. Jean had most likely prepared the skulls in a sort of spirit-extracting
ritual, treating them with baths of dew, rain, and sunshine. The skulls had
been given food (which they absorb mystically, as spirits in the invisible
world generally do), and had been baptized with new, ritual names. Their
names would have been cryptic phrases such as “je m’engage” (“I’m trying”)
or “al chache” (“Go look”). Each skull would have been charged with
a specific strength, job, or problem to treat. Presumably, these skulls were
activated with the ability to enhance luck, wealth, and health.
“Spirit-admonishing medicines” instruct the zonbis in the work that
they are being commanded to do on my behalf.
Ingeniously, this technology of good luck zonbi-making involves dressing the zonbis in the
very instructions and work directions the maker intends them to perform.
The mirrors around the center of the bottle, are its “eyes for seeing”
and will identify any force coming at me with malevolent intent (see
Figure 2). The scissors lashed open under the bottleneck are like arms
crossed in self-defense. The dollar bill in the bottle instructs the zonbi
spirits to attract wealth. The herbs are for the zonbis to heal me of sickness
and disease, while the perfumes are to make me attractive and
desirable. St. Jean created for them a magnetic force field by placing
two industrial magnets as a kind of collar on the neck of the bottle. This
object is now swirling with polarity, intention, and life (McAlister 1995). It
is what Stephan Palmié has called “a life form constituted through ritual
action” (Palmié 2006:861).
This zonbi bottle refuses the
Western ontological distinction
between people and things, and
between life and death, as it is a
hybrid of human and spirit, living
and dead, individual and generic.
In Afro-Creole thought, spirit can
inhabit both natural and humanmade
things, and what is more,
this force can be manipulated and
used, often for healing and protection,
sometimes for aggression or
attack. When I later interviewed
the bòkò, I learned about the deep
moral ambiguity of the zonbi astral.
St. Jean told me that the zonbis
were trapped in the bottle until the
time when, as with every person,
their spirit would go on to God. The
bòkò instructed me to ask the zonbis
for anything I wanted, because,
captured and ritually transformed, they were working for him, and now,
as if subcontracted, for me.
I realized that I was effectively in the position of a spiritual slave-owner.
Besides being dismayed and upset, I found it puzzling that people
would practice the enslavement of this “raw spirit life” considering that
their ancestors suffered extreme brutality during colonial slavery in Haiti,
where the life expectancy of an enslaved person on a plantation was only
seven years. Planters fed and inaugurated the modern system of Atlantic
capitalism through dehumanization, starvation, and torture; these were
the routine ways of extracting production value to fund the obscenely
lucrative sugar trade.
But, then again, the living take charge of their history when they mimetically
perform master-slave relationships with spirits of the dead.
The production of spiritual (and bodily) zonbis shows us how groups
remember history and enact its consequences in embodied ritual arts.
The slave trade and colonial slavery—whose modus operandus was
to cast living humans as commodities—are quite literally encoded and
reenacted in this living object. Just as slavery depended on capturing,
containing, and forcing the labor of thousands of people, so does this
form of mystical work reenact the same process in local terms.
It is, as Taussig famously put it, history as sorcery (Taussig 1987:366).
Under slavery, Afro-Caribbeans were rendered nonhuman by being
legally transposed into commodities. Now, the enslaved dead hold a
respected place within the religion. In what might seem counterintuitive,
Randy Matory (2007:400) recently argued that in Afro-Latin religions,
“Instead of being the opposite of the desired personal or social state,
the image and mimesis of slavery become highly flexible instruments
of legally free people’s aspirations for themselves and for their loved
ones.” He notes that in these religions, the slave is often considered the
most efficacious spiritual actor. The relationship between spirit worker
and the dead is inherently unequal and exploitative, yet it is nuanced in
fascinating ways that give the spirits of the dead some agency. Usually
the dealings between people and the zonbis are just that—economic
affairs, caught up in a system revolving around money, work, capitivity,
predation, and coersion.
I did feed the zonbis a ritual meal of unsalted rice and beans, feeling
somewhat sheepish the entire while. But I was determined to operate in
as ethical a manner as I could toward this bottle, which its maker understood
to be a living thing. Who was I not to take care of my obligations to
the zonbis? I was haunted by a comment made by the scholar Luminisa
Bunseki Fu-Kiau at a conference. “When you put our ‘charms’ and ‘fetishes’
in your museums,” he said, “you are incarcerating our ancestors.”
I did not want to get in trouble in any way, either to the living or the dead.
I had been privy to a case of sorcery involving a malevolent zonbi. I
watched while Papa Mondy, an expert healer in spirit work, diagnosed
a teenager who had taken sick and was acting strange. After extensive
consultation and divination, Papa Mondy informed the boy’s mother that
someone with bad intentions had “voye zonbi” (“sent a zonbi”) against
the teen, and had “sold” the boy mystically to a secret society. The teen
had been captured mystically in the unseen world, and his life force was
being “eaten.” In a family drama of sickness and healing, once again
the transactions of slavery were at play. This diagnosis reenacted the
capture, sale, and exploitation of the life of a person, here in the unseen
world of everyday Haitian life.
The cure—and the teen was cured, at least in the semi-public neighborhood
narrative—involved a complex process of ritual freeing, negotiating,
and buying back: an unraveling and undoing of the spiritual enslavement.
The director of this healing ceremony was Papa Gede Loray, himself a
spirit of a former colonial slave—considered the best “worker” among the
spirits—who came to possess the priest Mondy for most of the proceedings.
The teen was ritually buried, lying down (up to his neck) beneath
a light layer of earth in a symbolic grave, and the zonbi was tricked and
forced to remain in the grave when the boy was lifted out. The zonbi was
quickly covered up with earth, then bound and tied to the spot with a rock
and a rope. These Haitian spirit workers once again performed some of
the actions famously used against the African enslaved—tricking, capturing,
binding, and shackling—but this time the ritual actors were the present-
day descendents of slaves, enacting the commodification and traffic
in humans through the ritual vocabulary most salient to their history, in
what Connerton called “the capacity to reproduce a certain performance”
(1989:22 as cited in Shaw 2002:6).
The boy was freed of the zonbi, but he still needed to be “bought
back” from the secret society. Since it was unclear who (as it often is)
sent this misfortune, the crucial redeeming deal had to be made with
Bawon Samdi, the spirit-in-chief of the recently dead and the ultimate
authority over the cemetery. We were going to buy the boy back from the
cemetery, before the cemetery swallowed him up. We went, quite late at
night by now, to an intersection of two roads where diplomatic spiritual
protocol necessitated that the family make a payment to Met Kalfou, the
spirit of the crossroads. “Si kalfou pa bay, simitye pa pran,” goes this important
principle: “If the crossroads won’t give (way), the cemetery won’t
take (accept).” When we got to the cemetery, Papa Mondy set up shop
next to the tomb of Bawon. An elaborate series of ritual exchanges ensued.
Mondy gently ripped the boy’s clothes from his body until he wore
only his underthings, and then laid the boy on top of the tomb. To the
accompaniment of prayers and prayer-songs, Mondy swept the boy with
a broom to remove any remaining negativity. He entreated Bawon to buy
back this boy from those who wanted to steal him, and stood pleading
with two arms outstretched while the rest of the small group sang behind
him. First he spoke to the afflicted boy, but really to us, to the dead, and
to the evil-doer. “Now you are known by the cemetery. Now you are like
one of the dead. How can you kill a dead man, mon cher? They can do
nothing to you.” Next he addressed Bawon: “You are the one with power
over death. You are the only one who can kill him,” said Mondy. “I sell this
boy to you, and you alone are buying him. It is you who will determine the
day he will die.” Papa Mondy knelt down and threw down a small package
wrapped in brown paper, held together with pins. He deftly poured
rum over the whole thing and lit a match. A hungry blue flame engulfed
the clothes, the brown paper, and the precious four hundred and twelve
dollars that were inside.
With this monetary sacrifice, Bawon was paid, and the boy was bought.
Mondy stood the boy atop the tomb, and dressed him in clean white
clothes. He told the boy he would no longer be under the influence of
other humans or spirits who wished to harm him—only Bawon “owned”
him. That night in the cemetery, the teen boy was literally, and with Haitian
currency, sold to a moral and powerful guardian, in order to escape being
owned by a malevolent and exploitative one.
In this case, selling a person was an act of redemption, a far cry from—
and yet also an echo of—the Atlantic slave trade. One cannot help but
notice the various profound ways that layers of historical events and conditions
are remembered and mimetically enacted through ritual, from the
slave trade to the current patronage system of politically powerful “big
men” and their more vulnerable followers. This religious logic also bears
a parallel to the Christian notion that Jesus pays the debt of sin for the
believer, whose soul is bought and paid for through the blood of the crucifixion.
In both cases, a supernatural entity can buy the spirit (or soul) of
a human, and become that person’s mediator with the unseen world and
the afterlife.
Some Vodouists understand Jesus as the first zonbi. This myth holds
that Jesus’ tomb was guarded by two Haitian soldiers, who unscrupulously
stole the password God gave when He resurrected Jesus. The soldiers
stole the password, sold it, and the stolen secret is now part of the secrets
of sorcerers. If we examine the story carefully, we see that the buyer of
people (Jesus) is victimized by people rebelling against him. The ordinary
folk—the soldiers—are stealing from God, who after all set the terms of
all negotiations. In this story, the sorcerer acknowledges his opposition to
(Roman Catholic) Christianity, which, in its affiliation with landowning elites,
has not always served the interests of everyday Haitians. Yet insofar as being
made a zonbi is a terrifying form of victimization, this story also sympathizes
with Jesus.
In this beautiful ironwork sculpture by Gabriel Bien-Aimé
(see Figure 3), cut and hammered
from a recycled oil drum, Jesus with
his crown of thorns is being taken
down from the cross with a chain
around his neck. At the other end
is the sorcerer controlling him (see
also Brown 1995).
Like the colonial slave, or the
oppressed worker, zonbi also possess
the potential for out-and-out
rebellion. There are plenty of stories
of people who ask these “bought
spirits” for wealth, land, or political
promotion, and who cannot provide
the food demanded in return. Then
the zonbi are said to rise up to attack
their owners, consuming their
life force as payment. Eating them
through magic, the zonbi becomes
more and more powerful as its master wastes away through sickness. St.
Jean himself was said to have been “eaten” in this manner, consumed by
his own enslaved zonbi, turned cannibal in response to St. Jean’s voracious
greed. Perhaps, that process is what is described in this mural, painted on
the interior wall of a Vodou temple (see Figure 4). Here, a sorcerer (indicated
as such by his red shirt and by the whip in his hand, a tool used to “heat
up” ritual and activate spiritual energy) is attacked by hundreds of skeletal
figures while facing a tomb.
Taussig (1987), the Comaroffs (1999), and others have written about
the ways such sorcery narratives are provoked by, and are a rendering
of, the basic mechanisms of capitalist production, that is, the creation
of value for some through appropriating and consuming the energies of
others. Haitian spirit-workers have redescribed this aspect of capitalism
in religious ritual. Seen this way, zonbi-making is an example of a nonwestern
form of thought that diagnoses, theorizes, and responds mimetically
to the long history of violently consumptive and dehumanizing capitalism
in the Americas from the colonial period until the present.9 Zonbi
can be understood as a religious, philosophical, and artistic response to
the cannibalistic dynamics within capitalism, and a harnessing of these
principles through ritual.
Human Trafficking in the Walking Dead
In order to understand the appropriation of zombie mythology by filmmakers,
we must rehearse in the broadest possible strokes the controversial
mythology of the zonbi kò kadav, or walking corpse, which is the reverse of
the astral zonbi. The idea is this: In the absence of a strong national government,
traditional, male-headed secret societies operate as quasi-governments,
as mafias controlling markets, and as juridical systems in the Haitian
countryside. One extreme and rare form of punishment these societies can
hand down to an accused criminal (who has, say, sold the family land without
permission) is to be made into a zonbi kò kadav, whereby his spirit is
extracted from his body and his body is sold into modern-day slavery to cut
cane on a sugar plantation.
