The Transatlantic Zombie

Sarah J. Lauro

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813575643
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Our most modern monster and perhaps our most American, the zombie that is so prevalent in popular culture today has its roots in African soul capture mythologies. The Transatlantic Zombie provides a more complete history of the zombie than has ever been told, explaining how the myth’s migration to the New World was facilitated by the transatlantic slave trade, and reveals the real-world import of storytelling, reminding us of the power of myths and mythmaking, and the high stakes of appropriation and homage.    Beginning with an account of a probable ancestor of the zombie found in the Kongolese and Angolan regions of seventeenth-century Africa and ending with a description of the way, in contemporary culture, new media are used to facilitate zombie-themed events, Sarah Juliet Lauro plots the zombie’s cultural significance through Caribbean literature, Haitian folklore, and American literature, film, and the visual arts. The zombie entered US consciousness through the American occupation of Haiti, the site of an eighteenth-century slave rebellion that became a war for independence, thus making the figuration of living death inseparable from its resonances with both slavery and rebellion. Lauro bridges African mythology and US mainstream culture by articulating the ethical complications of the zombie as a cultural conquest that was rebranded for the American cinema.   As The Transatlantic Zombie shows, the zombie is not merely a bogeyman representing the ills of modern society, but a battleground over which a cultural war has been fought between the imperial urge to absorb exotic, threatening elements, and the originary, Afro-diasporic culture’s preservation through a strategy of mythic combat.  

1. Slavery and Slave Rebellion: The (Pre)History of the Zombi/e

No slavery! Long live Death.

—Battle cry of Haitian revolutionaries, in Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Rebellion in the Caribbean

On July 30, 1789, a wealthy colonist from the French-controlled side of an island that had previously been known as Hispaniola and that was currently divided between France and Spain, spoke before the one-month-old National Assembly. He said, “The glorious epoch is now arrived when France quits her chains, emerges from her darkness, and is warmed to animation, by the bright beams of the Sun of Liberty” (European Magazine 208). Some might say that it was callous of the Martinique-born white Creole, Messr Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de St. Méry, to draw a comparison between France’s monarchical system and the chains of enslavement, between a nascent republic and a freed slave, when wealthy French colonists like himself had no intention of lessening the plight of the Africans who worked, and would continue to work, the cane-rich colonies of Saint Domingue for their exclusive profit. To Moreau de St. Méry, as in much of the discourse surrounding the American Revolution, the slave’s irons seemed a good metaphor to inhabit, but he wouldn’t want to literally live there.1

Moreau de St. Méry’s statement is an image of resurrection as much as liberation: France is “warmed to animation by the bright beams of the Sun of Liberty.” If we make nothing else of this, we can note that his words intimate that those who are not free are not quite living. And yet it was just a few years later that he would flee to Philadelphia, where in 1797 he would publish his Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’Isle de Saint Domingue, the text in which, according to most dictionaries of French etymology, the word zombi appears in print for the first time. There would have been an interested market for such a volume at the time. In Saint Domingue, the cane fields were burning. The slaves, unwilling to wait for the “Sun of Liberty” to shine on them, were warming themselves to animation by the light of their own fires, a blaze that would become the Haitian Revolution.

Most historians typically begin to tell the story of Haitian independence with the description of the Bois Caïman Vaudou ceremony, a gathering of slaves that involved the sacrifice of a black pig and a blood oath swearing them to carry out rebellion on their own plantations. Antoine Dalmas, who purportedly wrote the first account of the Bois Caïman ceremony in his 1814 Histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue, describes “a black pig, surrounded by objects [the slaves] believe have magical power, each carrying the most bizarre offering, [that] was offered as a sacrifice to the all-powerful spirit of the black race. The religious ceremony in which the nègres slit its throat, the greed with which they drank its blood, the importance they attached to owning some of its bristles which they believed would make them invincible reveal the characteristics of the African” (qtd. in Dubois and Garrigus 90).

