The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures LUP) 1802077995, 9781802077995

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
A Note on Orthography and Translation
Introduction
1 The Zombie Slave
2 The Zombie as Figure of Mental Illness
3 The Zombie Horde
4 The Popular Zombie
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 89

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

TOM CONLEY Harvard University

JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

DEREK SCHILLING Johns Hopkins University

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 77 Maria Kathryn Tomlinson, From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French 78 Kaoutar Harchi and Alexis Pernsteiner, I Have Only One Language, and It Is Not Mine: A Struggle for Recognition

83 Nikolaj Lübecker, Twenty-FirstCentury Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé 84 Ari J. Blatt, The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography

79 Alison Rice, Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music

85 Martin Munro and Eliana Văgălău, Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader’s Guide

80 Antonia Wimbush, Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile

86 Jiewon Baek, Fictional Labor: Ethics and Cultural Production in the Digital Economy

81 Jacqueline Couti, Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses, 1924–1948

87 Oana Panaïté, Necrofiction and The Politics of Literary Memory

82 Debra Kelly, Fishes with Funny French Names: The French Restaurant in London from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

88 Sonja Stojanovic, Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French

LUC Y S WA N SON

The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2023 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2023 Lucy Swanson Lucy Swanson has asserted the right to be identified as the author of this book in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-80207-799-5 eISBN 978-1-80207-651-6 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents Contents

Acknowledgements vii A Note on Orthography and Translation ix Introduction 1 1 The Zombie Slave

25

2 The Zombie as Figure of Mental Illness

59

3 The Zombie Horde

99

4 The Popular Zombie

133

Conclusion 165 Works Cited 173 Index 183

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

A few friends and colleagues were particularly present at various stages of the writing process of this book. Profound thanks to George MacLeod, Nathan Dize, and Jocelyn Sutton Franklin, who provided moral support, helped me work through difficult questions, read portions of this work before it was ready to see the light of day, and were always there. I want to express my gratitude to others who read portions of this book at various stages: Chris Bonner gave wonderfully generative feedback on chapter drafts; friends from graduate school provided community and moral support, read portions of this work when it was in dissertation form, and/or shared their own writing as a model for book proposals: François Massonnat, Lucas Hollister, Anne Bornschein, Samuel Martin, Caroline Grubbs, Romain Delaville, Saïd Gahia, Hervé Tchumkam, and Angelina Stelmach. Philippe Brand and Michelle Bumatay have also provided friendship and stimulating conversation on intellectual and musical matters. I would also like to recognize my brilliant and supportive mentors at the University of Pennsylvania, especially my advisor Lydie Moudileno, as well as Andrea Goulet, Gerry Prince, and Michèle Richman; and Koffi Anyinefa at Haverford College. I wrote or seriously revised all parts of this project between 2020 and 2022, and I could not have done so without the support and friendship of Ania Wroblewski, Kris Knisely, Aurélia Mouzet, and Emily Hellmich, and the mentorship of Denis Provencher, Phyllis Taoua, Carine Bourget, and Fabian Alfie. Farther afield, Katelyn Knox and Allison Van Deventer created invaluable structures and provided support and guidance throughout the first book-writing process, for which I am profoundly grateful. My colleagues at Lafayette College were model colleagues, pedagogues, and scholars. Thank you to Amauri Gutiérrez-Coto, Mary Toulouse, Michelle Geffrion-Vinci, Katie Stafford, Sid Donnell, Daniel

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

Quirós, Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa, Han Luo, Maureen Gallagher, Maggie Levantovskaya, Ute Bettray, and last but not least to Randi Gill-Sadler, whose feedback on an early draft of my book proposal helped me to see the project in a new light. I thank the three anonymous reviewers who offered generous and insightful feedback that have made this book much stronger. Thank you to Charles Forsdick and Chloe Johnson at Liverpool University Press. Numerous other scholars have made this work better and informed the ideas in it. The Haitian Studies Association has been a particularly transformative space—thank you especially to scholars involved in the organization and its intellectual life, who have influenced my work in various ways: Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Kaiama Glover, Alyssa Sepinwall, Nadève Ménard, Mariana Past, and Martin Munro. Portions of this work have also been presented at the 20th & 21st Century French & Francophone Studies International Colloquium (FFSC), the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies, the Winthrop King Institute, and NeMLA, which also led to fruitful discussions and feedback on my work and that of other scholars who have inspired it. The folks in Kwazman Vwa (Jen Boum Make, Nathan Dize, Erika Serrato, Corine Labridy, Jocelyn Sutton Franklin, and Charly Verstraet) have provided inspiration, support, and community during the early days of the pandemic and beyond. I would also like to thank Kaiama Glover and Laurent Dubois for generously allowing me to cite their translation of Jean-Claude Fignolé’s novel Aube Tranquille before Quiet Dawn reached the final stages of publication. Portions of Chapter 1 have been adapted from “Zombie Nation? The Horde, Social Uprisings and National Narratives,” Cincinnati Romance Review 34 (2012). Portions of the introduction have been adapted from my chapter, “Digging Up the (Living) Dead: The Roots of Antillanité and Créolité,” Antillanité, créolité, littérature monde, edited by Isabelle Constant, Kahiudi C. Mabana, and Philip Nanton (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 137–48. I thank the publishers of both pieces for their kind permission to reprint that material here. Finally, thank you to my mother Mary Caughey for her enduring support. Thank you to my father Fred Swanson for long talks on hikes and car rides over the years, and to my stepmother Julia Jones for advice about publishing and academia. And, of course, to Kim and Milo, for making everything better.

A Note on Orthography and Translation A Note on Orthography and Translation

Throughout this book, I use the spelling zombie, standard in popular US English, unless discussing specific forms of zombie found in Haitian Vodou. In quotations, I have preserved the original spelling, including zombi—an orthography common in French-language texts set in Haiti—and the Haitian Creole spelling zonbi. To distinguish from the exoticized popular representation associated with the spelling voodoo, I use the Haitian Creole spelling Vodou when discussing the Haitian religion—and I rely on Creole spellings for terms pertaining to Vodou beliefs. I have cited English translations of the French-language works analyzed in these pages when possible, as indicated in the footnote after the first citation from each work; other translations into English are my own. The English-language quotations from Aube tranquille come from Quiet Dawn, Kaiama L. Glover and Laurent Dubois’s forthcoming translation of the novel.

Introduction Introduction

On July 7, 2021, the day that de facto Haitian president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, the satirical news website The Onion ran an article with the headline “Haiti Faces Constitutional Crisis After Assassinated President Refuses To Step Down.” The article quotes a fictional political scientist who states that the president is “clinging to power from the afterlife” and trying to “extend his five-year term to infinity.” It also states that Moïse appointed “deceased dictator François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier to his cabinet.” The references to Papa Doc (president from 1957 to 1971) and to Moïse clearly satirize the deceased presidents’ attempts to prolong their mandates: the idea of Moïse extending his term “to infinity” refers to his efforts to outstay his five-year mandate and also hyperbolizes Duvalier’s own declaration that he was “president for life.” The vehicle for this satire is clear, although the word itself is not directly mentioned: Moïse is a zombie, speaking “from the afterlife.” The Onion’s satire, like many of the stories in the non-satirical US news media, reduces the narrative of Moïse’s assassination to a story of political intrigue and control. The article is unsettling in its flippant discussion of a politician who was attempting to cement his authoritarian rule when he was killed. The article does not say, but Moïse was assassinated in front of his wife Martine—who was injured in the attack—and their children. The article also ignores the very real peril faced by Haitians broadly as a result of Moïse’s assassination, not to mention as a consequence of his presidency—a presidency plagued by accusations of corruption and violence that will now likely remain unresolved.1 The Onion article does nod to US imperialist intervention 1 In her essay on the assassination in the New Yorker, Edwidge Danticat evokes a massacre of journalists and activists who were demanding transparency

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

by stating, “We haven’t seen anything like this since the US military backed a failed coup to install an undead regime,” and thus suggests the willingness of US leaders to promote unsavory (even zombified) regimes if doing so advances US national interests. Yet in this way the article also contributes to media discourse representing Haitian politics as rife with instability and the problematic influence of “voodoo” and superstition— the kind of clichés that even “reputable” news sources continue to resort to when covering the Caribbean nation.2 The use of the misunderstood zombie figure to disparage Haitian politics and even justify foreign intervention is, of course, nothing new. Moïse’s death, and subsequent calls for the United States to put troops on the ground in Haiti, echoes the assassination of Haitian president Vilbrun Guillaume Sam over a century earlier. The event was used by Woodrow Wilson as a pretext for the first US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 (Wilson was afraid the opposition leader Rosalvo Bobo, who was antagonistic to US economic interests, would come to power). It was, notably, during this period that the zombie proliferated in US popular culture, appearing in films and travelogues as an emblem for the purported barbarity of Haitians.3 These zombie narratives, which take up and transform the legendary figure rooted in the context of chattel slavery, also at times unwittingly reflect Haitian perspectives on the US occupation.4 For Haitians, the Marines’ presence represented a return to foreign rule and forced labor. Indeed, among other forms of imperial control, the Marines used over the PetroCaribe funds that Moïse was accused of squandering just a week before his death. Danticat writes that his assassination is seen as “a denial of government accountability” for corruption and for these deaths. See Danticat, “The Assassination of Haiti’s President.” 2 See, for instance, David Brooks’s op-ed in the New York Times soon after the 2010 earthquake describing Haiti and “the voodoo religion” as “progressresistant” and blaming the nation’s poverty on this fact. See also the Washington Post’s horrific op-ed calling for “swift and muscular intervention” following Moïse’s assassination, arguing that while in the past “U.N. troops from Nepal introduced a severe cholera epidemic in Haiti, and others fathered hundreds of babies born to impoverished local women and girls,” they “did manage, however, to bring a modicum of stability to Haiti.” 3 Even prior to that, the writer Lafcadio Hearn introduced the idea of the zombie to US audiences through descriptions of his time in Martinique in works like Two Years in the French West Indies. 4 See Fay.

Introduction

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existing but outmoded laws regarding the kòve—from the “French corvée, or forced labor crew” (Ramsey 120)—to impel Haitians to build roads. This intervention exemplifies one of many moments when Haiti’s sovereignty has been thwarted by the United States and by its former colonizer, France, since the Haitian Revolution’s culmination in 1804. The nearly thirteen-year fight for abolition—and, ultimately, independence from France—began with the 1791 Bois Caïman ceremony, which is widely represented as having included elements of Vodou ritual. The long and coordinated efforts of enslaved individuals, free people of color, and maroons frightened US officials; afraid that Haiti’s example would inspire similar uprisings at home, the United States did not recognize the nation as a sovereign state until 1862, three years before slavery would be abolished by the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. Yet Haiti’s right to self-governance has continued to be targeted by US and international imperialism, and since 1804 Vodou has been a means for justifying foreign intervention, with the Bois Caïman ceremony that inaugurated the Haitian Revolution serving as a reference in this discourse (consider, for example, Pat Robertson’s calling the 2010 earthquake punishment for the nation’s “pact to the devil”). As part of this broader use of Vodou, the zombie figure has rearisen at various moments since the US occupation to reinforce a vision of Haiti as a land of death and political dysfunction in the US media and popular imaginary. For instance, as Michael Dash noted, the zombie reappeared in films and other US media after the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, coinciding with the HIV/AIDS crisis (when Haitians were singled out as one of the “4 Hs” more likely to be affected by the disease5) and with the ousting of president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the 1990s. More recently, the valence of the zombie is arguably visible in the necropolitics implicit in the journalistic and humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake. While contemporary writers from the French Caribbean take up the zombie in these same contexts, they do so in ways that contest the sensationalization of the figure. Authors representing zombies across the region—including Jean-Claude Fignolé (Haiti), André and Simone Schwarz-Bart (Guadeloupe), and Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique)— reimagine the zombie’s function as a silent, passive, and arguably “ideal” slave—thereby critiquing the ontologies that rendered enslaved revolt “unthinkable” (M.-R. Trouillot) and interrogating narratives 5 See Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination.

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of abolition. Gérard Chenet contests the idea of Haitian Vodou as barbaric by positing it as a source of healing from US imperialism. If Frankétienne uses the zombie to think through the conditions for collective political action during the Duvalier regime and beyond, Dany Laferrière subsequently indicates the limits of the zombie as an allegory for national narratives of Haiti (including those posited by the US media). For his part, Gary Victor uses the living dead to critique the superstitions of the Haitian populace as well as the exploitation of these beliefs by local and global elites in faux-populist political campaigns both during and after Aristide’s presidencies. And, while René Depestre’s works have been analyzed in terms of auto-exoticism, he also seeks to restore the zombie’s complex epistemological significance in Haiti soon after ethnobotanist Wade Davis claimed to offer a medical “explanation” for the figure. Contemporary fiction by authors from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe thus shows how the zombie continues to function as a complex, iconic, and ever-evolving figure in the Caribbean imaginary—a figure that is used to critique political power and its very real effects on the lives of those in the region. As the reference to Wade Davis may suggest, even academic discourse has sensationalized and misunderstood the zombie figure’s significance.6 This is an issue I have grappled with while writing The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction. Working as a white scholar in the academy of the Global North, particularly from within a former and current imperial power in Haiti, is a fraught position from which to engage the zombie. In the pages that follow, I have sought to foreground the voices of the French Caribbean writers who deploy the zombie in their fiction, asking how and why they have chosen this particular narrative vehicle—and what their reimagining of it signifies. To do so centers the Caribbean avatars of the living dead in discussion of the zombie, in contrast to many works in the field of zombie studies that view the Caribbean zombie as little more than a footnote or preface to analyses of the “cannibal,” “modern,” or “Romero” zombies typically said to have first emerged in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). My research in The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction also draws on a wealth of research by scholars in Haitian and Caribbean studies, and is thus rooted in the rich work of 6 Claudine Michel noted in 2016 that Haitian studies were at a kalfou danje/ re—the expansion of the field representing immense promise but also “the danger of creating narratives that exceptionalize Haiti detrimentally” (196).