Underneath the cultural process of becoming a
zonbi kò kadav, the ethnobotonist Wade Davis (1988) famously claimed, lies
a scientific one. He argued that the would-be zonbi is surreptitiously given
tetrodotoxin from the puffer fish, which lowers his metabolism to the point
where he appears dead. His family buries him, usually in an above-ground
tomb as is typical in Haiti. That evening, the society’s sorcerer returns to the
cemetery, opens the tomb, and gives the victim datura plant, a hallucinogen,
and mystically separates out parts of the spirit from the body.10
In this scenario, mystical technology much like that applied to the zonbi
astral separates the spirit from the body, except that the separation takes
place before rather than after the body’s death. The body then is left, visible,
as a religious and social corpse. In the final phase of punishment,
this body—which we might redescribe as a traumatized, bound, socially
stigmatized, ensorcelled, and possibly brain-damaged person—is said to
be trafficked to a labor camp cum sugar plantation, with the secret society
collecting a procurement fee. But before being disappeared, the bound
victim is forced to pass by his family’s home and call out to someone he
knows, “Se mwen-menm!” (“It’s me!”).
In this mural on the wall of a Vodou temple, a sorcerer uses a whip to
drive a shrouded figure whose hands are bound behind the back with a
length of rope held by the sorcerer (see Figure 5). The bottle under the
sorcerer’s arm signals that the victim’s spirit has been captured inside. It
is striking that the process of capturing slaves and leading them, bound
and whipped, to be sold for labor is represented in religious terms. Here
the moment of punishment-by-zombification throughout Haitian history
replicates and reproduces the crucial transformative moment in the
lives of West and Central Africans and the slaves in the colonies, where
Africans were seized, kidnapped, bound, whipped, sold, and forced to
labor. Insofar as this form of mythmaking (and, it is said, actual practice)
reenacts this primal moment, the zonbi phenomenon in Haiti can be said
to continue the infliciting of terror through the bodily reenactment of historical
memory (Shaw 2002).
My husband—an avowed religious non-believer—swears that as a
youth, he was tapped on the shoulder while walking down a country road
one evening by a man from his home village who had been buried just that
afternoon and was being hurried past by two other men. The two friends
with my husband—who looked and witnessed the “zonbi,” became sick
with high fevers for several days. They were traumatized themselves, or
were victims of a poison powder spray administered by the passing sorcerers.
This form of psychic and political terror is broadcast to the community
and made known as a kind of “semi-public secret.” The secret is
broadcast in satire during Carnival, when small bands of “zonbi“ dress in
white sheets behind a sorcerer and parade the myth: the walking living
performing the walking dead (see Figure 6).
The important point here is that the walking zonbi these maskers are
playing is rendered a monstrous form of “raw life“ through a mystical
technology that is also a political punishment. Edwidge Danticat (2002),
in her book on Jacmel carnival, recalls that as a girl, she once heard a
radio broadcaster announce that a few dozen zonbis had been discovered
wandering in the hills. Danticat’s aunt had no doubt that those “zonbis”
were actually political prisoners “who were so mentally damaged
by dictatorship-sponsored torture that they had become either crazy or
slow” (2002:69-70). The announcers’ plea for family members to reclaim
these “zonbis” was a trap.
Danticat’s story highlights the ways in which
mythmaking about zonbis can serve the interests of dictatorship and other
male-dominated secret societies. Highlighting its use as a mythology of
liberation, Kaiama Glover (2005) discusses how Haitian writers used the
zonbi as a metaphor in their writings about dictatorship and its dilemmas,
often stressing the potential for the zonbi to awaken and rebel. A living
nightmare of modern capitalism, this kind of zonbi with all the secrecy,
rumors, and mystification of power that surround it, remembers and reperforms
the history of enslavement, as well as the capitalist consumption
and cannibalism of human bodies and spirits in contemporary Haiti.
Apocalypse and the Religion of American Zombies
Now we’re going to move from the question of the zonbi in the Haitian
context to a question of a different order: by what means did the zombie
become a US American, as it were? Others have written helpfully about
zombie mythology as it’s taken up by early Hollywood in Caribbean settings,
such as in White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
The horror of the Haitian zombie, for white Americans, was the image of
the disfigured body dis-possessed of its soul, will, agency, and hence
its interiority and its very humanity. When set against Christian dualisms
of body and soul that placed theological priority on the soul, these religious
differences were terrifying.
White Americans became fascinated with zombie mythology and reproduced it in writings on Haiti during the
Marine Occupation between 1915 and 1934, usually overlooking its obvious
articulations with slavery, capitalism, and political control.11 Instead,
the zombie myth authorized military intervention. Laënnec Hurbon (1987)
writes about how the zombie, along with the cannibal practices that were
imputed to be part of Haitian culture, become the image of the Other
through which barbarism comes to be the sign for the Haitian.
So early Hollywood invited the New World walking corpse to take its
place in the monstrous pantheon alongside Old World figures such as the
vampire, werewolf, and ghost. From the 1930s until the 1960s and still today,
the zombie is synonymous with a kind of barbaric racial blackness.
But zombie images also spin off in a totally different and fascinating direction.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, Hollywood produced a slew of “trash
films” featuring a variety of mutated, radioactive, or hybrid monsters that
were termed “zombies” but had fairly little formulaic coherence (Russell
2007). Then came George Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead,
which he soon followed with Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the
Dead (1985). His independent, low-budget trilogy of Dead films set the
terms for the American zombie horror flick and most pop-culture zombie
images since. Consistent with the historical pattern of the horror genre,
Romero lifted the monstrous from its exotic setting in the Caribbean and
set it down squarely in everyday America, to lurch and rampage its way
into the popular imagination. Although Romero reportedly did not think of
his creatures as zombies and the word is rarely used in other films about
the ravenous walking dead, from Night on, the critics and the public pronounced
the label.12
Stephen King writes that horror “arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment,
that things are in the unmaking” (as cited in Beal 2002:54). As
other commentators have noted, Romero’s films are anti-establishment
parables about the corruption and decay of the American way of life.
Night of the Living Dead attacks the nuclear American family, patriarchy,
and racism; Dawn of the Dead fastens its attention on the deadening effects
of rampant consumerism; and Day of the Dead offers an indictment
of militarism and American misuse of science and technology. Virtually
all scholars writing on zombie films either take a Marxian economic and
consumer studies approach or they spin out in Lacanian terms the films’
abject-monstrous psychoanalytic operations. I want to insist that the US
film zombie cannot be fully understood apart from its meanings against a
set of deeply embedded symbolic structures that, like the Haitian zonbi,
are a matter of religious thought.
Now, within the narrative, Romero’s zombie films are set in a secular
frame, with no reference to an otherworld or to a superhuman force.
Zombies that had been created by a sorcerer in Haiti now had an indeterminate,
usually scientific cause—dust from Venus, radiation, or an inexplicable
virus. Romero visually rendered the metaphors of eating another’s
life force. That which was religious about the spirit zonbi in Haiti—the
fact that human spirit lives on beyond death in an invisible part of the
cosmos and has dealings with the living—was turned inside out, like the
Haitian corpse zonbi.
The film zombie is a former human with a body,
but no soul, spirit, consciousness, interiority, or identity. This above all
has become the common understanding of zombies in contemporary
culture. Zombies are autonomous, but incapable of autonomy. They are
a representation of a stripped-down form of “raw life,” if you will, animating
a body, plus an animalistic drive to consume human flesh. They
are not commodified but they consume; they are hyper-consuming.
The most horrifying and excessive aspect of film zombies is their violent cannibal
drive, as they lumber and lunge towards the living protagonists and
take enormous, gory bites out of their necks, arms, and torsos. What is
more, the American zombie is almost always a sign and a symptom of an
apocalyptic undoing of the social order.
As secular apocalypse film, the zombie film is postmodern in that it
has undermined the opposition of God and human (Ostwalt 2000). But a
religious logic inflects and infects American zombie monsters, and—in the
way of so many narratives of secular popular culture—a biblical blueprint
underlies and informs them. Romero’s zombies are monstrous, but not
demonic, precisely because no evil animates them. However they always
refer implicitly to the biblical apocalyptic tradition, and it is through this referencing
that meaning is created. In this sense, zombie films are residually
religious; articulated with religious themes to create secular ones.
In classical examples of religious monstrosity, we find a consistent pattern
(from the ancient Near East until today), in which a chaos god or chaos
monster threatens to undo creation and must be defeated by another
god—or hero—to maintain cosmic order (Beal 2002:15). From the etymology
of monster, the Latin monstere, we find “to demonstrate, or to warn.”
The monster gestures, inherently, to a sort of prophetic revelation. Like the
uncanny “danger within,” many ancient monsters are not anti-divinities or
“evil,” as such, but rather are “part of a divinity that is deeply divided within
itself about the future viability of the cosmos...” (Beal 2002:22). Timothy
Beal notes that in some places in the Bible, the monstrous is against God,
but at other times God lays claim to monsters, such as Leviathan, who is
an aspect of God’s power. God and monsters are intertwined in a complicated
dialectic that often confuses humankind.
The monstrosity and horror of film zombies revolves precisely around
the uncanny familiarity of the zombie as a dis-possessed monster in human
form. Yet zombies are anonymous and pose a counter-example to
the more common Western monster narrative centered on a single figure,
to whom the characters are forced to relate, such as Leviathan, Dracula,
and Frankenstein. Zombies are human-sized, human-shaped, and have
no supernatural attributes. They are neither sexually attractive nor are they
sexually attracting. Like slaves in rebellion, they are most dangerous as a
collective horde. Zombies (like Hobbes’ Leviathan) are formed of many
strands of society, and unleash themselves on the world to release chaos
from within the logic of society itself.
Film zombies are a collective of chaos monsters threatening to destroy
civilization and order in a secular scenario of world destruction. However,
the zombie apocalypse resists ancient chaos monster mythmaking—
where the hero or god saves the world by fighting the chaos god and thus
restores order to the cosmos. In the zombie films, order is not restored at
all. Rather, a small band—or couple—of survivors, comes to relative, contingent
and uneasy safety in a post-apocalyptic enclave. The films work
around the classic end-time paradox that the world must be destroyed in
order for it to be reborn, and time must end in order for there to be a future
(Pagano 2008:71). The films all close with a gesture—but nothing like a full
realization—towards a new beginning.
In biblical apocalyptics, a prophetic seer reveals a future rupture in
time and space, which is pre-ordained by God. Apocalypse, etymologically
linked to the word “unveiling,” is a process of revealing in the Books
of Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation, and others; the revelation conveys both
the fact of and the details about the future divine order. In the Christian
apocalypse of John of Patmos, the entire earth is destroyed in order
to bring about God’s new heaven and new earth. But the survivors of
zombie films certainly don’t manage such feats of new creation. The
films point back to the viewers’ future, as it were, as a future of violent
and chaotic degradation. Since no transcendent figure has predetermined
the apocalypse, it is humans alone who have caused the end
and humans alone who must survive it. There is no judgment day in
these apocalypses; judgment is not internal to the film, but rather relies
on the viewer’s pronouncement, based on interpretation (Pagano 2008).
Film zombies are good post-modern monsters, which emerge as “selffulfilling
prophecies of modernity” (Kearney 2003:97).
Yet the “revealing” or “warning” that zombie monsters occasion is not
divine revelation but rather a politics cloaked in pseudo-religious form.
Especially in the Romero films, the revelation is a confrontation with the
insight that the film viewers are all zombies in the making. We are all in
mortal danger of being made inhuman by virtue of being conformists,
empty consumers, automatons, and cannibals.
One clear message of most post-Romero zombie films is that the zombies are a logical result
of the racism, corruption, greed, violence, and other flaws that already
characterize Americans. Especially in Dawn of the Dead, in which the
survivors shelter in a shopping mall, the parallel is drawn that hell is being
dammed to repeat endlessly the mistakes Americans have made as
hyper-consumers, effecting our own “shopocalypse.”13
Whereas zombies were often cast as black workers in the early
Hollywood films, the vast majority of Romero-forward zombies are figured
as white Americans, and zombie film heroes, interestingly, include black
men often of West Indian decent. It is interesting that Peter, the black survivor/
hero in Dawn of the Dead, offers a theological explanation for the
ghoulish uprising that refers back to Vodou in the Caribbean. It comes in
the form of wisdom from his Trinidadian grandfather, who was “into all that
Obeah and Vodou.” About the zombies, Peter says: “They’re us, that’s all.
