August 05, 2008
Understanding Zombies
“What exactly is a zombie?” I was asked by that lady at the “Gauguin’s Zombie” exhibit at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. She quickly followed up with an other question, adding, “You are Haitian, are you not?”
“Sure, I am,” I responded a bit amused, realizing that she was not referring to the zombie in the exhibit’s title, but, rather, to the zombie concept in the Haitian folklore and mythology. And so began a conversation which went on as follows:
Zombies, I said, are living dead. But, to refer to zombies simply as living dead is to be caught in a vicious circle, for living dead is synonymous with zombie, and to echo this traditional belief as a definition for zombie does not, in any way, advance our understanding of what zombies actually are, or are supposed to be. That is why the mere mention of zombie, either as a concept or an actual being, usually evokes puzzlement, if not a sense of foreboding. In order to grasp the proper meaning of living-dead, one must literally trace the origin of the term back to its African root and show how it evolved over time and come to represent the stereotype that we now know as the Haitian zombie.
First, to avoid any confusion, it should be pointed out that the Haitian zombie bears no resemblance, and has nothing in common, with the Hollywood zombie, except for sharing the deceptive label of “living-dead”. The Hollywood zombie, indeed, is conceptually dead. He was conceived by Hollywood artists as a walking corpse for the sole purpose of horror-provoking ghoulish cinematographic productions. With no cardiac activity, no blood or oxygen flowing to any part of his body, the Hollywood zombie is actually in varying stages of decomposition, which is to say, he is rotting out and his soft tissues are sloughing off even as we watch him move across the silver screen. Needless to say, he is cold to touch and his stench is suffocating. Yet, even in this advanced state of disintegration, he can be counted on to get up and pursue his victims relentlessly, as in “The Night of the Living Dead,” or start dancing with the greatest agility, as in the magnificent choreography of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” At the end of the day, the Hollywood zombie, by design, returns to his permanent home which is the graveyard. As to the Gauguin’s zombie, it is simply metaphoric, hinting at a resurgence of interest in Paul Gauguin’s artistry — a rebirth, so to speak — and nothing more.
The so-called Haitian zombie, by contrast, is a real human being. He is not an imaginary character, not an idea. And, despite the claims to the contrary, he has never been dead. What has earned him the living-dead surname is the ingrained Haitian belief that dimwitted people who are lethargic, maladroit, uncommunicative, or do speak with a nasal twang, are revenant — people who, at one point in their lives, fell victim of an evil spell that sent them to their grave, but, then, were disinterred, reanimated and taken away by the evildoers from whom they eventually escaped. According to this myth, zombies lack the vital ingredient that confers humanity, namely, the human soul which has been surreptitiously cast away by evildoers, separated from the body out of malice, never to be returned.
This belief finds further support in Haitian statutory law which recognizes zombies as victims of Voodoo’s supernatural practices. Under the law, anyone accused of making a zombie is presumed to have initiated the victim’s zombification by way of a Voodoo curse, a crime deemed to be the equivalent of premeditated murder and punishable with life imprisonment, even though the alleged victim is visibly alive. Thus, the Haitian zombie’s existence is predicated on the belief in Voodoo, on the ability of its practitioners to effect profound changes in a person’s state of consciousness, to alter the internal metabolism and the human body and to keep it mysteriously alive when it is in fact dead, all of these with the mere invocation of supernatural forces or spirits. The Hollywood zombie, by contrast, is usually the product of a cadaveric infestation or contamination.
Supposedly, the Haitian zombie population numbers in the thousands. Yet, zombies have no voice in Haitian society. Unable to speak for themselves, they are, generally speaking, ignored by both the public and the government — there is, for example, no Department of Zombie Affairs, no charitable organization dedicated to the welfare of zombies. This is probably because zombies are viewed by most as people who have essentially outlived their worldly existence and no longer deserve recognition by the state. Often, they are shunned even by their own, presumptive family. They are Haiti’s untouchables. Their existence is confined to the Twilight Zone between Mother Earth and the Underworld, which explains their status as perennial wanderers in the Haitian landscape. Thus, while the Hollywood zombie has only one existential dimension — he is simply fiction — the Haitian zombie is two-dimensional and complex. On the one hand, he is real in flesh and bones; on the other, he is a legendary character rooted in mythology, the meaning of which is completely lost in the Haitian consciousness or psyche where it is fused with reality.