Introduction

5

literary scholars, historians, and others who have seriously and critically analyzed narratives about the Caribbean from decolonial perspectives— perspectives that are particularly relevant to analyses of the zombie figure. If The Onion article epitomizes a long legacy of the zombie being used to shore up twentieth- and twenty-first-century imperialist projects in Haiti, the legendary figure has centuries-old roots in European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. Scholars have traced the term etymologically to African spirit beliefs that concern soul theft and forced labor, suggesting that the zombie first emerged in the French Caribbean as these beliefs adapted to reflect the context of colonial enslavement.7 Maximilien Laroche writes that “[t]o speak of the character of the Haitian zombi […] is to speak of the evolution of African myth into Haitian myth, of a process by which the African, as he became a Haitian, was able to retain the essential nature of his heritage and at the same time renew it” (“Myth” 44).8 It seems the same is true of the zombie in Martinique and Guadeloupe, although the figure takes on different forms—what I call zombie avatars—in Haiti and the French Antilles. Today, the zombie represents the memory of enslavement in the popular imaginary across the French Caribbean.9 7 Ackermann & Gauthier offer an overview of the previous body of anthropological work on these origins in their article “The Ways and Nature of the Zombi.” Lauro offers a compelling and more recent analysis in the first chapter of The Transatlantic Zombie. 8 “Parler […] du personnage du zombi haïtien, c’est parler du passage du mythe africain au mythe haïtien, d’une opération par laquelle l’Africain devenant Haïtien a su tout à la fois sauvegarder l’essentiel de son héritage et le renouveler” (Laroche, L’image 180). 9 This term refers broadly to the French-speaking areas in the region, in contrast to “French Antilles,” which is used specifically to describe the French overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe. One other notable work discussing the zombie within a former French colony is Dominican-born Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which famously reimagines Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha Mason, also known as Antoinette Cosway, the Creole bride of Mr. Rochester. The zombie serves as a recurring motif in the novel, reflecting dispossession and the perceived threat of the exotic(ized) Caribbean. In a broader Caribbean context, the Jamaican writer Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988) uses the zombie metaphor—“Flesh that takes directions from someone” (108)—to describe the alienation of one character in the face of cultural appropriation by a white writer from the United States. The figure has also been taken up by writers from the hispanophone Caribbean and its diaspora, including the Puerto Rican

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

Arguably the most iconic form the zombie takes in Haiti (although perhaps not the most widespread), is that of the soulless body or zonbi kò kadav—an individual who has been buried and revived after a portion of their soul has been stolen by a bòkò or sorcerer (not to be confused with an oungan or Vodou priest) and/or who has ingested a zombifying powder provoking a catatonic state.10 (Anthropologists and sociologists varyingly indicate that it is the ti bon anj or the gwo bon anj that is captured, but it is generally described as the part of the soul containing personality, will, consciousness, and memory (Ackermann & Gauthier 469).) Forced to perform manual labor, a “zombi’s life is seen in terms that echo the harsh existence of a slave” (282) in colonial Saint-Domingue.11 The zombie is therefore not just the walking dead, but walking Haitian history. In 1988, sociologist Laënnec Hurbon noted a “veritable epidemic” (“véritable épidémie”) in Haiti of real-life tales of individuals returned from zombitude in recent years (Barbare imaginaire 83). This “epidemic” might also be seen in Haitian literature—because it is such a fascinating figure, the kò kadav is the predominant form of zombie found in the literary works of Haitian authors and, therefore, in this book. The counterpart to the Haitian corporeal or bodily zombie is the spirit zombie or zonbi astral. This zombie is described as consisting of the bon anj, the portion of the soul that is stolen to make the kò kadav, or which may be taken from near the graves of the “recently dead,” as Elizabeth McAlister calls them; these zonbi can also be made to work, performing spiritual labor as in rara ceremonies (102). Compared to these two Haitian avatars of the living or “recently” dead, the zombie in Martinique and Guadeloupe is quite different: it is defined as a shape-shifting evil spirit who leads writer Mayra Montero’s short story “Corinne, Amiable Girl,” about a young woman zombified after she rejects a suitor, and Dominican American writer Junot Díaz’s “Monstro”—about a disease from a fungus originating in Haiti—which has also been read as a sort of zombie narrative. For more on the ecological valences of the zombie in Latin America and the broader Caribbean, see the work of Kerstin Oloff. In the Caribbean cinematic realm, Juan of the Dead (Juan de los Muertos) uses the zombie to create a complex critique of both US imperialism and the Cuban political and social landscape. 10 Wade Davis’s controversial Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988) claims to identify the key ingredients of the zombie powder, but was critiqued as being unreproducible in a lab. 11 “L’existence des zombis vaut, sur le plan mythique, celle des anciens esclaves de Saint-Domingue” (Métraux 251).

Introduction

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those wandering at night to their death—a symbol, according to Aimé Césaire and René Ménil, of the dangers posed to the maroon or freedom-runner. Although rooted in the context of slavery and colonization, the zombie serves as a distinctly anticolonial narrative vehicle for French Caribbean culture. If the kò kadav can seem to make Haitians the enslavers, the myth itself nevertheless serves as a critique of enslavement and colonization. Moreover, contemporary writers from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe have reimagined the zombie, transforming it from a symbol of the enslaved into a vehicle for representing contemporary socio-political situations, but thereby tying them to the legacy of colonization. Whereas The Onion’s satire of Moïse’s attempt at dictatorship mentions only in passing the ongoing intervention of the United States and United Nations in Haitian politics, French Caribbean authors have turned to the zombie to make nuanced and complex political allegories and commentaries on international intervention and national narratives. Since the mid twentieth century, writers from Haiti have used the zombie in their literary fiction as a way to critique the Duvalier dictatorship, the second US occupation of Haiti during the 1990s, and ongoing struggles for democratic governance. In the French Antilles, writers have used the figure to conceptualize various aspects of Martinican and Guadeloupean identity—including the neocolonial status of the islands—at least since theories of antillanité and créolité began to coalesce in the 1970s and 1980s, if not even earlier, when négritude founding fathers Césaire and Ménil published the journal Tropiques in Martinique during World War II. Recent authors from the French Caribbean have also returned the zombie to the context of the colonial slave trade to represent the resistance of the enslaved and the contemporary resurgence of this historical memory. These literary works interrogate the widespread association of the zombie with the enslaved, yet they also foreground a variety of other aspects of the zombie. Specifically, these depictions coalesce around avatars of the zombie—those forms most often associated with the living dead figure in literature, anthropology, and film. In this book, I study four zombie archetypes: the slave, the trauma victim, the horde, and the popular zombie. In using these avatars, French Caribbean novelists call upon and reimagine tropes about the living dead that circulate both within the region and in what I call the global zombie imaginary, a body of narratives representing the legendary figure that crosses genre, media, and national boundaries. While I gesture towards the ways the

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

avatars ripple out into these global narratives (a potential area for future research given the recent proliferation of zombie narratives in places including South Korea, India and Israel), the primary focus of this book is on the zombie’s regional manifestations. Specifically, authors from the Caribbean use the zombie as a vehicle to critique those representations of the living dead that malign Haiti; to criticize internecine political conflicts or the neocolonial status of Martinique and Guadeloupe; and to reappraise the figure’s origins in the colonial French Caribbean. Writers from the region thus contribute to the continual metamorphosis of the zombie, with its roots in the adaptation of African beliefs and recent permutations spreading virally in B movies and video games. That is to say, even as the zombie has been appropriated by North American popular culture, it has also continued to evolve in the French Caribbean, at times in ways that parallel the “cannibal” zombie for reasons tied to the region’s unique socio-political realities. The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction traces the zombie’s evolution in recent Haitian fiction while attending to the significance of the figure in the broader French Caribbean as well. The first chapter takes a panoramic view of the zombie in the French Caribbean, looking at zombies from Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique, and exploring how the figure’s representation and significance differ between islands. The subsequent chapters narrow their focus to Haiti, where literature has explored the zombie’s narrative potential beyond symbolizing the enslaved in particularly adventurous and rich ways. This allows for a deep analysis of the zombie’s function as a vehicle for interrogating distinct socio-political contexts in Haitian history, thereby elucidating the figure’s literal and symbolic metamorphoses within this literary corpus and as a means of critiquing narratives of Haiti imposed from outside the nation. If the Haitian zombie takes on a particularly diverse array of literary forms, the zombie’s connection to the socio-historical context of the colonial slave trade nevertheless defines its avatars across the Caribbean. This connection differentiates the Caribbean zombie from creatures from Pygmalion’s Galatea (a statue brought to life by Venus after its sculptor fell in love with his creation), medieval European revenants (corpses spontaneously reanimated and driven to seek revenge), the Golem (a humanoid made of clay and ritually animated to protect Jewish communities against anti-Semitic attacks), or Frankenstein’s monster (a piecemeal corpse allegorizing the dangers of modern science). Moreover, as I demonstrate, the zombie as understood in Haiti also seems to influence writers from the French

Introduction

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Antilles, suggesting a connection not just through folkloric roots, but also through literary and textual pathways. The literary traces of the zombie in the French Caribbean date back centuries. Scholars widely cite Le Zombi du Grand-Pérou; ou, la comtesse de Cocagne (1697) by Pierre-Corneille Blessebois as the first textual reference to the word zombi in any language.12 This libertine novel set in Guadeloupe uses the term zombi in polyvalent ways, including to describe rendering the eponymous countess invisible (or so she believes) and to describe mischievous spirits (who echo the shapeshifting spirits described by Césaire and Ménil, although they seem less malevolent). The Zombi du Grand-Pérou associates the zombie with superstition and seduction, as, according to the narrator, the countess’s beauty “is unadorned by chastity, modesty, or shame” (2).13 This association between the zombie and lasciviousness reappears in the first reference to the figure in the context of colonial Saint-Domingue. Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1796) describes a young, enslaved woman’s nocturnal fears as she awaits her lover. A footnote defines zombi as a “Creole word meaning: spirit, revenant” (52).14 These definitions of the zombie differ from its contemporary avatars in the French Caribbean, but show clear ties through their connection to spirit beliefs.15 The zombie’s association with superstition and sexuality in the colonial French context reverberates in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury US representations of the figure, which constitute the next major body of textual zombie narratives.16 Lafcadio Hearn’s travel writing was one of the earliest bodies of work to introduce the zombie to audiences in the United States. While Hearn worked as a correspondent in Martinique for Harper’s Magazine, he wrote the book Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), which documents the zombie as part of local superstition. According to Hearn, the word zombie is “perhaps full of mystery even for those who made it,” noting the difficulty of defining it, but stating, 12 See Garraway, Lauro, and Murphy. 13 “n’est point ornée de chasteté, de modestie, ni de pudeur.” 14 “Mot créole qui signifie: esprit, revenant.” 15 See Lauro. 16 Here I am designating, specifically, texts using some form of the term “zombie,” rather than implied or proto-zombies. See Lauro on the latter. See ParavisiniGebert on eroticized zombie women.

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

“One form of the zombi-belief […] would seem to have been suggested by […] that form of nightmare in which familiar persons become slowly and hideously transformed into malevolent beings. The zombi deludes under the appearance of a travelling companion, an old comrade—like the desert spirits of the Arabs—or even under the form of an animal” (Two Years 290). (This description of the Martinican zombie’s mutable, indefinable characteristics would serve as a source for Césaire and Ménil in their description of the figure in Tropiques in 1942.) In 1929, nearly forty years after Hearn documented Martinican beliefs about zombies, William Seabrook popularized the Haitian corporeal zombie in his travelogue The Magic Island. Published near the end of the first US occupation of Haiti, the work’s descriptions of zombie laborers working in the sugar cane fields of the Haitian American Sugar Company, or HASCO, are now iconic, and they inspired many other travelogues and films. Perhaps the best-known of these was the first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie (1932), which once again used the zombie to characterize the French Caribbean through the lens of titillation and superstition, in this case by tying “voodoo” to the sexual exploitation of a white American woman visiting Haiti. Such representations have widely been linked by scholars to efforts to maintain the US occupation of the island nation.17 This increased popular interest in the zombie in the late 1920s and early 1930s was followed by a similar surge in visits to Haiti by anthropologists from the United States and Europe to study Vodou—and the zombie—in the following years. African American anthropologists Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham received Guggenheim fellowships to visit the island nation in the 1930s, detailing their experiences and observations in Tell My Horse (1938) and Island Possessed (1969), respectively. Both women were influenced by fellow anthropologist Melville Herskovits, known for his theories linking African American cultural elements to their diasporic roots. (Herskovits also describes the zombie figure in Life in a Haitian Valley (1937).) Later, Kyiv-born experimental filmmaker Maya Deren studied under and worked for Dunham in her dance studio and subsequently wrote Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti (1953) about Vodou ceremony, followed by a 1954 documentary film of the same title. Also notable in this period is Alfred Métraux’s widely known Voodoo in Haiti (Le Vaudou haïtien, 1958), based on his experiences directing the UNESCO Marbial Valley anthropological 17 See Ramsey and Fay, among others.

Introduction

11

survey from 1948 to 1950. All of this research was linked by an interest in the impact of the African diaspora in the Americas.18 Of course, this concern with returning to the African roots of Haitian culture was also something Haitian writers and artists were exploring by the 1930s, in part in response to the US occupation. Jean Price-Mars’s Ainsi parla l’oncle (So Spoke the Uncle, 1928) calls the Francophile elite to task for its bovarysme collectif, suggesting that it instead look to Haiti’s ties to the African diaspora to understand the roots of Haitian culture. The Revue indigène, created in 1927, “celebrated national culture in implicit opposition to the assimilatory politics of the 1915–34 US occupation” (Perry 50). One of its founders, the writer Jacques Roumain, would go on to establish the Bureau d’ethnologie in 1941 (Ramsey 210, ctd. Benedicty-Kokken 152n.19) in response to a different threat to Vodou: the anti-superstition campaigns of the Catholic church, which sought to repress the religion, destroying drums and other tools of Vodou ceremony. The Revue indigène also inspired a group of young intellectuals that included François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. The future dictator co-founded the journal Les Griots in 1938. The revue contains the seeds of Duvalier’s noiriste ideology, although it would not coalesce until later (Smith 26). One of the elements of “authentic” Haitian culture promoted by Les Griots and by Duvalier’s later noirisme was the Vodou religion. After Duvalier père was elected in 1957 and proclaimed himself President for Life in 1964, he became known for cultivating an association between himself and Baron Samedi—the lwa or Vodou god of death who often controls the creation of zombies (Cussans 181). It is in this context that the zombie came to occupy a significant place in Haitian literature—that is to say, as scholars including Kaiama Glover and Sarah Juliet Lauro have noted, during the dictatorial regime of the Duvaliers. The year before Duvalier was elected, the surrealist poet and former director of Les Griots Clément Magloire-Saint-Aude would publish the short story “Veillée” (1956), in which the narrator observes the corpse of a young woman during her wake, her eyes apparently staring back at him (the implication, of course, being that she is a zombie). This work was followed just four years later by the publication of Jacques Stephen Alexis’s short story “Chronicle of a False Love” in Romancero aux étoiles (1960), which could be read as the first zombie allegory of the Duvalier regime (published the year before Alexis 18 See Benedicty-Kokken on the political and humanitarian agendas behind this interest (144–51).