When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”
This idea transposes Vodou to deliver a prophetic vision of Christian apocalypse. In a
reversal of the promise presented by the Book of Revelation—of the bodily
resurrection of the saints, who will be given perfect bodies free of disease,
sin, and death—Dawn offers the idea that the zombies are sinners inhabiting
hell, which has backed up and overflowed like a sewer through some
kind of divine abdication of biblical promise.
True to the classic patterns of religious monstrosity, the band of survivors
who fight the chaos monsters are by definition doing battle with
“otherness.” Here the “other” is a monstrous version of the human, and so
like the Christian binary between good and evil, the zombie monster is in
binary opposition—or at least in tension—with what is human. If zombies
are not demonic and therefore not evil, what precisely makes them monstrous
and not-human? Certainly their mindless, catatonic quality renders
them suspect. Gretchen Bakke argues that one index of what counts as
human in film is a character’s capacity to carry narrative weight, to be
“seething with story” (2007:64). All we know about most zombies is that
they were bitten and/or they died. One thing that marks zombies’ status as
inhuman is precisely their lack of narrative freight as individuals. Zombies
are generic, they are nothing except not alive—remnants, remainders.
The main way that we know zombies are not human is their cannibalism,
and this is an interesting way the Romero zombies rhyme with the
Haitian case. The genius of Romero was to figure the zombies as both
catatonic and cannibals. Romero evokes a kind of spectral remainder of
the Caribbean zonbi by reaching back to this iconic historical figure of
barbaric otherness during the age of conquest and colonialism. Recent
scholarship addresses the recurring theme of cannibalism in early African
and American colonialism, beginning with the term’s first use by Columbus
in writing about natives of Hispaniola, now Haiti. Postcolonial scholars redescribe
how the Europeans convinced themselves of the twin facts of
native cannibalism and native inhumanity. Linked across representations
of Africans, Natives, and Jews, the cannibal was a linchpin Other in the
European imagination. The cannibal, writes Elspeth Probyn, “reminds us
of that which cannot be included in the polis, the social life of man. Yet its
very exclusion serves to define humanity” (2000:88). The cannibal functions
in the necessary place of the monstrous other in the quasi-religious
paradigm of zombie films. Perfectly uncanny, the cannibal is the perfect
“something human” outside humanity.
Zombies, Messiahs, and Race
Of course, any secular apocalypse film requires a human messiah hero
who will do battle with the death-seeking “other” that threatens to destroy
the world. Zombie films’ plots center on the survivors, who form a kind of
militaristic counter-insurgency, but who are weakened by conflicts and
power struggles from within. By virtue of being the ultimate survivors, one,
two, or a trinity of survivors emerge. Insofar as they occupy the symbolic
place of messiah in the narrative of apocalypse, what is interesting here is
that from the hero Ben in Night, to Peter in Dawn (see Figure 7), and John
in Day, to Robert Neville in I Am Legend, a central male hero is black, two
of whom are West Indian.
The trend begins with Ben in Night, who as Steven Shaviro writes is
“the sole character in the film who is both sympathetic and capable of
reasoned action...” (1993:87). Self-possessed, direct, logical, capable,
Ben understands the zombie threat and takes decisive action to preserve
himself and the group that forms by happenstance around him in an abandoned
farmhouse. His role is striking, coming in 1968 as it does, in its
portrayal of black male leadership and calm authority, at a time when most
black males in film were peripheral at best, viciously stereotyped at worst.
A white man in the film challenges Ben’s authority, but Ben prevails and
ends up the lone survivor of the zombie attack (up to a point). Peter and
John in the next two Romero films are likewise solid, dependable, capable
black men who strategize and fight their way to survive the zombie outbreak.
All three make alliances with the one white woman in each group,
who also makes it to the post-apocalypse.
Will Smith’s character Robert Neville in Legend is a striking example
of the black male secular messiah.14 Neville is a consummate hero who
has everything: he’s a loving husband and father, dog owner, a US Army
Colonel, and Ph.D. in viro-biology who is in perfect physical, intellectual,
psychological, and moral condition. He has chosen to stay behind in
Manhattan, shouting “I am not going to let this happen,” not only to become
the lone survivor of an infectious pandemic, but to fight off attacking
zombies, shelter any remaining survivors he can find, and find the cure of
the infection to save humanity.
What can we make of the interesting trend that establishes zombies as
the monsters black men are to vanquish? In the successful zombie films I
am considering, black men are, like the spirits of former slaves in Vodou,
once again most efficacious. More than the whites in these films, black
men are exemplars of moral personhood. They all work cooperatively with
the survivors, they fight capably and ethically, and they are nice to the
women. Unlike the trend in action films where the black characters are
among the first to be killed, these black men survive by virtue of their own
character strengths to see a fragile post-apocalyptic future.
A problem here is that black characters in mainstream cinema have
always been made to signify both less and more than themselves. On the
one hand, we get what legal theorist Thomas Ross (1990:2) calls “black
abstraction,” “the refusal to depict blacks in any real and vividly drawn
social context.” On the other, black characters often carry more meaning
than the typical individual character when they are made to signify blackness
in general, in addition to its related associations with looseness, aggression,
sexuality, and other stereotypes.
Related to this, black people have long been deployed “as mirrors that help construct whiteness” in
Hollywood films, as Judith Weisenfeld (2004:308) helpfully notes.
So we might wonder, in turn, what it is about whiteness in zombie
films that the black male messiah characters point to. Here, Richard Dyer
(1988:44) makes a fascinating argument. Blacks in film are often depicted
as lively, musical, religious, as “having more life” than the whites around
them. Whiteness, which appears in mainstream society as “nothing in particular,”
is “revealed in emptiness, absence, denial, even a kind of death.”
Examining the Romero films—and I think we might extend his argument
to other works as well—Dyer argues that blacks in pop culture are often
depicted as “having more life,” and “whiteness represents not only rigidity
but death” (1988:59).
Dyer goes on to say that “In all three [Romero] films, it is significant
that the hero is a black man, and not just because this makes him ‘different,’
but because it makes it possible to see that whites are the living
dead” (1988:59, emphasis added). Zombies are overwhelmingly white in
Romero’s films, and the small minority of African-American zombies have
powdered whiteface. Just as whites in society are “ordinary looking,” and
therefore unmarked as white, as “nothing in particular,” so too are the zombies.
“If whiteness and death are equated, both are further associated with
the USA” (Dyer 1988:60).
In all of these films, the violence of the zombie catastrophe has killed the majority of the population, toppled the government as well as the media, and caused society to cease functioning altogether.
Dyer argues that “What finally forces home the specifically white
dimension of these zombie-US links are the ways in which the zombies can
be destroyed. The first recalls the liberal critique of whites as ruled by their
heads; as the radio announcer says, ‘Kill the brain and you kill the ghoul’
since, it seems, zombies/whites are nothing but their brains” (1988:61).
Romero and post-Romero zombies are cannibals, and white people and
zombies are both insatiably destructive consumers. Bakke writes that that
fact that zombies eat in order to reproduce—since in most zombie films
the zombie bite is what spreads infection—means that eating is “formally
and racially transformative” (2010:414). Eating and consumption are also
what make zombies reproductive and monstrous. Allegorically, excessive,
rampant consumption is what makes white people white and dead.
* * *
A new racial logic seems to be unfolding in action films produced since
the turn of the millennium. Bakke identifies the emergence of a new category
of whites in these films: “zombies, vampires, the virus-infected and
other sorts of hyperwhites—that is, whites over-endowed with traditionally
white characteristics (cultural as well as racial)—have, since the late
1990s, swarmed the big screen...” (2010:407-408).
Zombies, as a subcategory of hyperwhites, are exemplified by the virus-infected in I am
Legend and in 28 Days Later. As Bakke notes, they have blue eyes, white
skin so translucent that blue veins show through, are hairless, and—like
earlier film zombies—have little or no culture or language. It is the hyperwhiteness,
and the death they both embody and spread, that is destroying
human civilization. And it is this hyperwhite apocalypse that the black
male messiah is called upon to destroy. Bakke points out that Neville in
Legend is actually a black man inherently immune to the virus, immune to
whiteness, and that “In making (the black man) into the civilizing agent the
filmmakers turn an old story about colonization, savagery, and skin color
on its head” (2010:424). In these films, the black male messiah must save
humanity from the affliction of whiteness (see Figure 8).
This reading raises a number of critical questions. Is this sub-trend of
black male hero protagonists a progressive one, as these roles feature
positive and sympathetic men who fight to (contingent) victory at the end?
Or are these black male heroes in white-produced films a new way for
white culture to “eat the other” in bell hooks’ (1992) terms, where whites
“spice up” white culture by consuming racial difference?
Is it, as Hazel Carby (1992:3) reads multiculturalism, a way to focus once again “on the
complexity of response in the (white) reader/student’s construction of self
in relation to a (black) perceived ‘other’”? Is white filmmakers’ casting of
black men in the role of the messiah just racialization in a new form, one in
which blacks, as part of having “more life,” are figured as “more religious”?
We might compare the black messiah to the postmodern stock character
Spike Lee has termed “the super-duper magical negro” (Gonzales 2001)
in such films as The Green Mile (1999) and The Legend of Bagger Vance
(2000). In these films and others, a black man with magical qualities appears
out of nowhere to help a down-and-out white person realize their full
humanity or attain a goal (Colombe 2002). Zombie-fighting heroes possess
no magic, but they do function as capable helpmates of their white
allies. Instead of redeeming one single broken white person, the zombiefighting
heroes save (what’s left of) all of corrupt or infected humanity.
It is possible to read the black messiah as an exaggeration of the Magical
Negro, insofar as in zombie films, blackness is figured as a personified antidote
to the problem of whiteness; and black individuals are the planet’s
remediator, rectifier, and redeemer. Yet, arguably, the black male messiah zombie killer is more fully human
than the Magical Negro. These black zombie-killers are not magical,
but are ordinary, imperfect, and just as interested in saving themselves
as in assisting their white compatriots. What is more, the white man
does not end up with the (white) woman in the zombie apocalypse. In all
the films I consider here, the black male is paired with the white female
in the final scenes of the film.
Still, just as the Haitian zonbi myth mystifies the terrorism of slavery and political violence, zombie films displace and mystify the real threats to human survival. Neither nuclear war nor
climate change but rather the walking dead will trigger the apocalypse.
The films foreclose the possibility of organized, cooperative resistance
(since the majority of the population is dead or infected); instead, only a
small band of individuals survive.
An interesting feature of these zombie films is that for better or for worse,
the zombie post-apocalypse is not only black. By the end of the films (with
the exception of Night), the remaining survivors are the white woman and
the black man, and sometimes others. Whether surviving to stay human
by not succumbing to the excessive consumption of whiteness, as in the
Romero films and 28 Days Later, or going so far as to save the future
of humanity by finding the cure to the vicious virus of hyperwhiteness in
Legend, these films all point to a post-apocalyptic future that is multiracial.
Such a future may not bring us new bodies free of disease and death, as
in the Christian story. But the future society will consist of non-white and
multi-raced bodies and, presumably, culture.
Leader of the Zonbis for Obama
Two weeks after the final presidential debate that took place on October
15, 2008 it was time to observe the feast of the Day of the Dead in Haiti.
Every November 1 and 2, the cemetery in downtown Port-au-Prince fills
with people who come to honor their departed loved ones. Decorated
with candles and stacked with plates bearing food offerings, the aboveground
cement tombs are beehives of activity. The deity Bawon presides
over the spiritual affairs of this necropolis and the cross that stakes out his
presence is ringed with people beseeching him for health, food, and relief
from suffering. In 2008, many Haitians added another prayer to their long
list: “We pray for Obama,” they said. “Give Obama health, bring Obama
strength, and let Obama become president.” The head-of-state of the nation
of the dead—and the spiritual leader in charge of zonbis—was being
petitioned to support the election of the popular young candidate who
would become the first black US president.16
A common trope in many commentaries during the presidential campaign
was that the American psyche, wounded by and guilt-ridden over
slavery and racism, longed for the health and wholeness that would be
signified by the election of a black president. In other words, President
Obama would be a Magical Negro to the entire nation; he would rectify
the nation’s many problems, assuage white guilt over racism, and simultaneously
recast black men as reasoned leaders in place of stereotypes
of hypersexuality and criminality. Obama was also referenced in a messianic
idiom; scores of journalists, commentators, and artists either likened
his campaign to the second coming of Christ or noted the instances
where he was described in an exalted, prophetic vocabulary (Ehrenstein
2007).17
Elected in the teeth of an economic super-crisis, Obama was figured
as the zombie-killer who would slay the zombie-banks threatening
to cannibalize the nation’s funds. As the offspring of a white mother and
black father, Obama has also been seen both as a symbol of America’s
multiracial future and as someone with special power and authority to
make it a reality. In quickly casting the stumbling, white, John McCain as
a zombie, the maker of the “cool Obama/zombie McCain” image brought
American zombie films into conversation with the dramatically unfolding
presidential campaign. McCain was associated with the dead and
corrupt cannibalistic policies of the Bush administration, which Obama
possesses the natural “cool” to slay—or just ignore, until they go away.
