A Zombie Is a Slave Forever
By AMY WILENTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/opinion/a-zombie-is-a-slave-forever.html
ZOMBIES will come to my door on Wednesday night — in rags, eye-sockets
blackened, pumping devices that make fake blood run down their faces —
asking for candies. There seem to be more and more zombies every
Halloween, more zombies than princesses, fairies, ninjas or knights. In
all probability, none of them knows what a zombie really is.
Most people think of them as the walking dead, a being without a soul or
someone with no free will. This is true. But the zombie is not an alien
enemy who’s been CGI-ed by Hollywood. He is a New World phenomenon that
arose from the mixture of old African religious beliefs and the pain of
slavery, especially the notoriously merciless and coldblooded slavery
of French-run, pre-independence Haiti. In Africa, a dying person’s soul
might be stolen and stoppered up in a ritual bottle for later use. But
the full-blown zombie was a very logical offspring of New World slavery.
For the slave under French rule in Haiti — then Saint-Domingue — in the
17th and 18th centuries, life was brutal: hunger, extreme overwork and
cruel discipline were the rule. Slaves often could not consume enough
calories to allow for normal rates of reproduction; what children they
did have might easily starve. That was not of great concern to the
plantation masters, who felt that children were a waste of resources,
since they weren’t able to work properly until they reached 10 or so.
More manpower could always be imported from the Middle Passage.
The only escape from the sugar plantations was death, which was seen as a
return to Africa, or lan guinée (literally Guinea, or West Africa).
This is the phrase in Haitian Creole that even now means heaven. The
plantation meant a life in servitude; lan guinée meant freedom. Death
was feared but also wished for. Not surprisingly, suicide was a frequent
recourse of the slaves, who were handy with poisons and powders. The
plantation masters thought of suicide as the worst kind of thievery,
since it deprived the master not only of a slave’s service, but also of
his or her person, which was, after all, the master’s property. Suicide
was the slave’s only way to take control over his or her own body.
And yet, the fear of becoming a zombie might stop them from doing so.
The zombie is a dead person who cannot get across to lan guinée. This
final rest — in green, leafy, heavenly Africa, with no sugarcane to cut
and no master to appease or serve — is unavailable to the zombie. To
become a zombie was the slave’s worst nightmare: to be dead and still a
slave, an eternal field hand. It is thought that slave drivers on the
plantations, who were usually slaves themselves and sometimes Voodoo
priests, used this fear of zombification to keep recalcitrant slaves in
order and to warn those who were despondent not to go too far.
In traditional Voodoo belief, in order to get back to lan guinée, one
must be transported there by Baron Samedi, the lord of the cemetery and
one of the darkest and most complicated of the religion’s many
complicated gods. Baron is customarily dressed in a business jacket, a
top hat and dark glasses; he’s foul-mouthed and comic in a low, vicious
way. One of Baron’s spiritual functions, his most important, is to dig a
person’s grave and welcome him to the other side. If for some reason a
person has thwarted or offended Baron, the god will not allow that
person, upon his death, to reach guinée. Then you’re a zombie. Some
other lucky mortal can control you, it is believed. You’ll do the
bidding of your master without question.
Haiti’s notorious dictator François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, who
controlled Haiti with a viselike grip from 1957 until his death in 1971,
well understood the Baron’s role. He dressed like Baron, in a black
fedora, business suit and heavy glasses or sunglasses. Like Baron at a
ceremony, when Duvalier spoke publicly, it was often in a near whisper.
His secret police, the Tontons Macoutes, behaved with the complete
immorality and obedience of the undead, and were sometimes assumed to be
zombies under the dictator’s control. I once heard a Haitian radio
announcer describe Klaus Barbie, a Nazi known as the Butcher of Lyon, as
“youn ansyen Tonton Makout Hitler,” or one of Hitler’s Tontons
Macoutes: a zombie of the Reich.
The only way for a zombie to have his will and soul return is for him to
eat salt — a smart boss of a zombie keeps the creature’s food
tasteless. In the 1980s, with Duvalier’s son ousted from power and the
moment ripe for reform, the literacy primer put out by the liberation
theologians’ wing of the Roman Catholic Church in Haiti was called “A
Taste of Salt.”
There are many reasons the zombie, sprung from the colonial slave
economy, is returning now to haunt us. Of course, the zombie is scary in
a primordial way, but in a modern way, too. He’s the living dead, but
he’s also the inanimate animated, the robot of industrial dystopias.
He’s great for fascism: one recent zombie movie (and there have been
many) was called “The Fourth Reich.” The zombie is devoid of
consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has
entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never
goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker
in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North
Korea; he’s the man, surely in the throes of psychosis and under the
thrall of extreme poverty, who, years ago, during an interview, told me
he believed he had once been a zombie himself.
So when kids come to your door this Halloween wearing costumes called
Child Zombie Doctor or Shopko’s Fun World Zombie, offer them a
sprinkling of salt along with their candy corn.
Comments
Post a Comment