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

would be killed by the tonton makout). In the 1970s, numerous novels by writers of Haitian origin referenced the zombie, within the context of Duvalier père’s authoritarian rule: notably including Frankétienne’s Dézafi (1975) and Gérard Etienne’s Crucified in Haiti (Le Nègre crucifié, 1974), as well as Romulus Pierre’s Les Zombis en furie (1978).19 Other Haitian writers would revisit the tropes explored in these novels and others in the decades to follow, including René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, 1988), winner of the Prix Goncourt; Dany Laferrière’s Down Among the Dead Men (Pays sans chapeau, 1996), set during the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power under the second US occupation of Haiti; and Gary Victor’s numerous, genre-crossing works reviving the zombie between 1997 and 2009. These works form most of the primary corpus studied in The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction.20 While the zombie in Haitian fiction has been tied to the Duvalier regime and its political reverberations in the post-dictatorship context, writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe used the zombie figure during roughly the same period to interrogate another question: that of French Antillean identity. Much as the Revue indigène and Les Griots would locate Haitian cultural authenticity within the realm of Vodou and the popular imaginary, authors from Martinique in particular used the zombie legend to illustrate and think through the cultural legacies of colonization and enslavement. Aimé Césaire and René Ménil’s aforementioned contribution to Tropiques, entitled “Introduction au folklore martiniquais” (1942), presents the zombie by citing Hearn’s mention of a shape-shifting evil spirit in local folklore, but centers the figure within the context of “the hunt for maroons,” “informing,” and “the time of great fear and universal Suspicion” (9).21 This framing locates the origins of Martinican folklore—emblematized by the zombie figure—in the 19 As Lauro notes, the zombies in the latter work are controlled by enemies of the government in power, rather than by the dictator himself (130). 20 There are a few texts representing characters that are merely zombie-like that I do not study within these pages—notably Stanley Péan’s Zombi Blues (1996), Lyonel Trouillot’s Thérèse en mille morceaux (2000), Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Les Possédés de la pleine lune (1987), and Anthony Phelps’s Moins l’infini (1972). 21 “La chasse ‘aux marrons,’” “la délation,” and “le temps […] de la grande peur et de l’universelle Suspicion” (9). The first part of this list uses inverted commas to highlight a play on words: marron also means “chestnuts.” This might seem to equate the authors’ critique of the colonial system’s ability to liken violence against Black bodies with a playful pastime such as foraging.

Introduction

13

context of colonial enslavement. Decades later, in Caribbean Discourse (Le Discours antillais, 1981), Edouard Glissant writes “Just as the Martinican seems to be simply passing through his world, a happy zombi, so our dead seem to us to be hardly more than confirmed zombis” (59).22 Glissant makes this statement in response to the question of whether any traces of African beliefs about death remain in Martinique, implying that there are none (moreover, according to Glissant, because Christian beliefs do not come from within the community, they do not satisfy this lack).23 The zombie thus signifies a spiritual unrootedness. In contrast, in their manifesto In Praise of Creoleness (Éloge de la créolité, 1989), Chamoiseau and his co-authors Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant call on writers from creolized cultures to incorporate their cultural heritage into their writing, including among others an appeal to “accept again without any judgment our ‘dorlis,’ our ‘zombis,’ our ‘chouval-twa-pat,’ ‘soukliyan’” (897).24 That is to say, for the créolistes, the zombie is part of a body of folk beliefs that represent creolized cultural authenticity. The zombie therefore appears in these works where literary movements from négritude to créolité were theorized as a way of thinking through the cultural identity of Martinique in relation to both the diasporic homeland and the (neo)colonial power—a task that reflects the distinct political status of the French Antilles. In Guadeloupean and Martinican literary fiction, many of the references to the zombie appear as motifs offering a meditation on loss, living death, and enslavement, as for instance in the case of the toponym “Fond Zombi” in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s The Bridge of Beyond (Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, 1972), or of references to the spirits which the titular freedom runner avoids in Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man (L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, 1997). These Antillean literary zombies may also represent the unpredictability of life, as is the case 22 “Tout comme le Martiniquais semble de passage sur sa terre, un zombi heureux, tout ainsi nos morts ne nous paraissent guère plus que des zombis confirmés” (Discours antillais 125). All quotations in English come from the translation by J. Michael Dash. 23 This is in striking contrast to Maximilien Laroche’s previously cited assertion that “[t]o speak of the character of the Haitian zombi […] is to speak of […] a process by which the African, as he became a Haitian, was able to retain the essential nature of his heritage and at the same time renew it” (“Myth” 44). 24 “Réadmettre sans jugement nos ‘dorlis,’ nos ‘zombis,’ nos ‘chouval-twa-pat’” (40). All quotations in English come from the translation by Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar.

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

of references to the spirits troubling the protagonists of Gisèle Pineau’s The Drifting of Spirits (La Grande drive des esprits, 1993). In Maryse Condé’s seminal Crossing the Mangrove (Traversée de la mangrove, 1989), the mysterious Francis Sancher equates his zombie-like state with his impending mortality: “I’m more or less a zombie trying to capture with words the life that I’m about to lose. For me, writing is the opposite of living. I confess to impotence” (283).25 Although his allusion to the zombie refers to the way his obsession with his own death has consumed his existence—making him living dead even before his time—this description of writing as a way of recording ones’ own consciousness and existence, preserving it in a liminal state, also seems to equate writing with zombitude in a way. These allusions all speak to the metaphorical valence of zombies in Antillean fiction. However, zombies also appear as central characters in some works interrogating the legacy of enslavement and colonization in Martinique and Guadeloupe. I study two of these novels—Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows (Chronique des sept misères, 1986) and André and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude (La Mulâtresse Solitude, 1972)—in Chapter 1 of this book. These zombies offer rich sites of inquiry and are linked with the Haitian fictions studied in that and other chapters because they show the influence of the zombie–slave (and the zombie tout court) as a character, even as the writers in question reimagine the avatar to consider the context of the French Antilles. My approach to studying these literary zombies is informed by the research of scholars both in the fields of Haitian and francophone studies and in zombie studies. To the former, as the first book-length study of the living dead figure in French Caribbean fiction, The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction offers a more complete vision of the diverse forms the zombie takes in literature by writers from the region. Scholars including Kaiama Glover and Rachel Douglas have discussed the polyvalent nature of the zombie in Haitian fiction, exploring, respectively, its usefulness for writers associated with the Spiralist movement (and others) and its function in allegories of the Haitian Revolution in literature.26 The scholarly dialogue has paid 25 “Moi presque zombie, j’essaie de fixer la vie que je vais perdre avec des mots. Pour moi écrire, c’est le contraire de vivre. C’est mon aveu de sénilité” (Traversée 221). 26 See Glover’s Haiti Unbound and Douglas’s “Haitian Revolutions in Literature.”

Introduction

15

particular attention to the zombie’s symbolic function as an emblem of both enslavement and revolt, which is the overarching focus of Sarah Juliet Lauro’s chapters examining the Haitian zombie in The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death. While The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction begins by reexamining the zombie–slave avatar, it subsequently identifies and explores other tropes that define the figure in the region’s literature and beliefs—and that, at times, also characterize the zombie as portrayed outside Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. In zombie studies, the Caribbean zombie, as previously mentioned, often appears as a footnote to explorations of the cannibal or Romero-style zombie, perhaps due to the field’s focus on visual culture and, to a large extent, anglophone works (with notable exceptions, of course, such as early Italian and recent Korean zombie films and television shows). This means that the way the zombie has continued to evolve beyond symbolizing enslavement in the Caribbean is often absent from the scholarly conversation in the field of zombie studies, reinforcing the obfuscation of this history of the zombie and making it difficult to fully take stock of the figure’s dynamic migrations and metamorphoses (including, for instance, how the zombie horde proliferated in Haitian literature at roughly the same time that it began stalking the screen in Night of the Living Dead).27 The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction re-centers Haiti and the Caribbean in discussions of the living dead icon. This book also contributes to the growing body of work on the zombie in prose fiction as opposed to visual culture.28 While drawing on ideas about the symbolic function and transformations of the zombie by scholars such as Lauro, Peter Dendle, and Steven Shaviro, I read the zombie figure in relation to Vodou and French Caribbean 27 Sarah Juliet Lauro’s Transatlantic Zombie (2015), Roger Luckhurst’s Zombies (2015), Toni Pressley-Sanon’s Zombifying a Nation (2016), and Chera Kee’s Not Your Average Zombie (2017) are all notable exceptions, offering significant meditations on the zombie as represented in the Haitian context. John Cussans’s Undead Uprising (2017) might also be included among these works, although his study of the “zombie complex” does not exclusively explore the living dead figure, instead focusing on a wide range of historical and cultural phenomena related to zombitude (e.g., mesmerism, Vodou, Baron Samedi). 28 As their titles imply, both Tim Lanzendörfer’s Books of the Dead (2018) and Kyle Bishop and Angela Tenga’s edited volume The Written Dead (2017) meditate on the growing body of zombie fictions in English, with a primary focus on the modern or cannibal zombie.

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

politics and culture, and I question the assumption in some zombie studies research that the Haitian zombie is a fixed tradition from which the cannibal zombie evolved. Instead, I show how writers from the French Caribbean contribute to a constantly shifting legend. I also allude to the ways these narrative transformations of the legend run parallel to or are influenced by global zombie narratives. As stated above, this book is organized around the concept of zombie avatars—archetypes of the living dead figure that appear frequently in fiction and popular beliefs. The term avatar refers in Hinduism to the bodily manifestation on Earth of a god, and it has recently been appropriated to describe a figure representing a player or person in video games and computer programs.29 I use it to examine how the core concept of the zombie changes in different contexts within the French Caribbean and to point to the evolution of these manifestations of the myth within the global zombie imaginary. Much as the word avatar in the Hindu or digital context refers to emblems that act as agents for other beings (divine or human) in the earthly or digital realm, the zombie’s distinct avatars reflect the core legend of dehumanization, otherness, and alienation. More than simple types, these avatars highlight different aspects of the zombie myth that are used to represent and critique distinct ontologies, discourses, and socio-political realities. Notably, these avatars can be labeled as such because they function—perhaps paradoxically, given the zombie’s traditional lack of volition—as narrative agents for the zombie legend, particularly in the hands of French Caribbean writers. Through their intertextual reiterations, these avatars work to decolonize or offer correctives to certain appropriations of the figure in the global zombie imaginary.30 The concept of zombie avatars builds on Glover’s concept of the “usefulness” or “exploitability” of the zombie for Haitian authors. I identify four central forms in which French Caribbean writers exploit and reimagine the zombie legend: the slave, the trauma victim, the horde, and the popular zombie. While one of these avatars originated in the French Caribbean and clearly defines the figure there—the zombie–slave—the others reflect both the Caribbean zombie and other iterations of the zombie within the broader global imaginary, including the cannibal zombie. The zombie as figure of mental illness, discussed in Chapter 2, is used by Caribbean writers to interrogate and correct 29 See Weinstone and Banks on different valences of the term avatar. 30 See Halberstam on the “technology of monsters.”

Introduction

17

early US representations of the Haitian corporeal zombie. At the same time, it can be seen as a predecessor of more recent humanizing depictions of the zombie. The idea of the horde has been associated with the emergence of masses in US zombie narratives, although, as I discuss in Chapter 3, the zombie horde arose in Night of the Living Dead only shortly before it surfaced in Haitian literature, albeit from a set of socio-political concerns unique to the Caribbean (even if these concerns are related to the global Cold War politics evoked by Night). The exploration of the “popular” zombie in Chapter 4 not only shows how Gary Victor gives the Haitian zombie new life within forms of media more typically associated with the cannibal zombie, but also asks whether his serialized novel Le Revenant responds to Stan Lee’s Marvel character Simon Garth, whose story appropriates the Haitian zombie legend. Even the most purely Caribbean avatar of the zombie— the living dead as enslaved—resonates with more recent representations of zombies as slaves to capitalism (Dawn of the Dead) but also as figures of resistance (Land of the Dead). These avatars have a certain set of characteristics—both literal and literary—and are tied to distinct socio-political contexts. While Peter Dendle has called the zombie a “barometer of cultural anxiety,” in the context of the French Caribbean, the living dead figure is a vehicle for cultural critique, whether it is found in literature or popular belief, or whether it critiques enslavement, dictatorship, or imperialism. Yet, similarly to Roger Luckhurst’s argument that the “lone Caribbean zombi never goes away” even after it becomes an allegory for the “modern mass” (109), the roots of the French Caribbean zombie in the context of enslavement and colonization are never fully overwritten—even when the zombie becomes an allegory of François Duvalier’s autocratic rule or of the neocolonial status of Martinique and Guadeloupe. In this way, the French Caribbean authors who reimagine the zombie’s avatars in order to reflect more recent socio-political issues also gesture towards the rootedness of contemporary realities in the ontological, economic, and political hierarchies of the colonial system.31 The first chapter of this book reexamines the most iconic avatar of the zombie in the Caribbean imaginary: the zombie as symbol of the enslaved. The living dead figure is widely interpreted as an embodied remnant of the memory of the slave trade—a set of mnemonic remains that, while they symbolize past enslavement and colonization, still 31 Recker calls the zombie a “palimpsest.”

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

haunt Haiti and the French Antilles in the contemporary moment. As such, its defining characteristics in the popular imaginary—passivity, forced labor, and threat to those wandering alone at night—typically evoke the legacy of the institutionalized slave trade within the present. In this chapter, I study zombies that writers represent in the colonial past as victims of the French Atlantic slave trade. Specifically, I examine how writers in the late twentieth century portray these doubly enslaved living dead characters in the historical contexts of the Haitian Revolution, the Guadeloupean resistance against the 1802 reinstatement of slavery, and the aborted abolition of 1794 in Martinique. While the zombie is not typically represented as an enslaved individual in Guadeloupe and Martinique, the works studied in this chapter reimagine the zombie, deploying unique iterations of the zombie–slave avatar to interrogate narratives of enslavement and resistance in the French Antilles. Ultimately, I argue these writers use the zombie to interrogate the “unthinkability” of enslaved resistance, anticipating Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s seminal historiographical argument in Silencing the Past. Through the comparative lens used in this chapter, which foregrounds the distinct realities of each island, I examine how the zombie’s unique symbolic function in each socio-historical context is reflected in its literal traits. I argue that the works studied in this chapter reimagine two frequent characteristics of the zombie–slave: the figure’s inability to revolt unless (and sometimes even if) fully revived, and its typical function as a silent symbol, rather than vocal narrator, of the realities of enslavement. Through close readings of the Haitian writer Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Quiet Dawn (Aube tranquille, 1990), André and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude (La Mulâtresse Solitude, 1972), and the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows (Chronique des sept misères, 1986), I show how the trope of the zombie as slave contradicts the idea that the zombified (and by extension, enslaved) individual is inherently submissive. The zombie–slaves in Fignolé and the Schwarz-Barts’ novels bely this presumed passivity by acting as central agents at moments of revolutionary resistance. Beyond this engagement with narratives of slave revolt, I argue that this depiction of the zombie during the colonial era serves as a way of reflecting on the legacies of slavery and colonization in the contemporary period. In Chamoiseau’s novel, the zombie Afoukal narrates the context of enslavement to a twentieth-century Martinican soon after the 1946 departmentalization. This moment’s ambivalent cementing of the island’s neocolonial relationship with France is echoed