Zombie mythmaking began in Haitian colonialism as a complicated
engagement with slavery and death-dealing capitalist formations. In
white American books and films, zombie mythmaking became articulated
through, and into, a sign for black barbarism, only to re-emerge
recently as a cipher whose meaning has to do with the death-dealing
qualities of whiteness itself. The zombie has been part-human, inhuman,
slave, revolutionary, cannibal, monster, destroyer, and that which it is
moral to destroy. Insofar as the zombie is a cipher, it can be cast to form
any number of meaning-sets; it is always shifting signification and yet
it can be said to hint at something of the original. After all, we all know
what a zombie is. n
En d n o t e s :
1Image on page 459 accessed from http://cheezburger.com/View/1184086272 in May 2010. Use of images
in this article are by permission, or are reproduced under Fair Use as stipulated by Section 107 of the U.S.
Copyright Act. See Society for Cinema and Media Studies Statement of Fair Use Best Practices for Media
Studies Publishing accessed from http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=positions_policies on May 1, 2011.
2Scores of news articles referred to the “cool” of Barack Obama and his even temperament throughout
the campaign and into his presidency.
3This discussion revisits and expands upon an earlier article (McAlister 1995). For their comments and
encouragement I would like to thank Jill Morowski and Wesleyan Center for Humanities fellows Gretchen
Bakke, Andrew Curran, Joe Fitzpatrick, Peter Gottschalk, Jason Craige Harris, and Letia Perta, as well as
Erol Josue, Christina Klein, Nick Marshall, Pierre Minn, Robin Nagle, Katherine M. Smith, and Gina Athena
Ulysse; as well as discussants following its presentation at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion
including Paul C. Johnson, Patrick Polk, Kate Ramsey, Karen Richman, and all the students in my course
Zombies as Other.
4I will use the Kreyòl spelling, zonbi, when discussing the ethnographic practice or thought about it in Haiti,
and zombie when speaking of ideas and appropriations of the figure.
5Accessed from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100762999 on Feb 17, 2009.
6And it goes on…The University of London hosted a conference in September of 2009 on “Zombomodernism.”
7Even the employed are not making a living wage; in August of 2009 the minimum wage in Haiti was raised
to $3.72 per day, from just $1.75. It is against this background of abject poverty and exploitation that one
must understand the religious arts in Haiti. Positioned apart from the societies of “servants of the spirits”in Haitian religion, and working alone for clients, sorcerers like St. Jean function through their exclusion
from the normative practices of Vodou.
Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies
484
8This living object surely evolved from both the contained spirits called minkisi, in Kongo religion, and
bocio carvings or bo bottles, “empowered cadavers” associated with the spirits of the dead, in Benin and
Togo Vodun practice. For the latter, see Blier 1995.
9For helpful descriptions and analyses of history and Cubans’ dealings with spirits of the dead, see Palmié
2002, Routon 2008, and Ochoa 2010.
10Davis’ (1988) research sparked great controversy and his hypothesis has not been conclusively validated
to my knowledge, although the high-profile traditional priest, Max Beauvoir, and others, have supported
it. I am not in a position to evaluate the science at issue; my interest lies in examining the social
narratives surrounding people who are claimed to be zombies, which often follow the pattern Davis and
Beauvoir outline.
11An exception to this is Seabrook (1929), who describes Haitian workers as “zombies” who work like
slaves in a description consistent with capitalism.
12Accessed from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NotUsingTheZWord on March 22, 2009.
13This term is coined in the context of anti-consumer activism by performance-artist-activist Reverend
Billy, whose website is Revbilly.com.
14This film is a remake of The Omega Man (1971), in which the “nightseekers” are more like vampires
than zombies, and in which the protagonist was not black; the screenplay of Legend apparently did not
specify the race of its hero. Also, the film’s “second ending” (on DVD only) might change my analysis here.
Nevertheless, the version of the film as released to theaters is what concerns us.
15Accessed from http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/2007_i_am_legend_010.html on May 2, 2011.
16Thanks for this observation goes to Katherine M. Smith, personal communication August 2009.
17See over 100 examples of commentators using messianic language in reference to Obama at http://
obamamessiah.blogspot.com accessed on August 7, 2009.
Re f e r e n c e s :
Bakke, Gretchen. 2007. “Continuum of the Human.” Camera Obscura 22(3):61-91.
____________. 2010. “Dead White Men: An Essay on the Changing Dynamics of Race in American Action
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Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies
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Thompson, Robert Farris, Joseph Cornet, and National Gallery of Art. 1981. The Four Moments of the Sun:
Slaves, Cannibals, and
Infected Hyper-Whites:
The Race and Religion
of Zombies
Published in Anthropological Quarterly (available through Stevenson Library)
Elizabeth McAlister
Wesleyan University
Abstract
The first decade of the new millennium saw renewed interest in popular
culture featuring zombies. This essay shows that a comparative analysis
of nightmares can be a productive method for analyzing salient themes
in the imaginative products and practices of cultures in close contact. It
is argued that zombies, as the first modern monster, are embedded in a
set of deeply symbolic structures that are a matter of religious thought.
The author draws from her ethnographic work in Haiti to argue that the
zonbi is at once part of the mystical arts that developed there since the
colonial period, and comprises a form of mythmaking that represents, responds
to, and mystifies the fear of slavery, collusion with it, and rebellion
against it. In turn, some elements of the Haitian zonbi figure can be found
in patterns that haunt recent American zombie films. Zombies in these
films are read as figures in a parable about whiteness and death-dealing
consumption. This essay suggests that the messianic mood surrounding
the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama was consistent with a pattern
in zombie films since the 1960s where many zombie-killing heroes
are figured as black American males. Zombies are used in both ethnographic
and film contexts to think through the conditions of embodiment,
the boundaries between life and death, repression and freedom, and the
racialized ways in which humans consume other humans.
After shaking hands with Barack Obama at the conclusion of the last US
presidential debate, John McCain started to head the wrong way off the
stage before realizing his mistake and reversing course. As he fell in step
behind his opponent, he acknowledged his error with an extravagant
full-body grimace. His grotesque pose was frozen by photographers and
instantly uploaded onto the Internet with the caption “Zombie McCain.”
Other zombie-themed captions for the image proliferated, including one
on PoliticalHumor.com that read: “Obama: cool enough to just ignore
zombies” (see Figure 1).1
The fact that McCain’s clumsiness figured him as a zombie in contradistinction
to Barack Obama’s unflappable “cool” reflects the widespread
fascination with zombies in US media and culture—consider the recent
success of the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) or the sudden
currency of the term zombie bank. It also indexes markers in US popular
culture of racial whiteness and blackness. As Robert Farris Thompson
(1973:41) points out in his classic essay, “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” the
concept of “cool” in many African-derived cultures is a metaphor for the
aesthetic and moral value of remaining composed under pressure, and is
ultimately a marker of “transcendental balance.”2 The juxtaposition of this
“cool” black presidential candidate—lithe and poised—with a stumbling
and staggering white “zombie” candidate is emblematic, I will suggest, of
a wider form of mythmaking about race currently at work in US culture.3
This essay shows that a “comparative analysis of nightmares”
(Wilson 1951:313) can be a productive method for analyzing salient
themes in the imaginative products and practices of cultures in close
contact. I pair ethnographic interpretation of work on the zonbi in
Haitian religious thought and art with a religious studies reading of key
films about zombies made in the US.4 I run a finger along several conceptual
strands from Haitian religious arts that remain to haunt zombie
representations in US popular culture. Like the Haitian zonbi, the US
film zombie must be understood as being embedded in a set of deeply
symbolic structures that are a matter of religious thought. In both contexts,
zombie narratives and rituals interrogate the boundary between
life and death, elucidate the complex relations between freedom and
slavery, and highlight the overlap between capitalism and cannibalism.
What I want to stress especially is that in each context, race is the
pivot on which these dynamics articulate themselves.
Zombies: A Brief History
What intrigues me as a scholar of Afro-Caribbean religion is that the
mythmaking comprising and surrounding the zombie in America originates
from sensationalized descriptions of a set of Afro-Caribbean mystical
arts. The word zonbi appears in writing as far back as colonial Saint-
Domingue, glossed by travel writer Moreau de Saint-Méry (1797) as the
slaves’ belief in a returned soul, a revenant. 20th century reports describe
not a returned soul but a returned body—a person bodily raised from
the grave and turned into a slave worker. As a spirit or a slave, complex
spiritual formulae separate body and soul, and compel one or the other
to work. These entities—especially the invisible zonbi astral (astral zombies)—
continue to be fairly common inhabitants of the unseen mystical
world of Haitian Vodouists.
A very different kind of zombie populates US film and television: a ghoul
who lumbers around trying to eat people. George Romero’s “Living Dead”
films exemplify this concept of the zombie in the popular imagination. The
idea refers, of course, to dead people who are still alive, and driven to
kill and cannibalize the living. These monsters made an appearance in
Michael Jackson’s smash hit music video “Thriller,” and now star in the
more recent I am Legend, 28 Days Later, and others. In this first decade
of the new millennium, the walking dead and their cannibalistic appetites
seem to be everywhere. We hear a lot lately about “zombie banks”—
banks whose debts are greater than their assets—which drain bailout
money from the government but don’t facilitate more lending in turn.5
Zombies show up in pop songs and are stock characters in comic books
and graphic novels. They appear in video games such as the Resident
Evil series and in the Resident Evil movie spin-offs. Since 2000, about
100 movies and scores of video games have featured undead, cannibal
zombies. Zombie-like creatures called inferi make an appearance in the
sixth book of the Harry Potter series. Zombies have even earned a special
place in the academy: the philosopher David Chalmers (1996), in order to
elaborate various ethical questions, has posited the “philosophical zombie,”
or p-zombie, a human body without consciousness that behaves like
a human with consciousness.6
Mel Brooks’s son, Max Brooks, wrote the bestselling Zombie Survival
Guide (2003), a tongue-in-cheek manual for surviving a widespread zombie
attack, and he packs lecture halls when he speaks about the impending
zombie apocalypse. Especially intriguing are the “zombie walks” in many
US cities, where ordinary people dress up like zombies from all walks of
life—construction workers, doctors, nuns—and lumber through the parks
and streets. Zombie flash mobs move through downtown spaces, having
read rules for play on the internet. In 2007, a zombie flash mob invaded
a San Francisco Apple Store to stage an anticonsumerist performance
piece where zombies pretended to eat the computers on display. Pride
and Prejudice and Zombies (2009)—the Jane Austen novel “mashed up”
with a zombie plotline—soared to the top of numerous bestseller lists.
The 2010 television series The Walking Dead, on the cable channel AMC
is set in a zombie post-apocalypse and won a Golden Globe Award for
best drama. Zombies are all around us. Americans have brought to life—
or death, if you prefer—a proliferation of monsters who are doing a fair
amount of cultural work.
What if we highlight this fact about zombies: the zombie is the one stock
horror character that does not have a genealogy in European tradition or
much presence in Gothic fiction, as do the ghost, vampire, werewolf, and
Frankenstein (Ellis 2000). Rather, the zombie originates in Afro-Haitian religious
thought and practice, and is traceable (in part) to colonial-era Kongo
religion from Central Africa. Deleuze and Guattari (1983:335) assert that
“the only modern myth is the myth of zombies” and this is quite true in any
number of ways. The zombie came into being (as it were) in the plantation
society of colonial Saint Domingue, and I will argue here that its figure, its
story, its mythology are at once part of the mystical arts that have developed
since that time, and comprise a form of mythmaking that effects the
mystification of slavery and ongoing political repression.