Leaving aside the overt bias of its author, this characterization of the Bois Caïman ceremony as uniting the slaves’ religious practice with the spirit of rebellion is not isolated. The witness accounts of the rebel slaves and the early histories of the revolution emphasize that Vaudou played a part in instilling in the insurgents an indefatigable spirit. Jacques Nicolas Léger writes that the Vaudouists, “in order to inspire the slave with confidence in them[,] . . . pretended to possess supernatural powers, such as being able to insure happiness, to make their enemies impotent, and defy death itself by becoming invulnerable” (356). Many ascribed to Vaudou the manufacture of charms—alluded to by Dalmas himself in his reference to hog bristles taken as souvenirs—which slave-soldiers during the rebellion and revolution believed made them invulnerable to bullets. As I discuss, there is a direct line that connects the metaphysical tactics of the Haitian revolutionary and the Vaudou zombie.

In contemporary accounts of the Haitian Revolution, the ferocity of the rebels was denigrated: they were less than men; they were animals or machines run amok. This is the transformation by which the dehumanized slave becomes the inhuman rebel. In contemporary accounts penned by Europeans and former colonists, the rebel slaves were not bestowed with a comparison to the Resurrection, though this vocabulary, as we see in the impassioned speech of Moreau de St. Méry, was the natural conclusion of the narrative when it was a metaphoric slave shaking himself free of his shackles. Similarly, the zombie is not a figure of resurrection but only of living death, and insofar as the zombie metaphorizes both slavery and slave rebellion (an argument I’ve been making since the publication of my coauthored piece “A Zombie Manifesto” in 2008), its ability to represent not merely enslavement, but liberation from that state, is tempered by its irresolvable dialecticality.

The larger project of this book is to illustrate the way that, at various points in its mythology, the figure of the zombie clearly represents one or the other: the history of a people’s enslavement or that of their fierce resistance to oppression. More than a decade after a black pig was slaughtered in the Bois Caïman ceremony and the cane fields were burned, the first black republic declared its independence on the first day of the year 1804, proclaiming that all its citizens would remain forever free of the bondage of slavery. Out of the ashes of a war that had raged for thirteen years and in full view of an empire that had been brought to its knees by the conflict, a new subject did indeed, as Moreau de St. Méry suggested in his address before the National Assembly, come forth out of the darkness, freed of his chains, to take his place among the citizens of the free world, but as a member of the republic of Haiti. This, a nation’s inauguration out of what was once a colony of displaced slaves—a moment redolent of images of birth and rebirth, animation, and resurrection—is also a flash point in the history of the mythology of the soulless, living dead that today we call the zombie. Significantly, the Haitian Revolution is the big bang that gives rise to two dialectical theories of power relations: one we associate with Caribbean folklore, the other with Continental philosophy. Neither pair of oppositions is as simple as it would seem.

Hegel’s theory of the master and the bondsman—which we know from Susan Buck-Morss’s landmark piece, “Hegel and Haiti,” was written as Hegel read, in Jena from 1803 to 1805, accounts of the Saint Domingue slave rebellion that had bloomed into a war for independence (844)—clarifies, first, that the identity of the master is dependent upon the slave for definition and, second, that the consciousness of the slave comes to being through a process of realizing its negative constitution of the master’s existence.2 In the abstract sense in which self-consciousness is concerned, Hegel’s master becomes the slave and the slave, the master.

Furthermore, this turnabout is achieved through a “trial by death,” important, Buck-Morss emphasizes, for its direct implication of slave revolt (849). It is in the process of seeking the death of the other and being willing to risk one’s own life that they each “raise the certainty of being for themselves to truth” (Hegel 114). Hegel writes, “And it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won. . . . The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness” (114). But the gain of this life-and-death struggle, in Hegel’s description, comes to seem like a vanishing point: “This trial by death, however, does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally. For just as life is the natural setting of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so death is the natural negation of consciousness, negation without independence, which thus remains without the required signification of recognition” (114). The self, therefore, may have established itself in its willingness to die, but it will not be around to enjoy the victory.

