August 06, 2009
What Exactly is a "Real" Zombie?
This question keeps recurring despite the plethora of literature dealing with the issue. People are generally thrown in a state of disbelief whenever they are told that "real" zombies or living-dead roam the streets in Haiti without causing the slightest disturbance amongst the general population. Surely, it is because the usual explanation that zombies are resurrected dead people - men and women brought back from the dead without being reunited with their departed soul - raises more questions than it answers. Indeed, repeating the often heard mantra that zombies are "soulless individuals," does not in any way convey a clear meaning of zombie, since the soul belongs to the realm of the Spirit or psychic reality, an esoteric area of knowledge that generally defies understanding.
What exactly is the soul? Some say it is God Himself. Others say it is what make us conscious of our own self, the very attribute of humanity. Because of the conceptual questions concerning the soul, few people, if any, are ready to buy into the idea that to make a zombie, the so-called "ti bon ange," the part of the soul supposedly responsible for your IQ, must be driven out of the body while the "gro bon ange, the other half, is left in situ to maintain life. Such an explanation can only lead to more questions, more confusion. How do you divide the soul and keep the two parts apart? How do you carve out or dissect an immaterial thing? Obviously, the whole notion of gro bon ange/ti bon ange is utter nonsense and should be dropped from any serious discussion. Can anyone remember the last time they had a conversation about the transfer of the soul to a machine by Daedalus! I dare say, a logical explanation, one that does not require a study in religious metaphysics or philosophy, is necessary to clear out the confusion in people's mind. This is the goal of "The Haitian Zombie Secret.".
Written in part as a satire of the Haitian condition as it relates to zombies, "The Haitian Zombie Secret" is a historical non-fiction novel about the evolution of the French colonial society into the Haitian society. It shows that "real" zombies in the magical sense do not exist and yet do exist as a cultural phenomenon presented as a metaphor. A metaphor says that one thing represents another. In the case of the book, the metaphor is that a slave is a zombie, and a zombie culture is a slave culture. There is also the other aspect of zombie as "living dead" in a magical voodoo sense, but the true metaphor in this case is slave as a "living dead." A case is made as to why a cultural reality of a slave island, first to the French colonists and subsequently to the post-independence landowners, is one inhabited by "soulless" people, i.e., zombies. In the second mainly African sense of the zombie metaphor, it can be said that the slaves' souls were ripped from them when they were taken from Africa and shipped to Saint Domingue (Present-Day Haiti) to work on the plantations, and so these slaves were "living dead" as they were rendered soulless, hence the synonimy between the two terms.
Of course, many among the die-hard believers in the magical powers of Voodoo will continue to oppose the idea of zombie as a mere metaphor. Some will cite the legendary Narcisse story as proof that "real" zombies do exist in the material world. Others might pointedly ask, "What about the zombies we saw with our own eyes in Petionville? What were they? Ghosts?"
My answer to them: Read "The Haitian Zombie Secret" or, at the very least, the article published on this site under the title "Connaisez-vous Narcisse? That should clarify the issue.