That is, the zombie represents, responds to, and mystifies fear of slavery, collusion with it,
and rebellion against it. The zombie was born (so to speak) in what Michael
Taussig (1987) terms the colonial “space of death” and is inextricable from
the “culture of terror” of the plantation. This modern monster is a complex
and polyvalent Other that points us to art and thought produced out of the
nightmarish aspects of modernity. In particular, this monster refers and
responds to the nexus of capitalism, race, and religion.
There are many kinds of zombies, and many levels, if you will, of the
representation and meaning of zombies. Working from the gothic, sensationalized
travel writers’ accounts of black West Indian “superstition,”
early Hollywood produced several “zombie” films, such as White Zombie
(1932) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943). As a constellation of misunderstood
and distorted elements in early Hollywood films, these Caribbean
zombie representations might be described as a profound example of
what Toni Morrison calls “American Africanism,” that is, “the denotative
and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as
well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings
that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. As a trope, little
restraint has been attached to its uses” (1993:6-7). The films invariably
cast black sorcerers (or quack sorcerers) plotting for conquest of and control
over white women, and blackness is unmistakably linked with primitive
menace, superstition, and the diabolical.
Contemporary American zombie films have diverged quite a bit from
their Caribbean beginnings. Most zombies now are figured as racially
white, and most of the films that portray them are set in the US. As an
American horror film genre character, the zombie has come to make certain
statements about whiteness in America. Yet this inversion or inside-outness
of earlier racial associations also presents a meta-commentary on
the same subjects as do Haitian zonbi: the intersections of capitalism and
consumption, slavery and cannibalism, bodily excess and race. Whether
in Haitian religious practices, art, and cultural mythology, or in US films,
the zombie serves to index the excessive extremes of capitalism, the overlap
of capitalism and cannibalism, and the interplay between capitalism
and race in the history of the Americas (see also Sheller 2003).
Capturing, Enslaving, Feeding, and Dressing Zonbis in Haiti
I accidentally bought two zonbis in Haiti. My zonbis are not the walking
dead but rather the common, everyday spirits of the recently dead, zonbi
astral. The spirits were captured from a cemetery in a mystical ritual and
then contained in an empty rum bottle. I did not do the capturing and containing;
this feat was achieved by a man named St. Jean, who made his
living (in the face of chronically high unemployment) as a bòkò, or sorcerer,
in a neighborhood near the cemetery in downtown Port-au-Prince.7 I had
gone to interview the bòkò, and when I complimented a colorfully decorated
bottle that sat on his altar, he asked if I would like to have one like it.
In agreeing, I got much more than a decorated bottle. My encounter with
the sorcerer turned into something far more complex than the comission
of what I took to be an art object. When I returned to pick up the bottle,
St. Jean performed a complex ritual that infused human life into the bottle
and transformed the container into a living grave, housing a human-spirit
hybrid entity.
The essence of the zonbis’ spirit life emanates from shaved bits of bone
from two human skulls. The zonbis in the bottle can not properly be understood
as souls, but rather as fragments of human soul, or spirit. In Afro-
Haitian religious thought, part of the spirit goes immediately to God after
death, while another part lingers near the grave for a time. It is this portion
of the spirit that can be captured and made to work; let’s say, a form of
“raw spirit life.” The bòkò performed a spontaneous ritual, which began
when he popped a cassette tape into a player. Our soundscape was a
secret society ceremony to which he said he belonged.
He put these skull shavings into the bottle, along with the ashes from
a burned American dollar and a variety of herbs, perfumes, alcohols, and
powders. Robert Farris Thompson spelled out the logic of this sort of
“charm” in his work on minkisi (containers of spirit) from the Kongo culture,
which are surely one of the cultural sources of the zonbi:
...the nkisi is believed to live with an inner life of its own. The basis of
that life was a captured soul...The owner of the charm could direct
the spirit in the object to accomplish mystically certain things for
him, either to enhance his luck or to sharpen his business sense.
This miracle was achieved through two basic classes of medicine
within the charm, spirit-embedding medicine (earths, often from a
grave site, for cemetery earth is considered at one with the spirit of
the dead) and spirit-admonishing objects (seeds, claws, miniature
knives, stones, crystals, and so forth). (Thompson et al. 1981:37)8
In my bottle, the spirit-embedding medicine includes cemetery earth,
but also more to the point, the skull shavings. At some previous time,
St. Jean had most likely prepared the skulls in a sort of spirit-extracting
ritual, treating them with baths of dew, rain, and sunshine. The skulls had
been given food (which they absorb mystically, as spirits in the invisible
world generally do), and had been baptized with new, ritual names. Their
names would have been cryptic phrases such as “je m’engage” (“I’m trying”)
or “al chache” (“Go look”). Each skull would have been charged with
a specific strength, job, or problem to treat. Presumably, these skulls were
activated with the ability to enhance luck, wealth, and health.
“Spirit-admonishing medicines” instruct the zonbis in the work that
they are being commanded to do on my behalf.
Ingeniously, this technology of good luck zonbi-making involves dressing the zonbis in the
very instructions and work directions the maker intends them to perform.
The mirrors around the center of the bottle, are its “eyes for seeing”
and will identify any force coming at me with malevolent intent (see
Figure 2). The scissors lashed open under the bottleneck are like arms
crossed in self-defense. The dollar bill in the bottle instructs the zonbi
spirits to attract wealth. The herbs are for the zonbis to heal me of sickness
and disease, while the perfumes are to make me attractive and
desirable. St. Jean created for them a magnetic force field by placing
two industrial magnets as a kind of collar on the neck of the bottle. This
object is now swirling with polarity, intention, and life (McAlister 1995). It
is what Stephan Palmié has called “a life form constituted through ritual
action” (Palmié 2006:861).
This zonbi bottle refuses the
Western ontological distinction
between people and things, and
between life and death, as it is a
hybrid of human and spirit, living
and dead, individual and generic.
In Afro-Creole thought, spirit can
inhabit both natural and humanmade
things, and what is more,
this force can be manipulated and
used, often for healing and protection,
sometimes for aggression or
attack. When I later interviewed
the bòkò, I learned about the deep
moral ambiguity of the zonbi astral.
St. Jean told me that the zonbis
were trapped in the bottle until the
time when, as with every person,
their spirit would go on to God. The
bòkò instructed me to ask the zonbis
for anything I wanted, because,
captured and ritually transformed, they were working for him, and now,
as if subcontracted, for me.
I realized that I was effectively in the position of a spiritual slave-owner.
Besides being dismayed and upset, I found it puzzling that people
would practice the enslavement of this “raw spirit life” considering that
their ancestors suffered extreme brutality during colonial slavery in Haiti,
where the life expectancy of an enslaved person on a plantation was only
seven years. Planters fed and inaugurated the modern system of Atlantic
capitalism through dehumanization, starvation, and torture; these were
the routine ways of extracting production value to fund the obscenely
lucrative sugar trade.
But, then again, the living take charge of their history when they mimetically
perform master-slave relationships with spirits of the dead.
The production of spiritual (and bodily) zonbis shows us how groups
remember history and enact its consequences in embodied ritual arts.
The slave trade and colonial slavery—whose modus operandus was
to cast living humans as commodities—are quite literally encoded and
reenacted in this living object. Just as slavery depended on capturing,
containing, and forcing the labor of thousands of people, so does this
form of mystical work reenact the same process in local terms.
It is, as Taussig famously put it, history as sorcery (Taussig 1987:366).
Under slavery, Afro-Caribbeans were rendered nonhuman by being
legally transposed into commodities. Now, the enslaved dead hold a
respected place within the religion. In what might seem counterintuitive,
Randy Matory (2007:400) recently argued that in Afro-Latin religions,
“Instead of being the opposite of the desired personal or social state,
the image and mimesis of slavery become highly flexible instruments
of legally free people’s aspirations for themselves and for their loved
ones.” He notes that in these religions, the slave is often considered the
most efficacious spiritual actor. The relationship between spirit worker
and the dead is inherently unequal and exploitative, yet it is nuanced in
fascinating ways that give the spirits of the dead some agency. Usually
the dealings between people and the zonbis are just that—economic
affairs, caught up in a system revolving around money, work, capitivity,
predation, and coersion.
I did feed the zonbis a ritual meal of unsalted rice and beans, feeling
somewhat sheepish the entire while. But I was determined to operate in
as ethical a manner as I could toward this bottle, which its maker understood
to be a living thing. Who was I not to take care of my obligations to
the zonbis? I was haunted by a comment made by the scholar Luminisa
Bunseki Fu-Kiau at a conference. “When you put our ‘charms’ and ‘fetishes’
in your museums,” he said, “you are incarcerating our ancestors.”
I did not want to get in trouble in any way, either to the living or the dead.
I had been privy to a case of sorcery involving a malevolent zonbi. I
watched while Papa Mondy, an expert healer in spirit work, diagnosed
a teenager who had taken sick and was acting strange. After extensive
consultation and divination, Papa Mondy informed the boy’s mother that
someone with bad intentions had “voye zonbi” (“sent a zonbi”) against
the teen, and had “sold” the boy mystically to a secret society. The teen
had been captured mystically in the unseen world, and his life force was
being “eaten.” In a family drama of sickness and healing, once again
the transactions of slavery were at play. This diagnosis reenacted the
capture, sale, and exploitation of the life of a person, here in the unseen
world of everyday Haitian life.
The cure—and the teen was cured, at least in the semi-public neighborhood
narrative—involved a complex process of ritual freeing, negotiating,
and buying back: an unraveling and undoing of the spiritual enslavement.
The director of this healing ceremony was Papa Gede Loray, himself a
spirit of a former colonial slave—considered the best “worker” among the
spirits—who came to possess the priest Mondy for most of the proceedings.
The teen was ritually buried, lying down (up to his neck) beneath
a light layer of earth in a symbolic grave, and the zonbi was tricked and
forced to remain in the grave when the boy was lifted out. The zonbi was
quickly covered up with earth, then bound and tied to the spot with a rock
and a rope. These Haitian spirit workers once again performed some of
the actions famously used against the African enslaved—tricking, capturing,
binding, and shackling—but this time the ritual actors were the present-
day descendents of slaves, enacting the commodification and traffic
in humans through the ritual vocabulary most salient to their history, in
what Connerton called “the capacity to reproduce a certain performance”
(1989:22 as cited in Shaw 2002:6).
The boy was freed of the zonbi, but he still needed to be “bought
back” from the secret society. Since it was unclear who (as it often is)
sent this misfortune, the crucial redeeming deal had to be made with
Bawon Samdi, the spirit-in-chief of the recently dead and the ultimate
authority over the cemetery. We were going to buy the boy back from the
cemetery, before the cemetery swallowed him up. We went, quite late at
night by now, to an intersection of two roads where diplomatic spiritual
protocol necessitated that the family make a payment to Met Kalfou, the
spirit of the crossroads. “Si kalfou pa bay, simitye pa pran,” goes this important
principle: “If the crossroads won’t give (way), the cemetery won’t
take (accept).” When we got to the cemetery, Papa Mondy set up shop
next to the tomb of Bawon. An elaborate series of ritual exchanges ensued.
Mondy gently ripped the boy’s clothes from his body until he wore
only his underthings, and then laid the boy on top of the tomb. To the
accompaniment of prayers and prayer-songs, Mondy swept the boy with
a broom to remove any remaining negativity. He entreated Bawon to buy
back this boy from those who wanted to steal him, and stood pleading
with two arms outstretched while the rest of the small group sang behind
him. First he spoke to the afflicted boy, but really to us, to the dead, and
to the evil-doer. “Now you are known by the cemetery. Now you are like
one of the dead. How can you kill a dead man, mon cher? They can do
nothing to you.” Next he addressed Bawon: “You are the one with power
over death. You are the only one who can kill him,” said Mondy. “I sell this
boy to you, and you alone are buying him. It is you who will determine the
day he will die.” Papa Mondy knelt down and threw down a small package
wrapped in brown paper, held together with pins. He deftly poured
rum over the whole thing and lit a match. A hungry blue flame engulfed
the clothes, the brown paper, and the precious four hundred and twelve
dollars that were inside.
With this monetary sacrifice, Bawon was paid, and the boy was bought.
Mondy stood the boy atop the tomb, and dressed him in clean white
clothes. He told the boy he would no longer be under the influence of
other humans or spirits who wished to harm him—only Bawon “owned”
him. That night in the cemetery, the teen boy was literally, and with Haitian
currency, sold to a moral and powerful guardian, in order to escape being
owned by a malevolent and exploitative one.