Introduction

19

in the zombie’s murder by his master on the eve of the 1848 abolition, an act that denies him the freedom that will be decreed the next day. Yet he and other zombies in the novel become figures of historiographical resistance, complicating the French national narratives imposed on the new citizens by reviving the memory of the colonial past. In this way, the zombie–slave becomes a literal, rather than symbolic, vehicle for the memory of enslavement and colonization, verbally critiquing the legacies of this history—both material and narrative—in the French Caribbean and demonstrating one of the many ways the enslaved resist in these works. In Chapter 2, I discuss a widespread but underexamined zombie trope: the hesitation between the zombie as a “real” living dead person and the zombie as a mentally ill or intellectually disabled individual. As has been widely noted, the zombie represented Haitian barbarousness in US popular culture during the first US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). I illustrate how the avatar of the zombie as a figure of mental illness emerged during the occupation as a way of simultaneously titillating US audiences and “diagnosing” the living dead—explaining this apparent product of Haitian superstition through scientific, rational discourse (even though many of these works seem to portray rational discourse itself as challenged by the zombie’s ambiguity). Haitian writers of the twentieth century, including Jacques Stephen Alexis, René Depestre, and Gérard Chenet, reappropriate this avatar, blurring the distinction between the zombie as a product of Vodou and the zombie as a product of mental illness. In doing so, these authors seek to restore the complex historical and cultural backdrop against which the living dead must be understood in the Caribbean. I begin this chapter by exploring the emergence of the trope of the zombie as a figure of mental illness in iconic occupation-era and mid-twentieth-century travelogues, films, and anthropological writing by writers and directors from the United States and Europe (such as William Seabrook, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacques Tourneur), arguing that in addition to playing on US audiences’ fascination with zombies and Haitian “voodoo,” they also reveal implicit fears about emergent Western psychiatric treatments. These works thus replace the fear of slavery and colonization implicit in the zombie myth with a different set of societal anxieties. After establishing this avatar’s forms and functions in early twentieth-century US literature, I examine how writers from Haiti reclaim it, both on their own terms and in relation to the earlier works that often equate zombies with black magic and superstition. Jacques Stephen Alexis, who theorized magical realism

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

in the Haitian context, blurs the distinction between zombification and trauma in his short story “Chronicle of a False Love” (published in the collection Romancero aux étoiles in 1960). I show how the story, which is narrated in the first person by a young woman apparently zombified on her wedding day, complicates the idea that zombification and mental illness are two distinct ways—one natural, one supernatural—of understanding the narrator’s troubled psychological state. In fact, by the end of the story, the term zombie seems to become a means of naming a certain kind of traumatic memory, one involving sexual assault. In contrast, René Depestre’s celebrated and controversial novel Hadriana in All My Dreams (1988), which evokes Alexis’s zombie woman intertextually, offers no doubt that zombification is part of real spiritual and physiological phenomena. However, the zombie women in the novel—the eponymous heroine and another who appears in an embedded narrative—are cured in seemingly contradictory ways, the former perhaps by Vodou, and the latter by psychiatrists in Philadelphia. In this way, Depestre suggests there is no one epistemology that can explain zombification in the Haitian context. In the final section of this chapter, I explore how Gérard Chenet’s Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie (2009) brings Vodou even further to the forefront of healing zombie women. His eponymous protagonist is “zombified” by sexual and emotional trauma, but cured through “Vodou psychotherapy” (83). Far from categorically rejecting the idea of the zombie as a figure of mental illness, I argue, these writers nuance the representation of the zombie and Vodou, suggesting that zombification represents a kind of trauma in and of itself. They also offer a corrective to the image of the Vodou religion as nefarious and regressive and reflect on the full range of the zombie’s complex historical, cultural, spiritual, and epistemological significance in Haiti. Chapter 3 examines the zombie horde avatar, an iconic trope that first emerged in contemporary US visual culture in the late 1960s, by focusing on its nearly simultaneous rise in Haitian literature in the 1970s. Why, in contrast to earlier representations in which Haitian zombies typically appear individually or in small groups, did zombie hordes began invading Haitian novels only six years after George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead represented voracious living dead masses? While scholars have noted the connection between Duvalier and the zombie’s appearance in Haitian literary fiction, I connect the emergence of the living dead horde to both local and global contexts, showing how Haitian authors’ use of the trope is at once a

Introduction

21

critique of local socio-political concerns and tied to the era’s global social uprisings and Cold War era anxieties, which also gave rise to the rabid masses of Night of the Living Dead. After all, Duvalier’s regime was supported by the US government as a bulwark against communism. I study this phenomenon through three literary works that represent a massive proliferation of zombies in Haiti at the level of plot. Two of these novels—Frankétienne’s Les Affres d’un défi (1979) and Gérard Etienne’s Crucified in Haiti (1974)—were published during the regime of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier (1971–1986). The other novel, French Academician Dany Laferrière’s Down Among the Dead Men (1996), is set during the reinstatement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency in the mid-1990s. In these works, zombies appear on a massive scale, becoming vast allegories for national narratives. In his celebrated novel Les Affres d’un défi, Frankétienne’s French-language rewriting of his own earlier Creolophone text Dézafi (1975), the author uses the zombie horde allegory to critique the dictatorships of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude. I study Frankétienne’s narrative of a zombie revolt catalyzed by salt—said to revive the living dead— through the lens of the horde’s transformation from a passive zombie “herd” into a furious mob and, finally, into a collective uprising against the totalitarian regime. Elsewhere, these zombie hordes resemble the violent masses of Romero’s films, at times taking on a drive and ferocity typically unseen in the Haitian kò kadav. In Gérard Etienne’s Crucified in Haiti, the narrator battles the President’s zombified henchmen, a bloodthirsty mass that evokes the real-life dictator’s militia, the tonton makout. In contrast with Frankétienne, then, Etienne makes the zombie horde complicit with the dictator. The end of this chapter explores how the two opposing forms that the zombie horde takes in the works of Frankétienne and Gérard Etienne—a revolt against the powers that be and a militia that protects these political forces, respectively—both reappear two decades later in Laferrière’s Down Among the Dead Men. There, they represent conflicting political factions and the influence of foreign imperialism during Aristide’s return to power in 1994, following the coup that led to his ousting. I argue that Down Among the Dead Men’s zombie hordes (plural) appear as meta-narrative proliferations rather than “real” masses; ultimately, they gesture towards the overdetermination of the zombie horde as allegory and signal its limits as a form of national narrative. Indeed, by the time Laferrière published his 1996 novel, the zombie horde had become a polyvalent political allegory outside the Haitian context, losing its national specificity but also

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

defying the exceptionalist narratives suggesting that only Haiti endures such political upheavals. Whereas Chapters 1 through 3 of this book show that the zombie has been widely appropriated by “highbrow” literary fiction of the French Caribbean, especially of Haiti, the final chapter explores a trait that characterizes the zombie both in the French Caribbean and in Hollywood B movies: its status as a “popular” figure in its association with popular culture (whether folklore or mass media) and its symbolic connection to the masses. In this chapter, I explore how Gary Victor— widely considered the most popular writer in Haiti (Cévaër)—revives and foregrounds the zombie’s association with popular culture and the populace as he writes for a wide Haitian audience. In his 1996 novel La Piste des sortilèges, I argue, Victor deploys the zombie to critique the longstanding marginalization of the masses following their decisive role in the Haitian Revolution, tying the zombie to the moun andeyò (a term referring initially to rural inhabitants who were not represented by the central government, but which has recently been used to describe other marginalized groups in contemporary Haitian society). Victor uses this connection to show how current struggles for fully democratic and representational structures of governance are undermined by both local elites and imperialist intervention. In his serialized Le Revenant novels (2007 and 2009, respectively), first published in the Port-auPrince newspaper Le Nouvelliste, Victor draws on global pop culture references to create a zombie ninja that is uniquely able to protect the Haitian people from ruthless political actors seeking the pierre de Damballah. The Damballah stone grants absolute power, ultimately representing the double-edged nature of political power in Haiti, since the stone has served historically as a tool both for resisting colonial control and for installing an authoritarian dictatorship. Finally, I show that in his screenplay for the 2009 Arnold Antonin film Les Amours d’un zombi: Zombi candidat à la présidence, Victor reimagines the zombie’s marginality, allowing the zombified character to remain on the ontological margins—neither fully passive nor fully alive—even as he moves from the social and political margins to the center after a group of politicos enlist him to run for president. Yet if Victor uses the zombie to satirize puppet presidents installed with the support of foreign intervention, he also criticizes ordinary citizens for their complicity in the zombie’s near-election, thus indicting both the elites and the people in his denunciation of populism. In this way, Victor interrogates the zombie’s role as a symbol of the nation in relation to socio-political

Introduction

23

moments during the complicated and fraught post-Duvalier transition from dictatorship to democracy, including the second US occupation of Haiti in the 1990s and the presence of UN peacekeeping forces after Aristide’s final presidential term in the 2000s. However, much as Laferrière suggests the limits of the horde as national narrative in Down Among the Dead Men, I argue that Victor indicates the limits of the zombie as an emblem of the people. In the conclusion to The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction, I examine subsequent references to the zombie in global narratives. I begin by exploring narratives that emerged from Haiti following the 2010 earthquake in which the zombie was transformed into a symbol of trauma. From there, I consider several representations from writers and filmmakers from outside Haiti (e.g., France and Italy), visions that may initially seem to offer more accurate and nuanced representations of the zombie and Vodou, but which upon further exploration simply exemplify the new ways the Global North undermines Haiti’s economic and political sovereignty—for instance, via necropolitics, NGOs, and other novel forms of international intervention. But I also suggest that works from Guadeloupe (Henri Hazaël-Massieux’s Zombi à Chabine (2009)) and Senegal (Mati Diop’s Atlantique (2019)) demonstrate the zombie legend’s continued and renewed use as a critique of similar forms of neocolonialism outside Haiti. Ultimately, I contend that the zombie figure represents not merely the vibrancy of Caribbean culture, but also the ability of writers and artists to push against reductive narratives of the region, imagining “new narratives” (Ulysse) and new futures. Indeed, at a time of great flux in Haiti—which is both politically and literally seismic—the zombie continues to hold multivalent resonance for those who seek to think through the nation’s historical legacies and complex contemporary realities.

chapter one

The Zombie Slave The Zombie Slave

In the Caribbean, the zombie is defined at the most fundamental level by its relationship to slavery. Scholars believe the mythic figure emerged in the geo-historical context of the New World colonies, as African spirit beliefs adapted to reflect the new realities of the enslaved.1 Today in French Caribbean folklore, the term zombie serves as an enduring memory of this legacy. The Haitian zonbi kò kadav—defined as a disinterred body robbed of the portion of its soul containing personality and volition by a Vodou sorcerer (bòkò) and forced to perform manual labor—symbolizes the slave.2 This metaphorical connection to the enslaved is echoed in the concept of the spirit zombie or zonbi astral, which may be forced to do spiritual work. Finally, the zombie in Martinique and Guadeloupe has been described as a symbol of the dangers that confront the maroon or freedom runner. In subsequent chapters of this book, I will examine the recent proliferation of works by French Caribbean authors that transform the zombie into a metaphor for contemporary socio-political situations, even as the living dead retains its original symbolic function and thereby connects the colonial past to later post- and neocolonial moments. In contrast, this chapter explores what happens when contemporary writers “return” the living dead to the period of slavery and colonization in the French Caribbean, representing figures that are both enslaved spiritually—as zombies—and subject to chattel slavery within the transatlantic trade and plantation system. It studies how, in returning the zombie to the colonial period, contemporary writers from the region interrogate the relationship between the zombie and the slave, calling into question the 1 See Ackermann & Gauthier for an overview of scholarship on this issue. 2 It has also been explained by the idea of a zombifying powder inducing a comatose state. See Hurston and Davis.

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idea that the traditional passivity of the zombified individual reflects an incapacity of the enslaved to resist. This tension between the zombie’s function as a symbol of enslavement and its potential for liberation has led to diverse interpretations among scholars. Kaiama Glover states that the zombie is “effectively subjugated but smoldering with the potential for rebellion” (Haiti Unbound 61)— citing such examples as Frankétienne’s Les Affres d’un défi (see Chapter 3), in which zombies are revived by salt to overthrow their masters. While this interpretation speaks to the symbolic and literary valences of the zombie–slave, Sarah Juliet Lauro ties the zombie’s origins to slave revolt in another way, not only tracing the zombie’s folkloric origins in African spirit beliefs (52), but also connecting the poisonings tied to slave revolt (e.g., Makandal) to the belief that the zombie is created through knowledge of herbal medicine (58).3 While both Glover and Lauro suggest a meaningful symbolic relationship between the zombie and slave revolts (arguments that inform my approach to the zombie here), Raphael Hoermann contends that the zombie is “in essence a deeply anti-revolutionary trope,” since “the zombie is incapable of offering resistance” unless freed (166). Although I agree with Hoermann that representations of the zombie in US and European media frequently use the zombie to distinctly anti-revolutionary ends, his argument fails to account for the ways French Caribbean writers use the zombie. The works studied in this chapter represent enslaved individuals who revolt while zombified. By doing so, I argue, they reflect the fact that slave revolt was unimaginable under the colonial ideology that conceived of the enslaved as less than human and, ultimately, challenge predominant narratives—past and present—of slavery, resistance, and abolition. The three novels studied in this chapter reinterpret the zombie–slave in ways that reflect the distinct historical memories around enslaved resistance and abolition in Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Quiet Dawn (Aube tranquille, 1990) represents a zombie army used by a sorceress to avenge sexual and physical violence against the enslaved in colonial Saint-Domingue. While the zombies in 3 Lauro notes a connection between the belief of the enslaved that their souls would return to Africa and the idea that enslavement represents a living death, citing the description of a tale of slave rebellion (that would become the Haitian Revolution) in which the enslaved believed “there was no risk of ‘death’ in rebellion but that they would awaken in Africa, finally free from the curse of a living death” (52).