Tales of resurrection or reanimation of the dead by local sorcerers have been a part of the Haitian nation ever since the creation of the Republic. The purported practice leading to the creation of zombies received worldwide publicity around the time of the first American occupation of Haiti in 1915 when the Marines brought these bone-chilling tales home and to the attention of the international community. It did not take long, then, before researchers in anthropology, ethnology, sociology and other disciplines became interested in the possible ramifications of these stories, and soon several “scientific investigations” were launched to uncover the secrets of this reputed phenomenon of post-death reanimation. Unfortunately, the publications borne out of these investigations — with one exception (1) — contain little beyond hearsay and the authors’ own prejudiced speculations. However, despite their lack of scientific objectivity, they helped to sustain the notion of zombification as an inscrutable, yet undeniable paranormal phenomenon connected with Voodoo viewed as an animistic African religion.
Given this history, many around the world have come to believe strongly in the existence of true zombies while ill-informed journalists continue to report about stories of lifeless bodies being snatched away from their graves and mysteriously brought back to life to work as unpaid laborers in Haiti’s agricultural industry. For their part, the presumptive zombie-makers revel in the resulting free publicity. They steadfastly refuse to share their purported knowledge with the academic community or, for that matter, with anyone outside of their inner circle. They claim that the cabalistic rituals and the potions needed to bring the dead back to life are trade secrets they have sworn never to divulge. It seems, then, that zombie-making is a business, and those involved in the industry have a vested interest in protecting it against outside invasion or interference. Already, a number of urban entrepreneurs have taken to training otherwise normal people to parade as real zombies in front of European and American tourists, ushering in an era of zombie-tourism. This, of course, represents an ominous trend for the traditional zombie-makers who cannot but feel cheated by these fake-zombies.
One of the most important aspects of the Haitian zombie is that, unlike the Hollywood zombie, he cannot spontaneously wake up, get out of his grave and start acting on his own volition. He has to be commanded to rise from the dead and, once up, he must be prodded into action.
Furthermore, contrary to the angry zombies in ‘The Night of the Living Dead’ movie, or the dancing zombies in the Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ video, the Haitian zombie is incapable of emotive responses. He can experience neither anger nor joy. Indeed, to be a zombie in the Haitian sense is to have lost your soul to the Devil — the zombie-maker or bôkor saw to it — and without a soul, the lone body is all but dead, unable to emote. In fact, with his soul cast away, the Haitian zombie has no way of apprehending conscious thoughts: he is completely unaware of the world around him. He is thus deprived not only of the ability to feel, but also of the ability to know. He is both unfeeling and unknowing, which is why the characteristic facial expression of a zombie is the fixed blank stare of someone who has no clue about anything that goes on around him.
Many find the whole idea of the soul being removed from the body utterly preposterous since the soul, by definition, has no essence and cannot be anatomically located anywhere in the body. Others point out that the “body-and-soul unity” is crucial to the continued survival of the body, and that any disruption of that essential bond would necessarily lead to the withering and ultimate death of the body.
The zombie-makers, then, counter that in their own cosmological view, the human soul is made up of two distinct components, namely, the gro-bon-ange and the ti-bon-ange working in unison, yet independent of each other. The gro-bon-ange, they say, is the animating agent — that which keeps the organism alive — while the ti-bon-ange holds the key to consciousness, to self-agency and all the other faculties that one associates with humanity; in particular, the faculty of language. With the appropriate knowledge and skills, they claim to be able to locate the ti-bon-ange and remove it from the body, leaving the gro-bon-ange behind to sustain life in the body. The result of this operation is someone who walks around unaware of his own existence, of his own humanity, totally oblivious of the world around him. Such an individual, many would argue, is in fact dead.
Be that as it may, the return from the dead is a notion that leaves many in the West confused, since the dichotomy of the soul — or the ti-bon-ange/gro-bon-ange theory — does not seem to make the issue any clearer. While many believe that the real zombie issue is steeped in witchcraft, Wade Davis (2), the Canadian anthropologist made famous by his seminal treatise on the Haitian zombie, theorizes that the process leading to the ti-bon-ange leaving the body is a self-induced psychogenic phenomenon that begins with the implantation of a spell or death-curse in the body of the intended victim. It is, he believes, a psycho-social drama, not something that can be achieved, or induced, with pharmaceuticals. He came to this unsupported conclusion only because he could not prove his original postulate that zombification was a drug-induced state.
“Gosh!” the lady said while I paused to catch my breath, “You should write a book. Really! The world deserves to know the truth abouth this amazing story.” I took her advice to heart, and I wrote The Haitian Zombie Secret.
The Haitian Zombie Secret by Reynold Ducasse is available now through Abebooks, Alibris, and Amazon.
1. Littlewood R., et al.: Clinical findings in three cases of zombification. Lancet 1997; 350:1094
2. Davis Wade, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian zombie, University of North Carolina Press 1988, pp 199-202.