In this case, selling a person was an act of redemption, a far cry from—
and yet also an echo of—the Atlantic slave trade. One cannot help but
notice the various profound ways that layers of historical events and conditions
are remembered and mimetically enacted through ritual, from the
slave trade to the current patronage system of politically powerful “big
men” and their more vulnerable followers. This religious logic also bears
a parallel to the Christian notion that Jesus pays the debt of sin for the
believer, whose soul is bought and paid for through the blood of the crucifixion.
In both cases, a supernatural entity can buy the spirit (or soul) of
a human, and become that person’s mediator with the unseen world and
the afterlife.
Some Vodouists understand Jesus as the first zonbi. This myth holds
that Jesus’ tomb was guarded by two Haitian soldiers, who unscrupulously
stole the password God gave when He resurrected Jesus. The soldiers
stole the password, sold it, and the stolen secret is now part of the secrets
of sorcerers. If we examine the story carefully, we see that the buyer of
people (Jesus) is victimized by people rebelling against him. The ordinary
folk—the soldiers—are stealing from God, who after all set the terms of
all negotiations. In this story, the sorcerer acknowledges his opposition to
(Roman Catholic) Christianity, which, in its affiliation with landowning elites,
has not always served the interests of everyday Haitians. Yet insofar as being
made a zonbi is a terrifying form of victimization, this story also sympathizes
with Jesus.
In this beautiful ironwork sculpture by Gabriel Bien-Aimé
(see Figure 3), cut and hammered
from a recycled oil drum, Jesus with
his crown of thorns is being taken
down from the cross with a chain
around his neck. At the other end
is the sorcerer controlling him (see
also Brown 1995).
Like the colonial slave, or the
oppressed worker, zonbi also possess
the potential for out-and-out
rebellion. There are plenty of stories
of people who ask these “bought
spirits” for wealth, land, or political
promotion, and who cannot provide
the food demanded in return. Then
the zonbi are said to rise up to attack
their owners, consuming their
life force as payment. Eating them
through magic, the zonbi becomes
more and more powerful as its master wastes away through sickness. St.
Jean himself was said to have been “eaten” in this manner, consumed by
his own enslaved zonbi, turned cannibal in response to St. Jean’s voracious
greed. Perhaps, that process is what is described in this mural, painted on
the interior wall of a Vodou temple (see Figure 4). Here, a sorcerer (indicated
as such by his red shirt and by the whip in his hand, a tool used to “heat
up” ritual and activate spiritual energy) is attacked by hundreds of skeletal
figures while facing a tomb.
Taussig (1987), the Comaroffs (1999), and others have written about
the ways such sorcery narratives are provoked by, and are a rendering
of, the basic mechanisms of capitalist production, that is, the creation
of value for some through appropriating and consuming the energies of
others. Haitian spirit-workers have redescribed this aspect of capitalism
in religious ritual. Seen this way, zonbi-making is an example of a nonwestern
form of thought that diagnoses, theorizes, and responds mimetically
to the long history of violently consumptive and dehumanizing capitalism
in the Americas from the colonial period until the present.9 Zonbi
can be understood as a religious, philosophical, and artistic response to
the cannibalistic dynamics within capitalism, and a harnessing of these
principles through ritual.
Human Trafficking in the Walking Dead
In order to understand the appropriation of zombie mythology by filmmakers,
we must rehearse in the broadest possible strokes the controversial
mythology of the zonbi kò kadav, or walking corpse, which is the reverse of
the astral zonbi. The idea is this: In the absence of a strong national government,
traditional, male-headed secret societies operate as quasi-governments,
as mafias controlling markets, and as juridical systems in the Haitian
countryside. One extreme and rare form of punishment these societies can
hand down to an accused criminal (who has, say, sold the family land without
permission) is to be made into a zonbi kò kadav, whereby his spirit is
extracted from his body and his body is sold into modern-day slavery to cut
cane on a sugar plantation.
Underneath the cultural process of becoming a
zonbi kò kadav, the ethnobotonist Wade Davis (1988) famously claimed, lies
a scientific one. He argued that the would-be zonbi is surreptitiously given
tetrodotoxin from the puffer fish, which lowers his metabolism to the point
where he appears dead. His family buries him, usually in an above-ground
tomb as is typical in Haiti. That evening, the society’s sorcerer returns to the
cemetery, opens the tomb, and gives the victim datura plant, a hallucinogen,
and mystically separates out parts of the spirit from the body.10
In this scenario, mystical technology much like that applied to the zonbi
astral separates the spirit from the body, except that the separation takes
place before rather than after the body’s death. The body then is left, visible,
as a religious and social corpse. In the final phase of punishment,
this body—which we might redescribe as a traumatized, bound, socially
stigmatized, ensorcelled, and possibly brain-damaged person—is said to
be trafficked to a labor camp cum sugar plantation, with the secret society
collecting a procurement fee. But before being disappeared, the bound
victim is forced to pass by his family’s home and call out to someone he
knows, “Se mwen-menm!” (“It’s me!”).
In this mural on the wall of a Vodou temple, a sorcerer uses a whip to
drive a shrouded figure whose hands are bound behind the back with a
length of rope held by the sorcerer (see Figure 5). The bottle under the
sorcerer’s arm signals that the victim’s spirit has been captured inside. It
is striking that the process of capturing slaves and leading them, bound
and whipped, to be sold for labor is represented in religious terms. Here
the moment of punishment-by-zombification throughout Haitian history
replicates and reproduces the crucial transformative moment in the
lives of West and Central Africans and the slaves in the colonies, where
Africans were seized, kidnapped, bound, whipped, sold, and forced to
labor. Insofar as this form of mythmaking (and, it is said, actual practice)
reenacts this primal moment, the zonbi phenomenon in Haiti can be said
to continue the infliciting of terror through the bodily reenactment of historical
memory (Shaw 2002).
My husband—an avowed religious non-believer—swears that as a
youth, he was tapped on the shoulder while walking down a country road
one evening by a man from his home village who had been buried just that
afternoon and was being hurried past by two other men. The two friends
with my husband—who looked and witnessed the “zonbi,” became sick
with high fevers for several days. They were traumatized themselves, or
were victims of a poison powder spray administered by the passing sorcerers.
This form of psychic and political terror is broadcast to the community
and made known as a kind of “semi-public secret.” The secret is
broadcast in satire during Carnival, when small bands of “zonbi“ dress in
white sheets behind a sorcerer and parade the myth: the walking living
performing the walking dead (see Figure 6).
The important point here is that the walking zonbi these maskers are
playing is rendered a monstrous form of “raw life“ through a mystical
technology that is also a political punishment. Edwidge Danticat (2002),
in her book on Jacmel carnival, recalls that as a girl, she once heard a
radio broadcaster announce that a few dozen zonbis had been discovered
wandering in the hills. Danticat’s aunt had no doubt that those “zonbis”
were actually political prisoners “who were so mentally damaged
by dictatorship-sponsored torture that they had become either crazy or
slow” (2002:69-70). The announcers’ plea for family members to reclaim
these “zonbis” was a trap.
Danticat’s story highlights the ways in which
mythmaking about zonbis can serve the interests of dictatorship and other
male-dominated secret societies. Highlighting its use as a mythology of
liberation, Kaiama Glover (2005) discusses how Haitian writers used the
zonbi as a metaphor in their writings about dictatorship and its dilemmas,
often stressing the potential for the zonbi to awaken and rebel. A living
nightmare of modern capitalism, this kind of zonbi with all the secrecy,
rumors, and mystification of power that surround it, remembers and reperforms
the history of enslavement, as well as the capitalist consumption
and cannibalism of human bodies and spirits in contemporary Haiti.
Apocalypse and the Religion of American Zombies
Now we’re going to move from the question of the zonbi in the Haitian
context to a question of a different order: by what means did the zombie
become a US American, as it were? Others have written helpfully about
zombie mythology as it’s taken up by early Hollywood in Caribbean settings,
such as in White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
The horror of the Haitian zombie, for white Americans, was the image of
the disfigured body dis-possessed of its soul, will, agency, and hence
its interiority and its very humanity. When set against Christian dualisms
of body and soul that placed theological priority on the soul, these religious
differences were terrifying.
White Americans became fascinated with zombie mythology and reproduced it in writings on Haiti during the
Marine Occupation between 1915 and 1934, usually overlooking its obvious
articulations with slavery, capitalism, and political control.11 Instead,
the zombie myth authorized military intervention. Laënnec Hurbon (1987)
writes about how the zombie, along with the cannibal practices that were
imputed to be part of Haitian culture, become the image of the Other
through which barbarism comes to be the sign for the Haitian.
So early Hollywood invited the New World walking corpse to take its
place in the monstrous pantheon alongside Old World figures such as the
vampire, werewolf, and ghost. From the 1930s until the 1960s and still today,
the zombie is synonymous with a kind of barbaric racial blackness.
But zombie images also spin off in a totally different and fascinating direction.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, Hollywood produced a slew of “trash
films” featuring a variety of mutated, radioactive, or hybrid monsters that
were termed “zombies” but had fairly little formulaic coherence (Russell
2007). Then came George Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead,
which he soon followed with Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the
Dead (1985). His independent, low-budget trilogy of Dead films set the
terms for the American zombie horror flick and most pop-culture zombie
images since. Consistent with the historical pattern of the horror genre,
Romero lifted the monstrous from its exotic setting in the Caribbean and
set it down squarely in everyday America, to lurch and rampage its way
into the popular imagination. Although Romero reportedly did not think of
his creatures as zombies and the word is rarely used in other films about
the ravenous walking dead, from Night on, the critics and the public pronounced
the label.12
Stephen King writes that horror “arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment,
that things are in the unmaking” (as cited in Beal 2002:54). As
other commentators have noted, Romero’s films are anti-establishment
parables about the corruption and decay of the American way of life.
Night of the Living Dead attacks the nuclear American family, patriarchy,
and racism; Dawn of the Dead fastens its attention on the deadening effects
of rampant consumerism; and Day of the Dead offers an indictment
of militarism and American misuse of science and technology. Virtually
all scholars writing on zombie films either take a Marxian economic and
consumer studies approach or they spin out in Lacanian terms the films’
abject-monstrous psychoanalytic operations. I want to insist that the US
film zombie cannot be fully understood apart from its meanings against a
set of deeply embedded symbolic structures that, like the Haitian zonbi,
are a matter of religious thought.
Now, within the narrative, Romero’s zombie films are set in a secular
frame, with no reference to an otherworld or to a superhuman force.
Zombies that had been created by a sorcerer in Haiti now had an indeterminate,
usually scientific cause—dust from Venus, radiation, or an inexplicable
virus. Romero visually rendered the metaphors of eating another’s
life force. That which was religious about the spirit zonbi in Haiti—the
fact that human spirit lives on beyond death in an invisible part of the
cosmos and has dealings with the living—was turned inside out, like the
Haitian corpse zonbi.
The film zombie is a former human with a body,
but no soul, spirit, consciousness, interiority, or identity. This above all
has become the common understanding of zombies in contemporary
culture. Zombies are autonomous, but incapable of autonomy. They are
a representation of a stripped-down form of “raw life,” if you will, animating
a body, plus an animalistic drive to consume human flesh. They
are not commodified but they consume; they are hyper-consuming.
The most horrifying and excessive aspect of film zombies is their violent cannibal
drive, as they lumber and lunge towards the living protagonists and
take enormous, gory bites out of their necks, arms, and torsos. What is
more, the American zombie is almost always a sign and a symptom of an
apocalyptic undoing of the social order.
As secular apocalypse film, the zombie film is postmodern in that it
has undermined the opposition of God and human (Ostwalt 2000). But a
religious logic inflects and infects American zombie monsters, and—in the
way of so many narratives of secular popular culture—a biblical blueprint
underlies and informs them. Romero’s zombies are monstrous, but not
demonic, precisely because no evil animates them. However they always
refer implicitly to the biblical apocalyptic tradition, and it is through this referencing
that meaning is created. In this sense, zombie films are residually
religious; articulated with religious themes to create secular ones.
In classical examples of religious monstrosity, we find a consistent pattern
(from the ancient Near East until today), in which a chaos god or chaos
monster threatens to undo creation and must be defeated by another
god—or hero—to maintain cosmic order (Beal 2002:15). From the etymology
of monster, the Latin monstere, we find “to demonstrate, or to warn.”