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his work seem at times to possess their own individual willpower, at other moments they appear as agents of an individual vengeful desire. Nonetheless, their acts are ultimately represented as predecessors to the Haitian Revolution, and thus question the “unthinkability” of slave revolt. A Woman Named Solitude (La Mulâtresse Solitude, 1972), by André and Simone Schwarz-Bart, similarly reflects on the capacity of even the most marginalized individuals to resist oppression. The novel’s representation of the eponymous resistance fighter makes her what the authors call a zombi-cornes, which resembles in many ways the Haitian bodily zombie—including the fact it has lost its soul—but which differs from the latter in that it occurs spontaneously, unlike the kò kadav, which is created by a bòkò. Solitude’s fight against Napoleonic forces attempting to reinstate slavery in Guadeloupe in 1802 appears all the more surprising because she is zombified. This tension speaks to the ambivalence of this historical moment, which represents both the will of Guadeloupeans to resist and the reinstatement of colonial enslavement. But, like Toukouma’s band of zombies, Solitude’s ability to resist enslavement even while zombified suggests that resistance comes in many forms, and the Schwarz-Barts’ work has transformed Solitude into an icon of resistance in contemporary Guadeloupe. Like Solitude, the zombie in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows (Chronique des sept misères, 1986) offers a memory that serves to resist historical discourses that erase the slave trade and colonization in France national narratives. Afoukal and the ghostly marchandes-zombis or “zombi-vendors” (Chronicle 148) who haunt the Fort-de-France marketplace serve as mnemonic reminders of periods that shaped Martinican identity, resurfacing in the contemporary post-1946 moment and troubling narratives of French unity and “universalism” after departmentalization. All three of these works transform the zombie into a figure of various forms of resistance—from violent uprisings against plantation slavery to discursive interventions into historical memories. In this way, these works take the zombie, which typically serves as a silent reminder in the contemporary moment of the history of enslavement, and makes it speak, resisting through its actions, speech, or even silences in a way that not merely evokes but actively disputes the discourses underpinning the slave trade and plantation system. Because the works studied in this chapter represent zombie–slaves found in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique, reading them together elucidates the range of the zombie–slave’s symbolic potential to represent the distinct histories of enslavement and abolition on each island. This

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comparative approach provides a fuller understanding of the zombie’s complexity as a vehicle for decolonizing narratives of these histories, showing how it functions not only in an ostensibly postcolonial Haiti— where the return to enslavement after the first slave revolt against the colonial slave system makes zombification a particularly horrible punishment4—but also in the French Antilles, which never became politically “free” from their former colonizer. In fact, the zombies studied here depart from the most common definition of the term in the French Antilles—a shape-shifting evil spirit that leads people wandering alone at night to their death. Instead, the novels set in Guadeloupe and Martinique represent zombies with individual human consciousness, at times more closely resembling the Haitian zombie than the zombies traditionally found in Martinique and Guadeloupe. This suggests the predominant weight of the Haitian corporeal zombie in contemporary French Caribbean literature (something borne out by the focus on Haiti in this book), but more importantly I would like to highlight the zombie’s function as a vehicle for representing enslavement and the slave trade across the Caribbean, a vehicle that is reimagined by authors from the French Caribbean in a variety of ways that allow them to engage with this history in the contemporary moment. Zombies and the Haitian Revolution: Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Quiet Dawn (1990) Jean-Claude Fignolé’s novel Quiet Dawn (Aube tranquille, 1990) transforms the Haitian corporeal zombie or kò kadav—which is typically interpreted as passive and obedient—into a figure of slave resistance. The work represents the revolting zombies in the context of colonial Saint-Domingue, during the early revolutionary period, making them doubly enslaved—as human chattel sold in the transatlantic trade and as the living dead army of an avenging sorceress. Moreover, whereas one of the most famous French-language narratives of zombie uprisings, Frankétienne’s Les Affres d’un défi (1979), deploys salt to compel the living dead into action, Fignolé allows the enslaved to fight against their former masters while undead and ties their resistance to the Haitian 4 Lauro notes (110–12) that Wade Davis developed this idea, based on Michel Laguerre’s research, in his books The Serpent and the Rainbow and Passage of Darkness.

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Revolution. In other words, whereas in narratives such as Frankétienne’s the zombie is “smoldering with the potential for rebellion” (Haiti Unbound 61), in Fignolé’s work this potential is unleashed even as the living dead figure remains zombified—and therefore subjugated. One way Quiet Dawn does this is by melding the passive Haitian corporeal zombie (kò kadav) with the spirit zombie (zonbi astral), which is more frequently represented as committing acts of vengeance (in contrast, the kò kadav is at times created as revenge against the zombified individual but does not typically hurt others). The band of zombies commits acts of corporeal violence against the plantation class that clearly contest discourses legitimizing violence against the enslaved. The novel thus reimagines the zombie in a way that disputes what Michel-Rolph Trouillot just five years later called the “unthinkability” of slave revolt. In addition to problematizing once-accepted ideas about the enslaved, Fignolé’s work challenges the traditional conventions pertaining to the novel’s form, following the concepts developed through the Spiralist movement (which he theorized alongside his fellow Haitians Frankétienne and René Philoctète during the Duvalier regime).5 Fignolé blurs temporalities and doubles or even triples characters in Quiet Dawn as a way of creating connections across time and space.6 The novel’s central figure, Sœur Thérèse, a nun living in the twentieth century, has the same birth name—Sonja Schpeerbach Biemme de Valembrun— as her ancestor, who lived in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue. Sonja is also the name of a flight attendant who resembles Sœur Thérèse’s lover, Sœur Hyacinthe, and who tends to Sœur Thérèse as she flies across the Atlantic. During the voyage, Sœur Thérèse listens to recordings of the memoirs written by her ancestor Baron Wolf von Schpeerbach, husband to the sadistic and lascivious Sonja. Wolf’s memoirs recount the increasingly violent pre- or early revolutionary period in colonial Saint-Domingue. Quiet Dawn’s narration moves seamlessly between Sœur Thérèse and Wolf’s perspectives, and Fignolé does not use periods in the novel’s punctuation. These choices create a “free movement of speech [la parole] that leads to a fusing of figures and of spatio-temporal frames” (Famin 136).7 This fusion is evident in 5 For more on Spiralism, see Glover, Haiti Unbound. 6 Benedicty-Kokken sees the novel as exemplary of the ways in which the literary movement of Spiralism “may be read as a narratological avatar of possession” (275). 7 “libre circulation de la parole [qui] mène à une fusion des figures et des cadres spatio-temporels.”

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Wolf’s encounters with the sorceress Toukouma, who uses a band of zombies to avenge various forms of violence against the enslaved. After Wolf first crosses paths with Toukouma’s zombies, he tells his domestic slave Saintmilia about the encounter. In his memoirs, he describes their conversation to his mistress Cécile, a recounting that is interrupted by Sœur Thérèse’s question in the contemporary moment: “if there is a zombie in the plane, Sonja, how would I recognize it?” (96).8 In addition to illustrating this temporal and spatial blurring, this example suggests that the zombie functions as a figure of vengeance in Quiet Dawn, blurring the boundaries between colonial and “post”colonial narratives.9 (Saintmilia also haunts Sœur Thérèse in the present because the first Sonja killed her son.) Indeed, the zombies in Quiet Dawn can be read as figures of revenge that not only move seamlessly between past and present, but also defy traditional conventions of the living dead figure in Haiti.10 The zombies that Wolf initially describes in a conversation with his mistress Cécile resemble both the bodily kò kadav and the spiritual zonbi astral. He describes how he encountered Toukouma’s “band of zombies” (96) a few weeks after he raped an enslaved woman named Maïté, who was killed as a result by a group of freedom fighters with 8 “si dans l’avion il y a un zombie, Sonja, à quoi le reconnaîtrais-je?” All quotations in English come from Kaiama L. Glover and Laurent Dubois’s forthcoming translation of Aube tranquille, entitled Quiet Dawn. Page numbers match the French-language original. The flight attendant Sonja’s answer is strikingly modern: “You’d notice its steady gaze, robotic movement, sleepwalker’s manner” (“son regard fixe, sa démarche d’automate, son comportement de somnambule” 97). This apparent evocation of animatronics is further emphasized by Sœur Thérèse’s question in response: “so they can be conditioned, programmed?” (“on peut donc le conditionner, le programmer?” (97)). It evokes the idea of the zombie as a sort of robot, highlighting the fact that it continues to represent the fear of the revenge of the enslaved even in the modern (or rather post-modern) context of the airplane. 9 Regarding this temporal blurring, Gottin suggests that Fignolé uses the Spiralist aesthetic to make the connection between past and present traumas in Haitian history in Quiet Dawn. Glover categorizes the zombie among “the overwhelming presence of conflicted characters in [the Spiralists’] works—the zombies, schizophrenics, and oppositionally paired twins that people their works” (Haiti Unbound viii). 10 Similarly, Gottin suggests that Fignolé makes the connection between past and present traumas in Haitian history through his use of the Spiralist aesthetic in Quiet Dawn.

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whom she organized “Mackanda” (38).11 Among Toukouma’s living dead, Wolf was shocked to see the dead woman. He also notes the group’s strange bearing: “their eyes expressionless, bolt upright, they moved stiffly, as if animated by an external will” (95).12 The group’s stiff gait, vacant eyes, and apparent lack of individual will are traits that traditionally define the Haitian bodily zombie, which is passive and obedient to its bòkò or master.13 But Wolf describes how, trying to grab Maïté’s arm, he was stopped by an invisible force: “I wanted to grab her arm, felt a shock in my chest, stars in my head, the prodigious light of the sun burned my eyes” (96), a striking reaction that indicates he himself is in bodily danger.14 After returning to his home, Saintmilia tells him that “Toukouma’s band is a band of zombies, contact with them not good” (96), warning him that “their miasmas are deadly” (96).15 The term “miasma” suggests the zombie’s ontological state is contagious. Indeed, his mistress warns: “you were almost zombified, Wolf, if Saintmilia’s medicine hadn’t worked, you would have never woken from your slumber” (97).16 She goes on to tell the story of a white priest who was zombified and revived by salt. The invisible force that could have made Wolf himself into a zombie suggests not the physical power of kò kadav, but rather the influence of its counterpart, the spirit zonbi astral.17 11 “bande de zombies.” The novel elaborates that in Cécile’s absence Maïté organized “Mackanda” meetings promising a return to Africa for those who resist enslavement in any way (including suicide and marronnage), but that those having taken part in mackanda who consort with or collude with whites will be punished by death (38). This explanation demonstrates a connection to macandal or proto-Vodou resistance practices by pre-Revolutionary figure François Makandal (see Allewaert on these practices). 12 “les yeux inexpressifs, tête droite, ils allaient raides, comme animés par une volonté extérieur.” 13 Métraux writes that zombies are recognized by “their absent-minded manner” and “their extinguished [éteints], almost glassy eyes,” and states that “[t]heir docility is total” as long as they are not fed salt (283); “leur air absent”; “leurs yeux éteints, presque vitreux”; “leur docilité est absolue” (251). 14 “je voulus lui prendre le bras, un choc à la poitrine, des étoiles dans ma tête, la prodigieuse lumière du soleil me grilla les yeux.” 15 “la bande à Toukouma est une bande de zombies, contact pas bon avec eux”; “leurs miasmes sont mortels.” 16 “tu as failli être zombifié, Wolf, si la médecine de Saintmilia n’avait pas été efficace.” 17 I want to thank Lenny Lowe for raising this point during the Haitian Studies Conference in 2018.

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And yet there appears to be a slippage between the two types of zombies, as the corporeal zombies are surrounded by “mauvais esprits” (96). This slippage is also significant because whereas the kò kadav is typically obedient and non-threatening, the spirit zonbi is more frequently described as being used to perform harmful acts.18 Yet Wolf’s story reminds Cécile of what she had thought was a vision of her murdered servant Maïté, who passed by Cécile as she was napping outside, the ostensibly dead woman smiling at her former mistress: “a hint of menace in her voice, shouted: watch out! watch out!” (96).19 Maïté’s apparent threat (or warning) is striking in what appears to be a kò kadav, and it anticipates how Toukouma’s band subsequently avenges both personal and systemic colonial violence against the enslaved. Following this initial encounter, the zombie band’s first act is one of revenge for a brutal sexual assault: Toukouma and her undead army lay waste to the plantation owned by Bonbon, who viciously raped the sorceress decades earlier. In fact, the siege on Bonbon’s plantation seems to fulfill a longstanding desire for vengeance: Cécile tells Wolf that “every year, on the anniversary of the rape, her stomach swells, just ask her, she’ll invariably answer you: I’m pregnant with Bonbon’s death” (111).20 Bonbon’s death is thus reconfigured as a new creation Toukouma is bearing into existence. After Wolf learns that Bonbon’s plantation is under attack, he rushes to his friend’s aid, only to find that Toukouma and her zombies have already wreaked havoc. Wolf notes the numerous bodies on the ground, “some of them simply disemboweled, others completely eviscerated” (110).21 Whereas this disembowelment and evisceration reflect a generalized violence, Wolf describes Bonbon’s body with shocking precision: “I looked for Bonbon, his head had wandered far from his body, his eyes wide with terror, and, supreme indecency or extreme refinement, his penis dripping with blood hung from his mouth as if his executioner had imagined giving him the countenance of the sexual beast that, when he was alive, my friend had claimed to be” (110).22 The recomposition of Bonbon’s disarticulated 18 See, for instance, Elizabeth McAlister, Rara! (105). 19 “une pointe de menace dans la voix, lança: attention! attention!” 20 “chaque année, à la date du voil, son ventre enfle, interroge-la, elle [Toukouma] te répond invariablement: je suis enceinte de la mort de Bonbon.” 21 “les uns simplement éventrés, les autres complètement éviscérés.” 22 “je cherche Bonbon, la tête flânait loin du corps, les yeux écarquillés d’épouvante, et, suprême indécence ou raffinement extrême, son sexe dégoulinant

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body is presented here as a violent commentary on the man’s own claims to sexual prowess. The references to “composing” in the original French (“composer”) and “refinement” (a word that evokes both cultural capital and the process of preparing cane sugar—strikingly, given that Bonbon’s name means “candy”) also indicate an artistic or writerly composition. One might similarly read Cécile’s claim that “the assassin—was it an assassin or an executioner like you said—signed the murder” (110) as evidence that Toukouma was not simply getting revenge, but also sending a message.23 All of this suggests not a spontaneous act of vengeance, but rather a carefully constructed response to Bonbon’s rape of Toukouma, a response that recasts his bodily tools of discursive and sexual violence into a commentary on the sexual assault to which enslaved women were subjected. If this first act of revenge offers a clear commentary on violence against enslaved women—and against Toukouma in particular—the zombies’ next act similarly effects a discursive intervention through the bodily disarticulation of their victims. However, this time they attack the legal discourse authorizing horrific forms of corporal punishment (that is, torture) of the enslaved. After Toukouma’s attack on Bonbon’s plantation, Wolf pursues Toukouma and her zombies with a group of men, including his frère de lait, Salomon. They meet in a violent confrontation, and a number of Wolf’s group are brutally slaughtered: “Toukouma’s zombies, blind and deaf, continued their work with methodical violence, cutting off heads, arms, legs, a butcher’s precision, soon it was all over, the zombies disappeared” (114).24 Toukouma’s undead soldiers are strikingly mechanical and precise in their “methodical violence,” acting as avenging angels of death with a drive that seems to come from Toukouma’s will. After the carnage is over, Wolf states: “silently, Salomon and I inspected the battlefield, scattered torsos, severed hands, legs strewn about recalled the macabre images of other scenes of horror prescribed by the regulations, perpetrated in the name of the law, a slave caught stealing, hand cut off at the wrist; de sang pendait de sa bouche comme si son bourreau avait imaginé de lui composer la tête de bête sexuelle que, de son vivant, mon ami avait prétendu être.” 23 “l’assassin—s’agit-il d’un assassin ou d’un bourreau comme tu as dit?—a signé le meurtre.” 24 “les zombies de Toukouma, aveugles et sourds, poursuivent avec une méthodique violence leur œuvre, coupant têtes, bras, jambes, une précision de charcutiers, tout fut bientôt achevé, les zombies s’évanouirent.”