In the inseparability of the identities “master” and “bondsman,” and in this description of the “trial by death,” for what comes to seem like an infinite deferral of resolution, the master/slave dialectic finds a murky reflection in the figure of the zombie and the zombie’s dialectic. The zombie, as much as it represents life and death in one form—a two-headed monster, a terrible miracle—is also an incarnation of the slave and the slave-in-revolt. At all moments, the zombie’s paradoxical nature—as living dead, neither fully conscious nor completely inert—suggests the inseparability of these figures. In the most negative reading, the zombie’s pathos, its irresolvable dialecticality, seems an apt reflection of a people denied a right to life by their oppressors, many of whom would have to fight to the death for their freedom, leaving the survivors to face a host of challenges in a postcolonial state. Typically, the zombie is not liberated but merely deanimated, though myths can be rewritten.

In a more positive interpretation, the duality of the zombie also makes visible what Michel Foucault would later articulate about the dynamics of power relations. Although Foucault writes, in “The Subject and Power,” “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free . . . [for] slavery is not a power relation when man is in chains, he adds, “There is no face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom which is mutually exclusive (freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complex interplay” (221). He continues: “The relationship between power and freedom’s refusal to submit cannot therefore be separated. . . . Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an ‘agonism’—of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle” (221–22). And later: “Every power relation implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal” (225). One might contend that the wall separating and yet joining the slave and the rebel, as well as the master and the slave, is not a wall at all: it is fleshly, seeping, and porous. It is this movable boundary that we should look to for delimitation of the power relations involved in the institution of slavery, and in its resistance.

One of the central claims of this chapter—and of this book—is that the zombie is not merely an allegory for slavery, but is also representative of resistance; indeed, the zombie itself is an embodiment of one mode of resistance, mythmaking. When we think more broadly about what constitutes slavery and what constitutes resistance, the zombie’s living dead state suggests the difficulty of separating the slave from the slave-in-revolt, an idea that has had traction in the field of slavery studies for some time, with the suggestion that demonstrations of agency aside from overt rebellion are worthy of consideration as acts of resistance, no matter the political or social impact. The zombie’s dual metaphorization of slavery and rebellion continually conveys that the roles are not crystallized, forgive the expression, in black and white: even the docile slave is sometime a rebel and the free man, sometimes still a slave. The same duality is visible in postcolonial Haiti: sometimes, as we will find in studying the zombie myth’s machinations, resistance masquerades as subjugation, the better to fight undetected. Yet similar to Hegel’s “trial by death,” which immediately negates that which it established (being-for-itself), the zombie’s dialectic (always already undead) ultimately refuses any kind of definitive synthesis. The zombie is, after all, not a concrete weapon but a myth, and thus remains mired, like an example of dialectics-at-a-standstill (to borrow a description of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image), in a balancing act on, as Max Pensky puts it, “the unresolvable cusp of oppositions” (193).3

How the zombie functions in US cinema and popular culture today is a complicated issue, for it acts simultaneously as a dramatization of disempowerment (often in the form of a frustrated critique of capitalism) in line with its previous incarnation of slavery and as a fantasy of rebellion against the hegemonic order. The zombie of American cinema is epitomized in George Romero’s oeuvre—from the mall-haunting ghouls of Dawn of the Dead (1978) to the undead legions that follow their leader, a zombie in a workman’s uniform, in Land of the Dead (2005). As in these two examples, the cinematic zombie is a slave to its drives, but it is also redolent of the rebelling mob. It has but one function—to blindly consume—and yet it is relentless in this pursuit. It is a blank, subhuman, negative image of man, and yet, as depicted in World War Z (2013), in a swarm it is powerful, even posthuman. It may stand for the faceless crowd at a distance, but up close the zombie typically bears identifying marks, the traces of its former self—like Johnny with his driving gloves in Night of the Living Dead (1968). In representing simultaneously the individual and the horde, it also tacitly suggests the duality of the state’s mechanism of control as Foucault described it: “both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power” (213). But because life persists where it should not, the zombie is inherently resistant, if only to the forces of nature. This is the most elemental way that the zombie recalls, at one and the same time, enslavement and rebellion. Just as it exists in a state of living death, it dramatizes (non)existence; it belongs completely to neither category; it is ontologically defiant at the same time that it is a nonentity.