The monster gestures, inherently, to a sort of prophetic revelation. Like the
uncanny “danger within,” many ancient monsters are not anti-divinities or
“evil,” as such, but rather are “part of a divinity that is deeply divided within
itself about the future viability of the cosmos...” (Beal 2002:22). Timothy
Beal notes that in some places in the Bible, the monstrous is against God,
but at other times God lays claim to monsters, such as Leviathan, who is
an aspect of God’s power. God and monsters are intertwined in a complicated
dialectic that often confuses humankind.
The monstrosity and horror of film zombies revolves precisely around
the uncanny familiarity of the zombie as a dis-possessed monster in human
form. Yet zombies are anonymous and pose a counter-example to
the more common Western monster narrative centered on a single figure,
to whom the characters are forced to relate, such as Leviathan, Dracula,
and Frankenstein. Zombies are human-sized, human-shaped, and have
no supernatural attributes. They are neither sexually attractive nor are they
sexually attracting. Like slaves in rebellion, they are most dangerous as a
collective horde. Zombies (like Hobbes’ Leviathan) are formed of many
strands of society, and unleash themselves on the world to release chaos
from within the logic of society itself.
Film zombies are a collective of chaos monsters threatening to destroy
civilization and order in a secular scenario of world destruction. However,
the zombie apocalypse resists ancient chaos monster mythmaking—
where the hero or god saves the world by fighting the chaos god and thus
restores order to the cosmos. In the zombie films, order is not restored at
all. Rather, a small band—or couple—of survivors, comes to relative, contingent
and uneasy safety in a post-apocalyptic enclave. The films work
around the classic end-time paradox that the world must be destroyed in
order for it to be reborn, and time must end in order for there to be a future
(Pagano 2008:71). The films all close with a gesture—but nothing like a full
realization—towards a new beginning.
In biblical apocalyptics, a prophetic seer reveals a future rupture in
time and space, which is pre-ordained by God. Apocalypse, etymologically
linked to the word “unveiling,” is a process of revealing in the Books
of Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation, and others; the revelation conveys both
the fact of and the details about the future divine order. In the Christian
apocalypse of John of Patmos, the entire earth is destroyed in order
to bring about God’s new heaven and new earth. But the survivors of
zombie films certainly don’t manage such feats of new creation. The
films point back to the viewers’ future, as it were, as a future of violent
and chaotic degradation. Since no transcendent figure has predetermined
the apocalypse, it is humans alone who have caused the end
and humans alone who must survive it. There is no judgment day in
these apocalypses; judgment is not internal to the film, but rather relies
on the viewer’s pronouncement, based on interpretation (Pagano 2008).
Film zombies are good post-modern monsters, which emerge as “selffulfilling
prophecies of modernity” (Kearney 2003:97).
Yet the “revealing” or “warning” that zombie monsters occasion is not
divine revelation but rather a politics cloaked in pseudo-religious form.
Especially in the Romero films, the revelation is a confrontation with the
insight that the film viewers are all zombies in the making. We are all in
mortal danger of being made inhuman by virtue of being conformists,
empty consumers, automatons, and cannibals.
One clear message of most post-Romero zombie films is that the zombies are a logical result
of the racism, corruption, greed, violence, and other flaws that already
characterize Americans. Especially in Dawn of the Dead, in which the
survivors shelter in a shopping mall, the parallel is drawn that hell is being
dammed to repeat endlessly the mistakes Americans have made as
hyper-consumers, effecting our own “shopocalypse.”13
Whereas zombies were often cast as black workers in the early
Hollywood films, the vast majority of Romero-forward zombies are figured
as white Americans, and zombie film heroes, interestingly, include black
men often of West Indian decent. It is interesting that Peter, the black survivor/
hero in Dawn of the Dead, offers a theological explanation for the
ghoulish uprising that refers back to Vodou in the Caribbean. It comes in
the form of wisdom from his Trinidadian grandfather, who was “into all that
Obeah and Vodou.” About the zombies, Peter says: “They’re us, that’s all.
When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”
This idea transposes Vodou to deliver a prophetic vision of Christian apocalypse. In a
reversal of the promise presented by the Book of Revelation—of the bodily
resurrection of the saints, who will be given perfect bodies free of disease,
sin, and death—Dawn offers the idea that the zombies are sinners inhabiting
hell, which has backed up and overflowed like a sewer through some
kind of divine abdication of biblical promise.
True to the classic patterns of religious monstrosity, the band of survivors
who fight the chaos monsters are by definition doing battle with
“otherness.” Here the “other” is a monstrous version of the human, and so
like the Christian binary between good and evil, the zombie monster is in
binary opposition—or at least in tension—with what is human. If zombies
are not demonic and therefore not evil, what precisely makes them monstrous
and not-human? Certainly their mindless, catatonic quality renders
them suspect. Gretchen Bakke argues that one index of what counts as
human in film is a character’s capacity to carry narrative weight, to be
“seething with story” (2007:64). All we know about most zombies is that
they were bitten and/or they died. One thing that marks zombies’ status as
inhuman is precisely their lack of narrative freight as individuals. Zombies
are generic, they are nothing except not alive—remnants, remainders.
The main way that we know zombies are not human is their cannibalism,
and this is an interesting way the Romero zombies rhyme with the
Haitian case. The genius of Romero was to figure the zombies as both
catatonic and cannibals. Romero evokes a kind of spectral remainder of
the Caribbean zonbi by reaching back to this iconic historical figure of
barbaric otherness during the age of conquest and colonialism. Recent
scholarship addresses the recurring theme of cannibalism in early African
and American colonialism, beginning with the term’s first use by Columbus
in writing about natives of Hispaniola, now Haiti. Postcolonial scholars redescribe
how the Europeans convinced themselves of the twin facts of
native cannibalism and native inhumanity. Linked across representations
of Africans, Natives, and Jews, the cannibal was a linchpin Other in the
European imagination. The cannibal, writes Elspeth Probyn, “reminds us
of that which cannot be included in the polis, the social life of man. Yet its
very exclusion serves to define humanity” (2000:88). The cannibal functions
in the necessary place of the monstrous other in the quasi-religious
paradigm of zombie films. Perfectly uncanny, the cannibal is the perfect
“something human” outside humanity.
Zombies, Messiahs, and Race
Of course, any secular apocalypse film requires a human messiah hero
who will do battle with the death-seeking “other” that threatens to destroy
the world. Zombie films’ plots center on the survivors, who form a kind of
militaristic counter-insurgency, but who are weakened by conflicts and
power struggles from within. By virtue of being the ultimate survivors, one,
two, or a trinity of survivors emerge. Insofar as they occupy the symbolic
place of messiah in the narrative of apocalypse, what is interesting here is
that from the hero Ben in Night, to Peter in Dawn (see Figure 7), and John
in Day, to Robert Neville in I Am Legend, a central male hero is black, two
of whom are West Indian.
The trend begins with Ben in Night, who as Steven Shaviro writes is
“the sole character in the film who is both sympathetic and capable of
reasoned action...” (1993:87). Self-possessed, direct, logical, capable,
Ben understands the zombie threat and takes decisive action to preserve
himself and the group that forms by happenstance around him in an abandoned
farmhouse. His role is striking, coming in 1968 as it does, in its
portrayal of black male leadership and calm authority, at a time when most
black males in film were peripheral at best, viciously stereotyped at worst.
A white man in the film challenges Ben’s authority, but Ben prevails and
ends up the lone survivor of the zombie attack (up to a point). Peter and
John in the next two Romero films are likewise solid, dependable, capable
black men who strategize and fight their way to survive the zombie outbreak.
All three make alliances with the one white woman in each group,
who also makes it to the post-apocalypse.
Will Smith’s character Robert Neville in Legend is a striking example
of the black male secular messiah.14 Neville is a consummate hero who
has everything: he’s a loving husband and father, dog owner, a US Army
Colonel, and Ph.D. in viro-biology who is in perfect physical, intellectual,
psychological, and moral condition. He has chosen to stay behind in
Manhattan, shouting “I am not going to let this happen,” not only to become
the lone survivor of an infectious pandemic, but to fight off attacking
zombies, shelter any remaining survivors he can find, and find the cure of
the infection to save humanity.
What can we make of the interesting trend that establishes zombies as
the monsters black men are to vanquish? In the successful zombie films I
am considering, black men are, like the spirits of former slaves in Vodou,
once again most efficacious. More than the whites in these films, black
men are exemplars of moral personhood. They all work cooperatively with
the survivors, they fight capably and ethically, and they are nice to the
women. Unlike the trend in action films where the black characters are
among the first to be killed, these black men survive by virtue of their own
character strengths to see a fragile post-apocalyptic future.
A problem here is that black characters in mainstream cinema have
always been made to signify both less and more than themselves. On the
one hand, we get what legal theorist Thomas Ross (1990:2) calls “black
abstraction,” “the refusal to depict blacks in any real and vividly drawn
social context.” On the other, black characters often carry more meaning
than the typical individual character when they are made to signify blackness
in general, in addition to its related associations with looseness, aggression,
sexuality, and other stereotypes.
Related to this, black people have long been deployed “as mirrors that help construct whiteness” in
Hollywood films, as Judith Weisenfeld (2004:308) helpfully notes.
So we might wonder, in turn, what it is about whiteness in zombie
films that the black male messiah characters point to. Here, Richard Dyer
(1988:44) makes a fascinating argument. Blacks in film are often depicted
as lively, musical, religious, as “having more life” than the whites around
them. Whiteness, which appears in mainstream society as “nothing in particular,”
is “revealed in emptiness, absence, denial, even a kind of death.”
Examining the Romero films—and I think we might extend his argument
to other works as well—Dyer argues that blacks in pop culture are often
depicted as “having more life,” and “whiteness represents not only rigidity
but death” (1988:59).
Dyer goes on to say that “In all three [Romero] films, it is significant
that the hero is a black man, and not just because this makes him ‘different,’
but because it makes it possible to see that whites are the living
dead” (1988:59, emphasis added). Zombies are overwhelmingly white in
Romero’s films, and the small minority of African-American zombies have
powdered whiteface. Just as whites in society are “ordinary looking,” and
therefore unmarked as white, as “nothing in particular,” so too are the zombies.
“If whiteness and death are equated, both are further associated with
the USA” (Dyer 1988:60).
In all of these films, the violence of the zombie catastrophe has killed the majority of the population, toppled the government as well as the media, and caused society to cease functioning altogether.
Dyer argues that “What finally forces home the specifically white
dimension of these zombie-US links are the ways in which the zombies can
be destroyed. The first recalls the liberal critique of whites as ruled by their
heads; as the radio announcer says, ‘Kill the brain and you kill the ghoul’
since, it seems, zombies/whites are nothing but their brains” (1988:61).
Romero and post-Romero zombies are cannibals, and white people and
zombies are both insatiably destructive consumers. Bakke writes that that
fact that zombies eat in order to reproduce—since in most zombie films
the zombie bite is what spreads infection—means that eating is “formally
and racially transformative” (2010:414). Eating and consumption are also
what make zombies reproductive and monstrous. Allegorically, excessive,
rampant consumption is what makes white people white and dead.
* * *
A new racial logic seems to be unfolding in action films produced since
the turn of the millennium. Bakke identifies the emergence of a new category
of whites in these films: “zombies, vampires, the virus-infected and
other sorts of hyperwhites—that is, whites over-endowed with traditionally
white characteristics (cultural as well as racial)—have, since the late
1990s, swarmed the big screen...” (2010:407-408).
Zombies, as a subcategory of hyperwhites, are exemplified by the virus-infected in I am
Legend and in 28 Days Later. As Bakke notes, they have blue eyes, white
skin so translucent that blue veins show through, are hairless, and—like
earlier film zombies—have little or no culture or language. It is the hyperwhiteness,
and the death they both embody and spread, that is destroying
human civilization. And it is this hyperwhite apocalypse that the black
male messiah is called upon to destroy. Bakke points out that Neville in
Legend is actually a black man inherently immune to the virus, immune to
whiteness, and that “In making (the black man) into the civilizing agent the
filmmakers turn an old story about colonization, savagery, and skin color
on its head” (2010:424). In these films, the black male messiah must save
humanity from the affliction of whiteness (see Figure 8).