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caught running away, leg severed; with weapons in hand, decapitation, breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake” (114).25 Here, each wound recalls a punishment exacted on the enslaved that was not just legitimized by the law, but also served to enact the law. The echoes between the dismembered bodies of Wolf’s men and those of the enslaved punished under the law overlays the carnage with new meaning, exposing the brutality of the slave regime and evoking the wrongs to be avenged. Even though the zombies are mute, their violent disarticulation of the bodies of members of the planter class once again articulates an antislavery discourse, this one targeting legal violence. It is all the more intriguing that they produce this critical discourse as zombies who are apparently enslaved to Toukouma. Whereas the attack on Bonbon’s plantation is motivated by a desire to avenge a specific act of violence, the attack on Wolf’s group offers a broader indictment of the legal system underpinning and upholding plantation slavery. In turn, this indictment is tied to arguably the most decisive challenge to the institutionalized slave trade—the Haitian Revolution. After the confrontation between his men and Toukouma’s band of zombies, Wolf states: “today their magic has responded, it triumphs, Toukouma carries around the head of defeated whites on a pike, the Blacks will learn that they can fight the whites, that we are not invincible, in this truth lies the end of the system, the Negroes will no longer be afraid, if they find a leader capable of exploiting their hatred, of channeling their fury, of organizing their revolt in the name of liberty, not one of us will survive” (116).26 The references to the “end of the system” at the hands of a “revolt in the name of liberty” serve, in the context of late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, as a clear forewarning of the revolution to come. Wolf’s narration thus seems to anticipate the early stages of the Haitian Revolution, which would 25 “silencieusement, Salomon et moi inspectons le champ de bataille, troncs épars, mains coupées, jambes égaillées renvoyant ces images macabres à d’autres scènes proscrites par les règlements, perpétrées au nom de la loi: un esclave surpris à voler, le poignet coupé; à marronner, la jambe sectionnée; les armes à la main, décapitation, supplice de la roue, brûlé vif.” 26 “aujourd’hui leur magie a trouvé la parade, elle triomphe, Toukouma promène au bout d’une pique les têtes des Blancs, vaincus, les Noirs apprendront qu’ils peuvent battre les Blancs, nous ne sommes point invincibles, dans cette vérité la fin du système, les Nègres n’auront plus peur, qu’ils se donnent un chef capable d’exploiter leur haine, de canaliser leur ferveur, d’organiser leur révolte au nom de la liberté et aucun de nous ne survivra.”

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evolve from a legal fight by free people of color for full citizenship to a “revolution from below” (Fick) driven by the power of the masses. This moment—in which the “magic” of the enslaved wins, as Toukouma defeats the enslaving white planters with a band of zombies and thus reveals the potential of the enslaved as long as they find “a leader capable of exploiting their hatred”—evokes the “unthinkability” of the Haitian Revolution. If Michel-Rolph Trouillot suggested that contemporary whites in Europe and the Americas could not imagine the possibility of a successful slave revolt because of “the contention that enslaved Africans and their descendants could not envision freedom,” which was based on “an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants” (73), the zombie can be read as a mythical embodiment of this ontology. The living dead figure becomes a vehicle or tool with which the sorceress Toukouma reveals the possibility that the enslaved can overthrow the plantation system. Fignolé thus transforms the passive, “ideal” slave zombie, reimagining the figure’s relationship to revolt (Glover and Lauro) and pushing against the idea that only certain kinds of ontological subjects can participate in revolution. Toukouma’s zombie army—which uses physical violence to contest the discourses underpinning slavery and colonization—initially appears silent but deadly. However, the often-mute living dead are allowed to speak in Quiet Dawn, engaging performatively and verbally with political discourse about the revolutionary moment. Cécile tells Wolf about witnessing what onlookers describe as a provocative parade of “zombies reared by Toukouma” through Port-au-Prince (161).27 Their sudden appearance is “incomprehensible, unimaginable” (161), and they are described in both bestial and saintly terms.28 They pass in front of the market, where they “bleat provocatively, as if to declare the triumph of black over white” (162).29 The animalized terms applied to the zombies, apparently expressed through the third-person narration of Cécile as she describes the scene to Wolf, indicates the zombies’ apparent triumph is all the more unexpected. This provocation continues in front of the governor’s mansion, where several zombies stop: while “the first one stands on his hind legs, [and] the second lies down with his belly in the air […] as for the fourth he begins a speech stammering about about 27 “zombis dressés par Toukouma.” 28 “incompréhensible, inimaginable.” 29 “bêlent, provocateurs, comme pour crier le triomphe du noir sur le blanc.”

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liberty, equality, fraternity” (162).30 The stuttering speech on the ideals of what would become the French Republic might be read as parodic when paired with terms of animality. But the speaker is killed as a result, and the shots fired on the zombies, or the “crowd of sheep” (162), ignite a fire that burns through the area.31 This direct intervention into the revolutionary slogan by a zombie—a figure of the enslaved—and in front of the governor’s home is both politically and literally incendiary. This passage reflects the political context of the pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, and specifically the fight of free people of color to gain the full rights of citizenship, initially exclusive of the enslaved. When Cécile describes the explosive skirmish that follows the invasion of Port-au-Prince by the zombie horde, he asks whether it has occurred “despite the Concordat de Damien?” (162).32 The treaty Wolf appears to refer to is the agreement signed in October 1791 at Damien plantation that affirmed an earlier concordat granting citizenship to free people of color (Fick 121–23). The treaty was signed following a set of skirmishes between white troops and a confederacy of free people of color and armed slaves known as Suisses (Geggus 105). However, as Cécile’s response suggests—she alludes to the “massacre of your Swiss regiment” (162) putting the concordat into jeopardy—the Suisses, despite being led to believe they would be freed as well, were left entirely out of the concordat, and nearly all were either killed or left to starve chained on board a ship (Fick 124–25).33 The reference to the concordat in this passage thus highlights the political and social marginality of the enslaved—denied the citizenship rights newly afforded to free people of color—particularly when paired with the zombie’s discourse on liberty and equality. As Glover notes (in connecting the zombie with Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer), “the Haitian zombie is inherently political in that it makes visible the frontiers of legitimate/legitimized existence […] it is a being banned absolutely from participation in the political” (“New Narratives” 202). That the zombie in Quiet Dawn inserts itself into the political discourse of the French Revolution, at a moment when the marginality of the enslaved was being violently reasserted against the 30 “le premier se dresse sur ses pattes arrière, [et] le second se couche ventre en l’air […] quant au quatrième il commence un discours en bégayant liberté, égalité, fraternité.” 31 “foule des moutons.” 32 “malgré le Concordat de Damien?” 33 “le massacre de tes Suisses.”

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Suisses, confirms Glover’s point. Ultimately, it exemplifies Fignolé’s use of the zombie to show that even the most dispossessed can lay claim to discourses of liberty and equality. The zombies in Quiet Dawn appear to be the vehicles for Toukouma’s righteous vengeance when they attack the rapist Bonbon’s plantation and lay waste to Wolf’s men in a manner that evokes the Code noir’s acceptance of violent physical punishment of the enslaved. Yet at other moments the typically subservient living dead assert their own will, as when Maïté calls out to her former mistress or when the zombie in Port-au-Prince evokes the motto “liberty, equality, fraternity.” All of these moments challenge the colonial discourses that legitimized and upheld sexual, physical, and political violence against the enslaved—whether the zombies reappropriate the sexual boasts of Bonbon or the laws of the Code noir through brutal corporeal attacks or public proclamations of the Republican slogan evoking freedom. In this way, Fignolé revolutionizes the zombie figure, transforming it from a passive symbol of enslavement to a resistance fighter. Fifteen years after Frankétienne famously made “zombies become warriors” (Haiti Unbound 56) by awakening them with salt in Dézafi (1975), using dezombification as a trope of social awakening against dictatorship (see Chapter 3), Fignolé deployed the uprising of still-zombified armies to represent and reimagine the resistance of those whose revolt was deemed “unthinkable” before the slave uprising that would bring about the creation of the Haitian republic. The Slave and the Resistance Icon: The Schwarz-Barts’ A Woman Named Solitude (1972) Like Quiet Dawn, which reimagines the Haitian corporeal zombie’s ability to contest its enslavement and relates its resistance to the Haitian Revolution, A Woman Named Solitude represents a zombie as a freedom fighter. Its eponymous heroine—a historical Guadeloupean freedom fighter—takes the form of another avatar of the zombie, the zombi-cornes, which resembles the kò kadav except that its transformation occurs spontaneously. Whereas Toukouma uses zombies to resist, Solitude combines Toukouma’s rebellion with the passivity of the sorceress’s band of avenging zombies. The ambivalence of the zombified revolutionary icon echoes the fraught history of abolition and anti-slavery struggles in Guadeloupe. Unlike the soldiers of the Haitian Revolution, who defeated Napoleon’s army as it attempted to

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reinstate slavery in the French Caribbean colonies (after slavery was first abolished in 1794) and created a new Black republic, Guadeloupean insurgents were ultimately defeated by French forces in 1802. Solitude fought alongside the resistance leader Louis Delgrès, who on May 28, 1802, chose to die in an explosion with three hundred of his men to avoid being captured. Solitude was arrested and, after giving birth to a child who was subsequently forced into enslavement, was hanged in November 1802. Yet even though she is represented as a zombie, the Schwarz-Barts’ tale made her into an icon of the fight for freedom, creating an enduring historical legacy for contemporary Guadeloupeans. A Woman Named Solitude is part of a literary cycle of the same name by André and Simone Schwarz-Bart. The novel is based on the only (very brief) previous account concerning Solitude, a paragraph found in Auguste Lacour’s Histoire de la Guadeloupe (1837–1858); according to Laurent Dubois, the Schwarz-Barts’ novel “incited the process of the popularization of [Solitude’s] story” (“Solitude’s Statue” 33). Indeed, Solitude is now the subject of statues and other works of memorialization in Guadeloupe. The official author of A Woman Named Solitude, André Schwarz-Bart, was born to Polish-Jewish parents in 1928 in Metz, his early life marked by his family members’ deaths in Auschwitz and his own subsequent participation in the resistance— events that partially inspired his Prix Goncourt-winning first novel The Last of the Just (Le Dernier des justes, 1959).34 It is widely accepted that A Woman Named Solitude was co-authored by Simone Schwarz-Bart,35 who met André while studying in Paris in 1960 and has published celebrated novels about women from her native Guadeloupe, including The Bridge of Beyond (Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, 1972). In 1967, Simone and André published Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (A Plate of Pork with Green Bananas), the first installment in the “Mulâtresse Solitude” cycle.36 34 The Last of the Just met with both critical and commercial success, winning the Prix Goncourt and selling over a million copies, although it also provoked a number of debates, including accusations of plagiarism and Jewish cultural inauthenticity, and it led to Schwarz-Bart’s disillusionment with the Parisian literary sphere. See Kaufmann. 35 See, for instance, Brodzki 215–17, and a recent interview with Simone Schwarz-Bart for the “Paris Noir” podcast. 36 André Schwarz-Bart describes the genesis of the work in an open letter in Le Figaro littéraire, on January 26, 1967, entitled “Pourquoi j’ai écrit La Mulâtresse

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It is striking that the Schwarz-Barts’ reimagining of the now-iconic historical figure Solitude offers an ambivalent vision of the resistance fighter, exemplified by her status as a zombi-cornes. In A Woman Named Solitude, her role in the struggle for freedom coexists with her passive zombified state, an ontological ambiguity that is echoed in the ambivalence of 1802—a moment that exemplified, on the one hand, the will of Guadeloupeans to resist colonization and enslavement, and, on the other, the end of the 1794 abolition after Napoleon reinstated slavery. The novel is divided into two parts, the first section concerning Solitude’s mother’s childhood in western Africa before she is sold into slavery. The second part, entitled “Solitude,” begins with the eponymous figure’s birth in Guadeloupe around 1772. Initially called Rosalie, Solitude is born after her mother Bayangumay (nicknamed Man Bobotte) was raped by a white sailor. As a child, Rosalie is nicknamed “Deux-âmes” because of her differently colored eyes; later, her mother runs away with a maroon, and the child suddenly transforms into a zombi-cornes—spontaneously losing her will and soul—before dubbing herself Solitude. The zombi-cornes, like the kò kadav, offers an implicit critique of the Atlantic slave trade. However, throughout Solitude’s time on plantations, her zombified state troubles her owners and offers an embodied resistance to narratives of enslavement and liberation, including those associated with Enlightenment philosophy and the political discourse of the French Revolution. Although the zombi-cornes is presented as different from the Haitian corporeal zombie (in the former case, the transformation occurs spontaneously), descriptions of the figure in A Woman Named Solitude parallel widely known descriptions of the kò kadav in significant ways. Rosalie/ Deux-âmes begins the transformation into a zombi-cornes after her mother runs away from the plantation, leaving her there.37 She senses the oncoming change and imagines it like a metamorphosis: “she began to worry about changing. She feared it and she wanted it, but most of the time she was desperately afraid. Suppose she transformed into something terrifying, a dog, for instance, as certain wicked people were said to Solitude” (here, the title refers to the cycle rather than the as yet unpublished novel). 37 Mireille Rosello ties this ontological difference to Solitude’s racial alterity, arguing that in coming to terms with her mother’s rejection, which is described in racialized terms, Solitude moves beyond the Black/white dichotomy that alienates the métisse, opting instead for selective social affiliations.

