October 09, 2008
On the Misrepresentation
of the Haitian Zombie
Defining the Haitian zombie, James Dilworth writes, "A zombie is a dead person who is brought back to life by means of Vodoun or necromancy, destroying his mental faculties in the process." He then adds the following astonishing comment: "Most people consider zombies to be only the stuff of horror books and movies, but they do exist in the present-day Haiti. Thousands of people in Haiti are considered to be zombies, some leading normal everyday lives with families, jobs and are respected citizens."
To make a zombie, Dilworth affirms, the sorcerer - a voodoo practitioner - prepares a potion laced with the puffer-fish poison which, when administered to the intended victim, causes severe neurological damage, affecting primarily the left side of his brain. The victim, he says, "becomes suddenly lethargic and seems to die slowly. In reality, Dilworth claims, his pulse and his respiration are present, but are so shallow that they have become nearly impossible to detect. The victim retains full awareness as he is taken to the hospital, then, perhaps, to the morgue, and finally buried alive. Then, at the voodoo practitioner's leisure, the victim is retrieved from the grave and placed on the commodity market to be sold as slaves. At one time it was said that most of the workers in the sugar cane plantations in Haiti were zombies."
"A zombie," Dilworth says, "will remain in a robot-like state indefinitely, until he tastes either salt or meat. Then he becomes aware of his state and returns immediately to his grave."
The above statements, reproduced almost verbatim, offer a vivid example of the way the Haitian zombie has been described in various media, including the scientific literature. It is a distorted picture that is completely at odd with the true meaning of zombies in the sense intended in the traditional mythology. Each and every statement in the above citations is, to say the least, false. In the following comments, I shall expose the irrationality of the current thinking about the Haitian zombie and in so doing I will explain why the media and scientists from a diversity of academic disciplines continue to deal with the zombie mythology as if it were a real phenomenon.
Dilworth states: paragraph 1, sentence 1: "A zombie is a dead person who is brought back to life by means of Vodoun or necromancy, destroying his mental faculties in the process."
TFZ Comment: It should be noted that, unless one is specifically referring to the Hollywood zombie, it is absolutely wrong to call a zombie a dead person. The Hollywood zombie is without question a walking corpse. It has been conceived as such. As to the Haitian zombie, no matter how one chooses to look at him - as a fictional character in the supernatural world, or as a real person in the objective world - he is a living human being and, except in the metaphorical sense, he has never been dead.
According to this myth, a zombie is someone who has been deprived of his soul as a result of an act or action emblematic of man's inhumanity toward man. It is indeed an article of faith among Haitians that, with the proper ritual, one can expel someone's soul out of his body, usually in retaliation against an enemy, or out of sheer malice. This myth blended with objective reality when Haitians chose to believe that those among them who happen to be mentally impaired and afflicted with certain readily recognizable physical signs, such as a nasal twang, are, in fact, people who lost their soul as a result of foul play. In that cultural setting or mindset, all it takes for someone to qualify as a zombie is a dysfunctional behaviour and a speech pattern that deviates from the normal. There is absolutely no need to show that these so-called zombies have ever been dead, or that they were brought back from the grave, as generally reported.
Thus, notwithstanding the fact that many a Haitian will point a finger at someone and say, "Look, a zombie!" the truth of the matter is zombies do not exist in the natural world, except in the mind of the believer. Reality is indeed what one ends up believing in. I believe this fellow is a zombie, a living-dead, therefore he is!
Unfortunately, to believe in zombies as living-dead is to subscribe also to a set of absurd propositions that includes the duality of the soul -the ti-bon-ange/gro-bon-ange mantra, which is a staple of Voodoo theology - and the belief that so-called zombies are people who had been the victims of foul play as aforementioned.
According to believers, evil or demonic spirits can be induced to enter a person's body, cast the ti-bon-ange out and, in so doing, deprive that person of all cognitive and emotive abilities while the untouched gro-bon-ange attends to the preservation of life. The origin of this myth is the ancient, prehistoric belief that diseases, whatever their nature, were due to the presence of evil deities in the body, and that any cure would depend on one's ability to get rid of these demons. From that point, it did not take much imagination to conclude that these malevolent spirits could also be called upon to enter the body of one's enemies or adversaries, torment them physically, zombify them on occasions and, if need be, silence them. This myth, deeply ingrained in the Haitian psyche, is the core of the traditional belief in the supernatural zombie. This demonic, spell-induced zombification is achieved through devil worship, not with the use of pharmaceuticals or poisons. Demonic invocation in the creation of zombies is however not something one can seriously believe in, unless one is stuck in prehistoric times.
This leads us to paragraph 2, sentences 1-4.
Dilworth states: "To make a zombie, a voodoo practitioner makes a potion that consists mainly of the pufferfish poison ...which is given to the intended victim. This causes severe neurological damage, affecting primarily the left side of the brain. ... The victim becomes suddenly lethargic, then, slowly seems to die. In reality, his pulse and his respiration are present, but are so shallow that they have become nearly impossible to detect. The victim retains full awareness as he is taken to the hospital, then, perhaps, to the morgue, and finally buried alive.