Books describing how the zombie morphs from the folkloric somnambulistic slave to the cinematic contagious cannibal have been written for a popular audience, and most well-read zombiephiles now know that the zombie migrated to the United States in narratives written by journalists like William Seabrook (1884–1945) and in the memoirs of Marines stationed in Haiti during the American occupation (1915–34). But the connection between the Haitian zombie and the political history of the country that spawned both it and Hegel’s master/slave dialectic is not merely incidental to its narrative structure; rather, the zombie’s history, its connection to Saint Domingue, the most profitable slave colony in the New World, and to Haiti, site of the slave rebellion that became a national revolution, informs its symbolic mechanism, its dramatization of the dialectic between disempowerment and resistance. This first chapter of the book concerns the history and, what has previously been untold, the prehistory of this figure, looking specifically to the zombie’s ancestors in Africa and its parallels in the Haitian Revolution in order to explain the larger significance of a being that is perplexingly, paradoxically, simultaneously an archetypal figure of subjugation and of active resistance, like the revolutionary’s creed, “Long Live Death!”

This chapter provides an archaeology of the zombie, excavating its African ancestors and in doing so examining the origins of the slave/slave rebellion dichotomy that is so central to the zombie’s history and to its currency today as a cultural metaphor. Tracing the zombie’s earliest migration (not to “America” but to the Americas) and the initial transformation that accompanied this move at last clarifies many inchoate questions concerning the zombie’s association with Haiti and the zombie’s resonance with themes of resistance. As I trace this path, we will see that the zombie’s association with rebellion is actually endemic to the figure and its forebears.

Resistance was always, in some sense, a feature of the zombie’s makeup. The history presented here is critical to an understanding of the ramifications of the zombie’s (mis)translation for Euro-Americans in the early twentieth-century remaking of the myth in cinema, presented in the next chapter, so that we can fully account for the zombie’s transformations, the redactions of certain aspects of the myth and the ramifications of its redirection to suit the aims of a new audience. The zombie’s capacity to symbolize resistance will seem all the more trenchant when those moments are revealed in which the myth itself resists appropriation, refusing to have its historical associations with colonial resistance leached out of it, and instead retains its dual significations.

Yet—with the zombie there is always a “yet” or a “but,” or a “however” and a “nonetheless”—the irresolution of the zombie’s dialectic (not master/slave but slave/rebel-slave) continues to thwart attempts to read the figure as wholly resistive. Mapping the zombie onto the motif of living death in the Haitian Revolution, as I do in the second part of the chapter, reveals that on either side of the binary—for both the historical slave of Saint Domingue in the characterizations of the colonizers and the cinematic zombie—one is confronted not with depictions of men but with nonhuman objects. But if synthesis is impossible in the living dead zombie, catharsis may still be offered, for the myth may have real-world power. This is the field of inquiry that surrounds the zombie’s dialectic, and it will take the full span of several centuries (and the length of this book) to illustrate precisely how it works.

The Zombie Slave

The true history of the technique of zombification, as it was described in Wade Davis’s work in the 1980s, including The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988), which made legible the zombie as the victim of a pharmacological arsenal employed by a witch doctor, necessarily invokes the herbal expertise that was a weapon of the rebel slave.4 One might suppose that it was only once the raw material of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Orthography
• Introduction. Zombie Dialectics: “Ki sa sa ye?”(What is that?)
• 1. Slavery and Slave Rebellion: The (Pre)History of the Zombi/e
• 2. “American” Zombies: Love and Theft on the Silver Screen
• 3. Haitian Zombis: Symbolic Revolutions, Metaphoric Conquests, and the Mythic Occupation of History
• 4. Textual Zombies in the Visual Arts
• Epilogue: The Occupation of Metaphor
• Notes
• Filmography
• Works Cited
• Index