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do” (87).38 She anticipates she will undergo a kind of animalization, a transmogrification that will turn her into a non-human entity. Instead, after she becomes a zombi-cornes, Solitude is described by a kind of altered mental state reflecting the living dead rather than the animal: she possesses “dead [éteints], glassy eyes and the nasal voice characteristic of the spirits of the dead” (89).39 This description reproduces several parts of Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux’s bodily description of the Haitian in the 1958 Voodoo in Haiti (Le Vaudou haïtien): “Zombi are recognized by their absent-minded manner, their extinguished [éteints], almost glassy eyes, and above all by the nasal twang in their voices—a particularity which they share with the Guédé, spirits of death” (283).40 The lightly altered references in A Woman Named Solitude to Solitude’s “glassy” and “dead” or “extinguished” eyes (both original texts use the term éteint), her “nasal voice” evoking the sounds of “spirits of death,” all suggest that the author(s) based the figure of the zombicornes (a term I have not encountered elsewhere) on ideas about the Haitian corporeal zombie. (Indeed, the vacant gaze echoes the zombies’ “expressionless [eyes]” in Quiet Dawn (95).41) Moreover, in addition to sharing the kò kadav’s altered mental state, the zombi-cornes echoes its function as a “beast of burden,” as described by Métraux (282).42 38 “elle craignait maintenant de devenir autre, elle le craignait et le désirait […] mais surtout le craignait atrocement: quelque chose de terrifiant, un chien, par exemple, comme on dit que certaines personnes mauvaises tournent” (73). All quotations in English are from the translation by Ralph Manheim. The latter expression is repeated again in the following phrase: “the little girl wondered which she would prefer, to turn into a dog [tourner en chien] that looked like a dog, or a dog in human form, like that emaciated nigger, all skin and bone, she had seen one day when Mlle. Xavière had taken her to visit some neighbors; that old nigger, stark naked in his kennel, with his eyes closed and an iron collar on his neck” (87) (“la petite fille se demanda ce qu’elle préférait: si c’était de tourner en chien à forme de chien, ou bien en chien à apparence humaine, tel ce nègre efflanqué, tout en os, qu’elle avait vu avec Mlle Xavière […] ce vieux nègre tout nu dans sa niche, les yeux clos, un collier de fer autour du cou” (73)). This clearly links the transformation to the dehumanizing violence the planter class inflicted on the enslaved. 39 “ses yeux éteints, un peu vitreux, et […] cette voix nasale qui caractérise les génies de la mort” (75). 40 “On reconnait les zombi à leur air absent, à leurs yeux éteints, presque vitreux et, surtout, à l’intonation nasale de leur voix, particularité également propre aux Guédé, génies de la mort” (251). 41 “yeux inexpressifs.” 42 “une bête de somme” (250).

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In A Woman Named Solitude, “[zombi-cornes] worked like oxen” (88).43 If the zombi-cornes thus evokes the dehumanization imposed on the enslaved in ways similar to the kò kadav, the fact that it lacks a master is significant. It implies that, at least as much as any individual master, the systemic nature of the slave trade is responsible for this ontological transformation. A Woman Named Solitude relates the zombi-cornes to the Haitian zombie on a meta-narrative level as well, suggesting that zombie legends circulated, and continue to circulate, as a way of representing the trauma of enslavement. Solitude’s zombification is presented as existing within a network of Caribbean spirit legends that translate the existence of the enslaved: “At that time there were all sorts of Shadows on the sugar islands: dead blacks revived by magic, living blacks who moved into the bodies of animals, and many many more whose souls had gone off no one knew where. These last were commonly known as [zombi-cornes]” (88).44 In contrast to the dead “animated by magic,” created intentionally by a sorcerer, the zombi-cornes’ soul simply disappears, adding a new kind of zombie to this typology. Legends like the zombi-cornes are also described as representing a vestige of the memory of enslavement in contemporary Guadeloupean folklore: “At that time, say the old Creole storytellers, the black people were pursued by an evil spirit; a man would go to bed in his right mind and when he woke up, he would be a dog, a toad, or a zombie, just as nowadays you might wake up with white hairs” (88).45 These tales of fundamental ontological transformation thus represent alternative historical memories, enduring counter-narratives told by the enslaved to understand their lived realities, and which can help contemporary story-tellers—and audience members—grasp this history as well. The zombi-cornes’ symbolic relation to the trauma of enslavement is further specified through the contrasting reactions of the enslaved and the planter class to Solitude’s zombified state, with the former viewing 43 “avançaient comme des bœufs de labour” (74). 44 “Il y avait alors une grande variété d’Ombres dans les îles à sucre: nègres morts animés par magie, nègres vivants qui avaient chu dans un corps de bête, et d’autres, d’autres encore, dont l’âme était partie on ne savait où. Ces derniers portait habituellement le nom de zombi-cornes” (74). 45 “En ce temps-là, disent les vieux conteurs créoles, la malédiction était sur le dos du nègre et le talonnait sans arrêt; on se couchait avec son esprit pour se réveiller chien, crapaud de mares ou zombi, comme aujourd’hui l’on se reveille avec un cheveu blanc” (74).

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her state as a kind of disability. This distinction is revealed after Solitude is purchased at an auction by the Chevalier de Dangeau, who is struck by her vacant but beautiful eyes. The day after she arrives at his plantation, the “Temple of Delights,”46 the Chevalier notes his other slaves’ reaction to her strange comportment: “his drawing-room slaves were gazing at the new girl with bewildered sadness, and guiding her steps as though she were blind. They seemed to think she was ‘different,’ essentially different, and some said she had no soul” (95).47 This description indicates that the other slaves view her zombitude as a form of difference that does not negate Solitude’s humanity, but rather means she needs greater care. In contrast, the Chevalier and his friends view Solitude through categories of scientific or philosophical thought that objectify her by comparisons to inanimate objects. When the enslaved say the zombified woman does not have a soul, the narrator states: “The chevalier was unfamiliar with this ailment” (95).48 If this reference to illness indicates that the Chevalier pathologizes her difference, the reactions of the Chevalier’s guests to Solitude’s difference reflect a greater dehumanization: “She reminded one of a mechanical toy, one of those dancing dolls that twist and turn on a few tinkling notes, then suddenly stop still when the spring is unwound” (95–96).49 The reference to a “mechanical toy,” like that found in a music box, indicates that Solitude’s actions are being interpreted as involuntary. Her apparent lack of will or consciousness leads her to be equated, at least metaphorically, with automata or machines that lack feeling or subjectivity. This categorization as an object evokes the taxonomies that were created to justify the slave trade by “proving” that enslaved Africans were not fully human. Solitude’s recurring nightmare gives a rare insight into her subjective experience and fear of objectification: “In her nightmare, always the same, she saw herself changed into a sugar statue, which the Frenchmen of France were slowly eating far far away at the other end of the world” 46 “Temple des Délices” (92). 47 “tous ses beaux esclaves béaient tristement devant la nouvelle, et la guidaient à chacun de ses pas, comme on fait des aveugles, en la prenant doucement par-dessous le coude. Ils semblaient la croire autre, essentiellement autre, et certains disaient qu’elle n’avait plus d’âme” (78–79). 48 “Le chevalier ne connaissait pas cette maladie” (79). 49 “On eut dit un jouet mécanique, une de ces ballerines qui tournent et virent sur quelques notes grêles, et puis s’immobilisent en fin du rouleau, soudain” (79).

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(96).50 Here, the production of sugar is likened to the consumption of enslaved Black bodies. While Solitude’s zombified state might seem to confirm ideas about enslaved people’s lack of consciousness, it implicates the trauma of slavery in creating her detached mental state. Solitude’s lack of will and consciousness also serves as an embodied critique of the Chevalier de Dangeau’s ideas about slavery, a philosophy expressed through references to Enlightenment figures and through the Chevalier’s cadre of ideal slaves. Although the Chevalier is moved by the abbé de Raynal’s 1770 Histoire des deux Indes and dreams at times of “an ideal slave trade, more [careful of] human suffering” (92), he quickly dismisses the idea as inconsequential.51 His slaving ship, La Nouvelle Héloïse, is backed financially by Voltaire. The ironic pairing of references to figures like Rousseau and Voltaire with the acceptance of the slave trade indicates the Chevalier’s hypocrisy (and critiques the hypocrisy of the Enlightenment figures themselves). Yet the Chevalier treats a group of his own slaves in a manner that seems precisely to model an “ideal trade.” His discussions of Enlightenment philosophy take place in front of “a dozen slaves of both sexes, mentioned by many travelers among the greatest marvels and curiosities of the islands” (92–93).52 These slaves are “marvels” because of their surprising demonstration of intellectual and artistic refinement: The chevalier instructed them according to the precepts of his master Jean-Jacques. He had selected them with care: They must be young, gifted in mind and heart, and their features must be at once regular and grave. Dressed in the finest silks, as resplendent as idols, these slaves […] spoke like philosophers, sang like angels, and played all the fashionable instruments. (93)53

50 “Dans son cauchemar toujours le même, elle se voyait changée en statue de sucre que des Français de France dégustaient lentement, là-bas, à l’autre bout du monde” (79). 51 “d’une Traite Idéale, plus économe de la souffrance humaine” (77). 52 “une dizaine d’esclaves des deux sexes, cité par de nombreux voyageurs au rang des plus grandes merveilles et curiosités des Isles” (77). 53 “Les instruisant selon son maître Jean-Jacques, le chevalier les voulait jeunes, pourvus de toutes les grâces de l’esprit et du cœur, et d’une conformation de traits à la fois régulière et surprenante, empreinte de solennité. Vêtus de la soie la plus fine, luisants comme des idoles, ces esclaves […] parlaient comme des philosophes, chantaient comme des anges et jouaient de tous les instruments à la mode” (77).

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The Chevalier de Dangeau’s group of “ideal slaves” is essentially an experiment that tests the ability of the enslaved to excel in the intellectual and musical education of the elite European classes. This experiment simultaneously affirms the humanity of the enslaved and denies it, demonstrating the test subjects’ capacity but also suggesting that their exemplarity must be proven by their ability to perform European culture and consciousness. The existence of this ideal cadre of slaves also obscures the reality of their enslavement, a status that Solitude exposes at every moment through her obedience and apparent lack of interiority. If the other slaves’ physical beauty, education, and treatment in the Chevalier’s lavish home would seem to indicate the possibility of a gentler slave trade, Solitude’s presence shows that this is an illusion. Although her arrival is initially met with surprise and excitement, the Chevalier’s guests ultimately find her demeanor frustrating: “The child’s kisses and caresses, even her beauty, seemed to be made of nothing. […] She did everything she was told, as eager to carry out orders as a well-trained dog; but if you turned away for a moment, she would lapse into immobility, and when you looked back she had the vacant gaze of a sleepwalker” (95–96).54 While her passivity and obedience would normally make her another kind of “ideal slave”—a submissive drone—her inability to project the appearance of individual will and consciousness in the context of the Chevalier’s “Temple of Delights” has the opposite effect, especially given her failure to express physical desire (in the face of what appears to be a prelude to sexual assault). Her demeanor functions there to foreground her enslaved status, revealing the lie in the Chevalier’s carefully constructed illusion. Solitude’s zombitude therefore serves as an embodied resistance that puts into relief the status of the Chevalier’s twelve beautiful, intelligent, and witty slaves, shining a light on the fact that they are denied the right to exercise their will, even if they are able to speak like Enlightenment philosophers and sing like angels. Eventually, Solitude’s zombification causes her to be relegated to the ranks of the less exemplary domestic slaves, working in the kitchen where “for several years she [lives] the peaceful life of a [zombi-cornes] (96),” until events relating to the French and Haitian revolutions bring 54 “Les baisers, les caresses de l’enfant, ses grâces elles-mêmes, semblaient faites de néant. […] Elle faisait tout ce qu’on lui disait, sensible et frémissante comme une bête aux ordres lancés; mais pour peu qu’on la quittât un instant du regard, on la retrouvait figée dans sa position initiale, un air de somnambule sur les traits” (79).

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sudden change to the island.55 On February 4, 1794, a law ratified by the National Convention abolished slavery in the French colonies in response to revolutionary events in Saint-Domingue. The law went into effect in Guadeloupe the following year: as the narrator of A Woman Named Solitude states, “On May 7, 1795, the troops of the Convention landed at Grande-Terre de Guadeloupe, where they published the decree abolishing slavery” (97).56 Thus, the abolition that was prompted by the slave uprisings of Saint-Domingue spread to Guadeloupe, where it at least began to change the lives of the formerly enslaved before Napoleon’s forces reinstated slavery there fewer than ten years later. In A Woman Named Solitude, these metropolitan political upheavals disrupt the status quo of colonial life in Guadeloupe. Solitude’s zombified state once again challenges the Chevalier’s beliefs about slavery, this time in relation to abolition. When the decree of abolition arrives in Point-à-Pitre, the Chevalier de Dangeau joins “the royalists and English” (97) united against abolition, proclaiming that he is following “the camp into which he had been born,” although “his heart was with the soldiers of freedom” (97), which he urges his former slaves to join.57 Before leaving, he asks Solitude, “with infinite sadness: ‘And you, poor zombie, who will deliver you from your chains?’” (97).58 The question suggests that while the other enslaved have been granted the “horrible gift of freedom,”59 Solitude remains enslaved even when free, because of her zombified state. It suggests, moreover, that because of her apparent lack of will, Solitude will be unable to free herself. But to the Chevalier’s seemingly rhetorical question, Solitude responds, smiling, “What chains, Seigneur?” (97).60 On one hand, the reader might interpret Solitude’s response as a naive and literal misinterpretation of the Chevalier’s metaphorical question on the part of the childlike zombi-cornes. On the other hand, her response subtly resists the Chevalier’s assessment of her ability to free herself. This idea is borne out when Solitude’s discursive subversion is paralleled in subsequent acts of physical resistance. 55 “elle [mène] une paisible vie de zombi-cornes des années durant” (79). 56 “Le 7 mai 1795, les troupes de la Convention débarquaient en Grande-Terre de Guadeloupe où elles répandaient le décret de l’abolition de l’esclavage” (80). 57 “la coalition des royalistes et des Anglais”; “le camp de sa naissance”; “il formait des vœux pour celui de la Liberté” (80). 58 “d’une voix infiniment navrée: Et toi pauvre zombi qui te délivrera de tes chaînes?” (80). 59 See Wood. 60 “Quelles chaînes, Seigneur?” (80).

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Solitude’s status also clashes with accepted narratives of liberty after Republican rule reaches Guadeloupe. Because the zombi-cornes symbolizes enslavement at an elemental level, Solitude knew her place within colonial society. Yet she struggles to get by in the Republic: “The fugitives moved like ships on the sea, each with its own compass, its own itinerary, each propelled by the sails of its own fancy. Solitude soon discovered that there was no room for a [zombi-cornes] in this new world they called the Republic” (98).61 The fact that Solitude feels there is “no place for a zombi-cornes” under the new political order seems to indicate that slavery is antithetical to Republican ideals. And yet her status speaks to the limits of “liberty” in the new order. Even before Napoleon’s troops arrive to reinstate slavery, these limits are demonstrated first through the beheadings that are made public spectacles,62 and second through the return of forced labor that is not “really slavery” (103).63 Both Solitude’s status and this return of plantation labor show that the Republican experiment did not apply to all citizens, particularly not to the recently emancipated. The final narrative Solitude challenges is that of the triumphant resistance hero. At the end of A Woman Named Solitude, she resists even as she bears the wounds of enslavement. After the new Republican-run plantation where Solitude works is invaded, she escapes and joins a band of maroons. When the maroon leader asks if she is ill (“malade”), she states, “I used to be ridden by the spirits of animals; but they’ve left 61 “Les gens avançaient comme des navires sur la mer, avec chacun sa boussole et son compas, son itinéraire, ses voiles taillées à sa fantaisie. A divers signes, Solitude sut qu’il n’y avait pas de place pour un zombi-cornes, dans ce monde nouveau qu’on appelait la République” (81). 62 The inhabitants of Guadeloupe are described here in striking contrast to those of colonial Saint-Domingue: “It was said that when the blacks of Saint-Domingue saw the first head fall, they had rushed at the machine and torn it to pieces. But those of Guadeloupe had soon got used to the entertainment: They came and went at all hours, ate, drank, and laughed, savored the sweet air of freedom, and blinked sagely at the sun as they watched white men cutting white men’s heads off” (99) (“On disait que les nègres de Saint-Domingue, voyant sauter la première tête, s’étaient précipités sur la machine et l’avaient réduite en morceaux. Mais ceux de Guadeloupe s’y étaient largement habitués: on venait à tout bout de champ, on mangeait et riait, on goûtait l’air délectable de la liberté, on clignait finement des yeux, au soleil, en regardant l’homme blanc trancher la tête de l’homme blanc” (82)). This distinction may indicate the vigorous commitment to liberation associated with the Haitian Revolution. 63 “pas tout à fait l’esclavage” (85).