TFZ Comment: First of all, if making a zombie consisted simply in the administration of a poison to someone, then, the invocation of Voodoo spirits, or necromancy, would be a superfluous, pro forma act, in other words, a hoax! Indeed, it would not make sense to be calling on the Devil for help when you already have a poison that can do the job, in which case it would be a garden-variety crime of murder, pure and simple.
Furthermore, it should be noted that zombies can never be the product of Voodoo divination. Voodoo is best characterized as an element of white magic, which is to say, it does not deal with, or condone evil. As in any type of religious activity, Voodoo rituals are carried out to conjure that which is good for humanity. Voodooists, like the followers of the Judaic, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, or any other religious Faith, pray and thank God for healing in times of of illness, for rain in times of drought, for salvation in times of hardship and despair. Voodoo can never be about the conjuration of evil or about causing harm to others. If a ritual is held in the hope of bringing harm to a fellowman or to create havoc in the universe, then, it is not a Voodoo-related ceremony; it would be black magic, or witchcraft. Black magic practitioners are known as bokors, not houngans. Houngans are Voodoo priests who often act as traditional healers (docteur-feuille) owing to their knowledge of the medicinal properties of local plants. Nevertheless, people are generally afraid of Voodoo because of its tarnished image as a form of witchcraft, preoccupied with evil acts.
Second, the idea that zombies are created by administering the pufferfish poison to the intended victim is nonsense. This theory was first advanced by Wade Davis as a foundation for his research, but in his seminal book "Passage of Darkness: the Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie," he had to concede that Tetradotoxin, the pufferfish poison could not account for the manifestations generally attributed to zombification. He went on to propose, instead, a psychogenic theory of zombification, which has been, more or less, ignored. In Japan, for example, where the pufferfish is a common staple of the culinary culture, patients recovering from accidental Tetradotoxin (1,2) poisoning due to pufferfish consumption, show complete recovery with no evidence of brain damage. They come out of the experience in full possession of their mental faculties. There are absolutely no reports in the medical/scientific literature of zombies due to Tetradotoxin intoxication. It is simply not true that Tetradotoxin "causes severe neurological damage, affecting primarily the left side of the brain." This idea, promoted by Davis and reported here by Dilworth, has absolutely no merit.
Third, regarding the claim that "The victims of pufferfish poisoning retain full awareness as they are taken to the hospital, then, to the morgue, and finally buried alive," it must be said that a victim's level of consciousness post-intoxication depends on the severity of the poisoning. A minor intoxication would not necessarily be associated with a loss of consciousness, but a severe intoxication would inevitably cause a profound coma followed by death in the absence of emergency medical intervention.
Fourth, if it were true that the victim was mistakenly buried alive, then, that would mean he/she was not dead when the burial took place. It is indeed a self-evident truth that if you are alive, you are not dead. Why, then, did Dilworth open his lecture positively affirming that "A zombie is a dead person that is brought to life by means of Vodoun or necromancy?" Such a contradictory statement goes to show how specious the entire range of arguments about the real zombie as a living-dead is. In conclusion, unless one recognizes and affirms the supernatural essence of the Haitian zombie, that is, his non-existence in the natural world, it is impossible to make sense of the issue as it is being presented and debated.
Dilworth states: "Thousand of people in Haiti are considered to be zombies, some leading normal everyday lives with families, jobs and are respected citizens."
TFZ Comment: Faced with such a patently absurd statement, one can only wonder, if a person is severely brain-damaged, how, in the world, does he/she manage to lead a normal life, holding responsible jobs? And, in a country with 70 to 80% endemic unemployment, how does one explain that the brainless, apathetic and clueless people manage to get the few available jobs while the able-bodied roam the streets, begging for a hand-out? What happened to the survival of the fittest theory?
In case you were not convinced yet, the following statement should make it evident that the real zombie notion is nothing but nonsense.
Dilworth states: "A zombie will remain in a robot-like state indefinitely, until he tastes either salt or meat. Then he becomes aware of his state and returns immediately to his grave."
TFZ Comment: This statement is truly mind-blowing for what it says about human credulity: it is, undoubtedly, limitless. That Dilworth did not realize that what he was reading about the Haitian zombie was to be taken in with a grain of salt (pun intended) is beyond comprehension. But then and again, he is not alone in this state of confusion, and many a highly regarded scientist has fallen also into the trap. What they all fail to realize is that the zombie issue cannot be subsumed under a single, unitary concept. The zombie they describe is a composite made out of different, ill-fitting parts, namely, one part Hollywood zombie, two parts magical zombie, three parts hoax, one part zombie as metaphor for slave. And they want us to believe he is real. He is not!
1. Yasumoto T, Kao CY: Tetradotoxin and the Haitian zombie. Toxicon 1986; 24:747-749
2. From the CDC. Tetradotoxin poisoning associated with pufferfish transported from Japan. JAMA 1996; 275:1931