This reading raises a number of critical questions. Is this sub-trend of
black male hero protagonists a progressive one, as these roles feature
positive and sympathetic men who fight to (contingent) victory at the end?
Or are these black male heroes in white-produced films a new way for
white culture to “eat the other” in bell hooks’ (1992) terms, where whites
“spice up” white culture by consuming racial difference?
Is it, as Hazel Carby (1992:3) reads multiculturalism, a way to focus once again “on the
complexity of response in the (white) reader/student’s construction of self
in relation to a (black) perceived ‘other’”? Is white filmmakers’ casting of
black men in the role of the messiah just racialization in a new form, one in
which blacks, as part of having “more life,” are figured as “more religious”?
We might compare the black messiah to the postmodern stock character
Spike Lee has termed “the super-duper magical negro” (Gonzales 2001)
in such films as The Green Mile (1999) and The Legend of Bagger Vance
(2000). In these films and others, a black man with magical qualities appears
out of nowhere to help a down-and-out white person realize their full
humanity or attain a goal (Colombe 2002). Zombie-fighting heroes possess
no magic, but they do function as capable helpmates of their white
allies. Instead of redeeming one single broken white person, the zombiefighting
heroes save (what’s left of) all of corrupt or infected humanity.
It is possible to read the black messiah as an exaggeration of the Magical
Negro, insofar as in zombie films, blackness is figured as a personified antidote
to the problem of whiteness; and black individuals are the planet’s
remediator, rectifier, and redeemer. Yet, arguably, the black male messiah zombie killer is more fully human
than the Magical Negro. These black zombie-killers are not magical,
but are ordinary, imperfect, and just as interested in saving themselves
as in assisting their white compatriots. What is more, the white man
does not end up with the (white) woman in the zombie apocalypse. In all
the films I consider here, the black male is paired with the white female
in the final scenes of the film.
Still, just as the Haitian zonbi myth mystifies the terrorism of slavery and political violence, zombie films displace and mystify the real threats to human survival. Neither nuclear war nor
climate change but rather the walking dead will trigger the apocalypse.
The films foreclose the possibility of organized, cooperative resistance
(since the majority of the population is dead or infected); instead, only a
small band of individuals survive.
An interesting feature of these zombie films is that for better or for worse,
the zombie post-apocalypse is not only black. By the end of the films (with
the exception of Night), the remaining survivors are the white woman and
the black man, and sometimes others. Whether surviving to stay human
by not succumbing to the excessive consumption of whiteness, as in the
Romero films and 28 Days Later, or going so far as to save the future
of humanity by finding the cure to the vicious virus of hyperwhiteness in
Legend, these films all point to a post-apocalyptic future that is multiracial.
Such a future may not bring us new bodies free of disease and death, as
in the Christian story. But the future society will consist of non-white and
multi-raced bodies and, presumably, culture.
Leader of the Zonbis for Obama
Two weeks after the final presidential debate that took place on October
15, 2008 it was time to observe the feast of the Day of the Dead in Haiti.
Every November 1 and 2, the cemetery in downtown Port-au-Prince fills
with people who come to honor their departed loved ones. Decorated
with candles and stacked with plates bearing food offerings, the aboveground
cement tombs are beehives of activity. The deity Bawon presides
over the spiritual affairs of this necropolis and the cross that stakes out his
presence is ringed with people beseeching him for health, food, and relief
from suffering. In 2008, many Haitians added another prayer to their long
list: “We pray for Obama,” they said. “Give Obama health, bring Obama
strength, and let Obama become president.” The head-of-state of the nation
of the dead—and the spiritual leader in charge of zonbis—was being
petitioned to support the election of the popular young candidate who
would become the first black US president.16
A common trope in many commentaries during the presidential campaign
was that the American psyche, wounded by and guilt-ridden over
slavery and racism, longed for the health and wholeness that would be
signified by the election of a black president. In other words, President
Obama would be a Magical Negro to the entire nation; he would rectify
the nation’s many problems, assuage white guilt over racism, and simultaneously
recast black men as reasoned leaders in place of stereotypes
of hypersexuality and criminality. Obama was also referenced in a messianic
idiom; scores of journalists, commentators, and artists either likened
his campaign to the second coming of Christ or noted the instances
where he was described in an exalted, prophetic vocabulary (Ehrenstein
2007).17
Elected in the teeth of an economic super-crisis, Obama was figured
as the zombie-killer who would slay the zombie-banks threatening
to cannibalize the nation’s funds. As the offspring of a white mother and
black father, Obama has also been seen both as a symbol of America’s
multiracial future and as someone with special power and authority to
make it a reality. In quickly casting the stumbling, white, John McCain as
a zombie, the maker of the “cool Obama/zombie McCain” image brought
American zombie films into conversation with the dramatically unfolding
presidential campaign. McCain was associated with the dead and
corrupt cannibalistic policies of the Bush administration, which Obama
possesses the natural “cool” to slay—or just ignore, until they go away.
Zombie mythmaking began in Haitian colonialism as a complicated
engagement with slavery and death-dealing capitalist formations. In
white American books and films, zombie mythmaking became articulated
through, and into, a sign for black barbarism, only to re-emerge
recently as a cipher whose meaning has to do with the death-dealing
qualities of whiteness itself. The zombie has been part-human, inhuman,
slave, revolutionary, cannibal, monster, destroyer, and that which it is
moral to destroy. Insofar as the zombie is a cipher, it can be cast to form
any number of meaning-sets; it is always shifting signification and yet
it can be said to hint at something of the original. After all, we all know
what a zombie is. n
En d n o t e s :
1Image on page 459 accessed from http://cheezburger.com/View/1184086272 in May 2010. Use of images
in this article are by permission, or are reproduced under Fair Use as stipulated by Section 107 of the U.S.
Copyright Act. See Society for Cinema and Media Studies Statement of Fair Use Best Practices for Media
Studies Publishing accessed from http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=positions_policies on May 1, 2011.
2Scores of news articles referred to the “cool” of Barack Obama and his even temperament throughout
the campaign and into his presidency.
3This discussion revisits and expands upon an earlier article (McAlister 1995). For their comments and
encouragement I would like to thank Jill Morowski and Wesleyan Center for Humanities fellows Gretchen
Bakke, Andrew Curran, Joe Fitzpatrick, Peter Gottschalk, Jason Craige Harris, and Letia Perta, as well as
Erol Josue, Christina Klein, Nick Marshall, Pierre Minn, Robin Nagle, Katherine M. Smith, and Gina Athena
Ulysse; as well as discussants following its presentation at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion
including Paul C. Johnson, Patrick Polk, Kate Ramsey, Karen Richman, and all the students in my course
Zombies as Other.
4I will use the Kreyòl spelling, zonbi, when discussing the ethnographic practice or thought about it in Haiti,
and zombie when speaking of ideas and appropriations of the figure.
5Accessed from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100762999 on Feb 17, 2009.
6And it goes on…The University of London hosted a conference in September of 2009 on “Zombomodernism.”
7Even the employed are not making a living wage; in August of 2009 the minimum wage in Haiti was raised
to $3.72 per day, from just $1.75. It is against this background of abject poverty and exploitation that one
must understand the religious arts in Haiti. Positioned apart from the societies of “servants of the spirits”
in Haitian religion, and working alone for clients, sorcerers like St. Jean function through their exclusion
from the normative practices of Vodou.
Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies
484
8This living object surely evolved from both the contained spirits called minkisi, in Kongo religion, and
bocio carvings or bo bottles, “empowered cadavers” associated with the spirits of the dead, in Benin and
Togo Vodun practice. For the latter, see Blier 1995.
9For helpful descriptions and analyses of history and Cubans’ dealings with spirits of the dead, see Palmié
2002, Routon 2008, and Ochoa 2010.
10Davis’ (1988) research sparked great controversy and his hypothesis has not been conclusively validated
to my knowledge, although the high-profile traditional priest, Max Beauvoir, and others, have supported
it. I am not in a position to evaluate the science at issue; my interest lies in examining the social
narratives surrounding people who are claimed to be zombies, which often follow the pattern Davis and
Beauvoir outline.
11An exception to this is Seabrook (1929), who describes Haitian workers as “zombies” who work like
slaves in a description consistent with capitalism.
12Accessed from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NotUsingTheZWord on March 22, 2009.
13This term is coined in the context of anti-consumer activism by performance-artist-activist Reverend
Billy, whose website is Revbilly.com.
14This film is a remake of The Omega Man (1971), in which the “nightseekers” are more like vampires
than zombies, and in which the protagonist was not black; the screenplay of Legend apparently did not
specify the race of its hero. Also, the film’s “second ending” (on DVD only) might change my analysis here.
Nevertheless, the version of the film as released to theaters is what concerns us.
15Accessed from http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/2007_i_am_legend_010.html on May 2, 2011.
16Thanks for this observation goes to Katherine M. Smith, personal communication August 2009.
17See over 100 examples of commentators using messianic language in reference to Obama at http://
obamamessiah.blogspot.com accessed on August 7, 2009.
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Picking out the symbolism of I Am Legend at first is not so apparent at least in my eyes. Reading this article is a huge help in pointing that out. In the article they relate the white zombie theme to the 2008 presidential election where a snapshot was taken of John McCain in an awkward zombie like stance and facial expression. The article explains how “the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama was consistent with a pattern in zombie films since the 1960s where many zombie-killing heroes are figured as black American males” (McAlister). At first i didn't think I would make the connection with I Am Legend until i realized that Will Smith is Black! And that all the Nightcrawlers in the movie are white, hence the “White Zombie” and the “Black Hero”.
ReplyDeleteAs far as The Walking Dead goes, the main protagonist, Rick, is a white man. However, Rick was originally saved by a Black man and his son in the first episode of the first season. This expresses the black male hero stemming from the traditions of early american Zombie stories. And thats not the only example of a black savior in the walking dead. Probably the most evident would be Michonne. Michonne carries a Samurai Katana and is just an all around badass zombie slayer and very important person in the group. She also has a mortal enemy in the “governor” who could easily represent a white zombie because of his secret grotesque collection of zombie heads as well as the eye patch he wears due to the injury that Michonne inflicted on him.
One intersesting bit of information pulled from this article is the origin of the zombie. first off the word zombie originates from the word “Zonbi” which means the return of a persons soul. The word Zonbi can be traced back at least all the way to 1797. it wasnt untill the 20th century when “reports describe not a returned soul but a returned body—a person bodily raised from the grave and turned into a slave worker”(McAlister).
McAlister’s essay approaches zombies in entertainment media from the prospective of her anthropological and religious studies background. She discovers interesting lenses to examine Zombie films and literature that yields meaning in both of these subjects.
ReplyDeleteThe first point that McAlister tackles in her article is the idea that the Zombie figure is one of the few horror figures that we use in western culture that does not come from European legends. Instead it is based in Haitian and other island religious and superstitious traditions. In these contexts, zombies were not simply the mindless living dead, but instead they are slaves for scorers. McAlister questions our original motivation for appropriating these figures and stories and suggests that maybe it was white America’s way of mystifying the slavery and now ongoing oppression of minority groups in America, and natives in lands we have occupied.
We can actually see echoes of this in the modern zombie stories. For example, in The Walking Dead season 3 when the audience is introduced to the gated sanctuary of Woodbury they learn that the citizens regularly put walkers up against each other in cage matches like a sporting event, they watch the living dead tear each other apart and sometimes citizens take part in the slaughter. This put me immediately in mind of gladiators, who were also essentially prisoners and slaves bought and sold as entertainment commodities.
Further into the essay McAlister makes connections between zombies and capitalism and specifically their cannibalism and capitalism. As we have discussed many times in class, Romero used his films often to address capitalism, most obviously Dawn of the Dead which takes place in a shopping mall. Looking at the new I Am Legend film starring Will Smith, I can see the ties of consumerism in the film. It takes place in uptown Manhattan, the shopping capital of America, but takes place in a time some-time after the stores and people have gone away. Our hero is surrounded by towering buildings and colorful advertisements that are slowly being reclaimed by nature and more or less ignored by the hero in favor of more essential human needs. Perhaps the most powerful example of this is the heroes re-purposing of store mannequins into a setup that provides him with human interaction. It is interesting that in this event of having unlimited access to high end fashion and goods, a man instead spends his time talking to fiberglass human figures.