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me now” (119).64 Yet she is still defined by her “absent, puppet eyes” (137), this defining feature of the zombie.65 When the maroon leader condemns those who fell into line with colonial thought as “puppets in the white man’s dream,” he assures Solitude that she “ha[s] a beautiful heart, a black woman’s heart, in her breast” (137).66 Indeed, Solitude demonstrates this resistance to becoming a puppet in the “white man’s dream” when she leads her companions in fighting French troops “searching for lazy citizens” (140) to work on their plantations.67 Solitude is therefore framed as already an icon when she arrives at the Habitation Danglemont, where she will join Delgrès and the others resisting Richepance and the return of enslavement. Her small appearance surprises one woman, who is “a trifle disappointed at finding her so pitiful, so frail and yellow and naked, so unlike the stories that had been told in the cane fields” (163).68 Even if she is no longer a zombi-cornes, Solitude still appears marked by the abjection and pain of enslavement and the fight against it—she is, simultaneously, the zombie and the freedom fighter of legend. The woman who was disappointed at her appearance consoles Solitude, asking: “where is the bird who can say: I look like my song?” (163).69 This question offers a metanarrative commentary, suggesting that legends aggrandize heroes. A Woman Named Solitude, in contrast, represents, as Simone Schwarz-Bart herself has indicated, a “little voice that suddenly decides that she will take her destiny into her own hands and from now on she will be a rebel, a resistance fighter, a maroon woman.”70 Before she is hanged, Solitude states, “in an excellent French French, which startled all about her: ‘It seems one must never say: Fountain, I shall not drink your water…’” (174).71 64 “Autrefois, j’étais chevauchée par des esprits de bêtes; mais ils m’ont tous quittée” (96). 65 “yeux absents de marionette” (109). 66 “des marionettes à l’intérieur du rêve de l’homme blanc”; “avait toujours eu un beau cœur de négresse dans sa poitrine” (109). 67 “en quête de citoyens paresseux” (111). 68 “vaguement déçue de la trouver telle, si misérable, si frêle et jaune et nue, si peu ressemblante aux histoires qu’on disait, aux récits de canne, aux légendes” (128). 69 “où est l’oiseau qui a dit, je ressemble à mon chant?” (129). 70 “petite voix qui brusquement décide que maintenant elle va prendre en main son destin et elle va être désormais une rebelle, une résistante, une maronne.” See Simone Schwarz-Bart’s interview with Kévi Donat. 71 “en un excellent français de France, dit-on, qui surprit toute l’assistance: ‘Il paraît qu’on ne doit jamais dire: Fontaine, je ne boirai de ton eau…’” (136).

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This statement—implying that one should “never say never” even within the context of the decades- or even centuries-long fight against colonial enslavement—has been interpreted as one last moment of resistance: a reminder that, even if the fight at Matouba in 1802 did not end slavery in Guadeloupe, the hope that inspired the fight was part of enslaved resistance across the Caribbean, and many of the formerly enslaved would taste the “water” of freedom just over a year later with the conclusion of the Haitian Revolution (Lezra 107). This discursive resistance is striking, a sudden departure from the non-verbal, embodied forms of resistance tied to Solitude’s zombified state that emblematize her story in A Woman Named Solitude.72 As a (perhaps former) zombie, Solitude might seem an unlikely heroine. But the novel suggests that even those who appear least likely to rebel can become figures of revolt. Making Solitude a zombie allows the novel to imagine some of the many ways the enslaved and maroons resisted enslavement—including through discursive, mental, and embodied resistance. This project is all the more significant in light of the Guadeloupean slave resistance of 1802, which did not have the triumphant outcome of the Haitian Revolution. The fight led by Delgrès at the Battle of Matouba and fought by over three hundred Guadeloupeans ended in what has been seen as a suicide mission; enslavement was reinstated in 1802 and was not abolished again in the French Antilles until 1848. The triumphant heroes of the Haitian Revolution such as Louverture and Dessalines may not have been possible in this context. Yet Solitude represents ongoing resistance despite the lack of a triumphant slave revolt narrative, and the novel offers a new legacy of resistance to French colonization in an arguably neocolonial contemporary Guadeloupe. This is the legacy that we see in the contemporary memorials to Solitude and other resistance fighters and in the 2009 general strikes.73

72 Kathleen Gyssels highlights Solitude’s lack of speech as a defining feature of the enslaved, who were often deprived of discursive agency, noting that nevertheless “the importance of this novel concerning a vile historical period lies in the fact that the author places the reader, from start to finish, in the consciousness of the Black woman, without her ever appearing as a discursive subject” (“la grandeur de ce livre sur une période historique infâme réside dans le fait que l’auteur installe le lecteur du début jusqu’à la fin dans la conscience de la Noire, sans que celle-ci n’apparaisse pour autant comme sujet discursive” (103)). 73 See Bonilla on these acts of memorialization.

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The Talking Dead: Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows (1986) Where Solitude’s status as zombi-cornes means she offers a largely silent but embodied resistance, her story serves as an intervention into narratives of enslavement and revolt in the context of colonial Guadeloupe, with the authors filling a lacuna in the historical memory of this period and bringing to light the ways Guadeloupeans fought the 1802 reinstatement of slavery. The central zombie in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows (Chronique des sept misères, 1986) effects a similar narrative intervention, but he does so at the diegetic level, sharing his first-hand experience of enslavement with a contemporary inhabitant of Martinique soon after the 1946 departmentalization of the island. Unlike Quiet Dawn and A Woman Named Solitude, the zombies in Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows function primarily not as agents of physical revolt, but rather as vehicles for discursive resistance to national narratives. The central zombie figure in Chronicle, Afoukal, begins his enslavement as a domestic servant who says he will stay on the plantation and serve his master after the abolition of slavery. His former master exploits this obedience when he kills Afoukal so his spirit will guard his fortune. The zombie becomes a vehicle for narrating the realities of colonial enslavement in the present when the novel’s protagonist, Pipi, goes in search of the buried treasure. While Pipi is in conversation with Afoukal, his friends at the marketplace in Fort-de-France are haunted by a group of “zombi-vendors” (marchandes-zombis). These zombies are silent and appear unseeing, but they wear Martinican clothing of a past era that serves as a sartorial reminder of the market’s former glory, before French imports overtook the local economy. In this way, although neither Afoukal nor the zombi-vendors represents physical resistance to enslavement, they inform twentieth-century Martinicans of the colonial past, thereby intervening in the erasure of this history.74 This use of the zombie to intervene in narratives about identity is particularly significant given the novel’s setting in post-departmental (in other words, neocolonial) Martinique, as discourses on French identity began to circulate more widely in the former colony. 74 Lorna Milne notes that the marchandes-zombis, alongside other signs, represent the “death of the market, of the djob, and of a cultural world” (“la mort du marché, du djob, et d’un monde culturel” (86)).

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Just three years after publishing Chronicle, Chamoiseau associated the zombie and other figures of Martinican folklore with authenticity in In Praise of Creoleness (Éloge de la créolité, 1989),75 which he co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphael Confiant (both also natives of Martinique).76 The literary manifesto calls on writers from creolized societies to bring elements specific to their cultures to bear in their literary work. Among other elements of their call, Chamoiseau and his collaborators ask the writer to “accept again without any judgment our ‘dorlis,’ our ‘zombis,’ our ‘chouval-twa-pat,’ ‘soukliyan’” (In Praise of Creoleness 897) as part of the project of creolizing and de-colonizing Caribbean literature in French.77 The zombie is thus identified as part of a constellation of folkloric figures that can be reincorporated into Martinican fiction as a way of reasserting the literature’s cultural specificity. If In Praise of Creoleness calls for a return to folklore for inspiration, it demonstrates a well-known uneasy relationship to the influence of the négritude founding father Aimé Césaire. This problematic kinship is evident in Chronicle as well, where Césaire appears as an inaccessible, Frenchified bureaucrat. Chamoiseau’s novel also reimagines the zombie in a way that ignores what Césaire had pinpointed as a defining characteristic of the figure in Martinique. In the January 1942 issue of Tropiques, Césaire and René Ménil describe the Martinican zombie as an enticing but dangerous shape-shifter: “Watch out for the crab limping across the street, for the rabbit that scurries away into the night, for the woman who is too friendly and too enticing: they’re zombies, all zombies, I’m telling you!” (9).78 This figure tricks solitary wanderers and is a “brutal phenomenon” (9).79 It reflects, they suggest, the dangers that threatened the runaway slave—indicating that, like the Haitian zombie, it reflects the context of colonization and enslavement. However, Césaire and Ménil caution against conflating the Haitian and 75 Bernabé, et al. 76 Éloge de la créolité garnered both acclaim and controversy—it was notably critiqued for its essentialist understanding of creole identity and its “insular and masculinized exclusivity” (Collins 69), with Edouard Glissant and Maryse Condé among its critics. 77 “Réadmettre sans jugement nos ‘dorlis,’ nos ‘zombis,’ nos ‘chouval-twa-pat’” (40). 78 “Attention au crabe qui claudique dans la rue, au lapin qui détale dans la nuit, à la femme trop aimable et trop aiguichante: zombi, zombi, vous dis-je!” Translation mine. 79 “phénomène [brutal].”

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Martinican zombies: “Don’t confuse [the Martinican zombie] with the common revenant that has also come to be called a zombie through linguistic misuse. Definitely don’t confuse it with the Haitian zombie— that docile and dutiful robot, a benevolent figure of the living dead” (9).80 Here, the Martinican zombie is neither a symbol of the slave nor a simple ghost. In Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, in contrast, Chamoiseau seems to interpret the zombie Afoukal as a kind of “common revenant.” When Pipi is struck by the desire to search for gold after business in the marketplace dries up, the tales of old gold-diggers lead him to “Afoukal […] the zombi-slave” (164).81 Because the enslaved man was killed by his master to guard a jar of gold on the eve of abolition, Afoukal is prevented from finding liberation during his lifetime. Even more strikingly, he is enslaved to his master’s fortune for a century or so, guarding it until Pipi sets him free by finally unearthing the jar (which ultimately contains no gold, besides the symbolic gold of Afoukal’s memories). Afoukal does not shape shift, and in fact never appears in visible physical form to Pipi. (Pipi does hear Afoukal’s skeletal presence through “the clicking of Afoukal’s bones” (107) or “the tikitak tikitak tak tak of a loose-jointed skeleton” (108).82) However, like the zombie described by Césaire and Ménil, Afoukal represents a threat to those who pursue the treasure: “A whole lifetime of foolhardy schemers had beaten themselves bloody against the fierce vigilance of the zombi Afoukal, who kept his word as stubbornly as a deaf devil” (106).83 His animated skeleton leaves gold seekers “tattered like an empty sack” (106) when they try to dig up the treasure.84 But making the zombie a revenant (rather than a shape-shifting trickster) allows Chamoiseau to endow the zombie with a characteristic it typically lacks: Afoukal possesses a narrative and discursive 80 “Ne le confondez pas avec le vulgaire revenant devenu Zombi lui aussi par un abus de langage. Ne le confondez pas davantage, avec le Zombi haïtien, ce doux et consciencieux robot, ce mort-vivant de bonne volonté.” 81 “Afoukal, l’esclave-zombi” (Chronique 143). All quotations in English come from the translation by Linda Coverdale. 82 “le cliquetis des os d’Afoukal”; “les tikitak tikitak tak tak d’une ossature mal soudée” (148). 83 “Toute une génération de foubin s’était abîmée contre la féroce vigilance du zombi d’Afoukal respectant avec une obstination de diable sourd la parole donnée” (145). 84 “chiffonné comme un sac vide” (146).

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capacity that allows him to offer a first-hand testimony of the historical realities of the French Atlantic slave trade. At night, Afoukal speaks to Pipi in his dreams. Pipi, hoping that Afoukal will reveal the means of unearthing the jar of gold, initially hears only “a nameless woe, the clanking of chains, foul odors from dark holes, the splashing of cruel waves” (110).85 However, eventually “Afoukal enjoyed visiting his dreams and began speaking to him more and more clearly about plantation life during slavery, that most searing day-after-day distress” (110).86 His “eighteen Dream-Words” (110–19) detail everything from the African origins of the enslaved to the Middle Passage and acts of resistance—story-telling, freedom running, poisoning the master.87 As a result, Pipi is described as having the “healthy gaze of those who, for the first time, possess a memory” (120).88 Whereas most Haitian corporeal zombies are unspeaking, embodied memories of enslavement, Afoukal serves as a voice representing the experiences of the slave trade and the plantation. In other words, Afoukal’s discursivity renders the zombie a vehicle for restoring the memory of slavery in the contemporary moment, rather than functioning as an abstract and symbolic reminder of the past.89 While Afoukal’s narrative alludes to numerous acts of enslaved resistance, it is notable that the eve of abolition on which he was killed was the 1848 abolition of slavery in the French colonies. Whereas both Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe saw the enactment of the 1794 law of the First Republic, which abolished slavery in the French colonies, Martinique did not. British forces took control of the island with the accord of royalist French planters two days after abolition was signed into law by the French Convention, thus preventing its implementation. When the island came into French possession once again in 1802, Napoleon reinstated slavery. Afoukal’s near-liberation 85 “une détresse sans nom, des bruissements de chaînes, des puanteurs de cales sombres, des clapotis de vagues amères” (150–51). 86 “Afoukal prit plaisir à visiter ses rêves, à lui parler de plus en plus nettement de la vie des plantations sous l’esclavage: plus grande des détresses quotidiennes” (151). 87 “dix-huit paroles rêvées” (151–68). 88 “le regard en bonne saison de ceux qui, pour la première fois, possèdent une mémoire” (169). 89 Jacqueline Couti argues that “La rencontre entre Afoukal et Pipi dans ‘la clairière maudite’ rappelle qu’aux Antilles, la mémoire avant d’être conservée doit être déterrée, reconnue, et acceptée, c’est-à-dire assimilée” (104).

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thus echoes this previous moment in which abolition was denied to the enslaved inhabitants of Martinique. Afoukal’s aborted liberation also reflects what Chamoiseau suggests is the false promise of 1848. Although Afoukal’s master kills him to protect the fortune he fears will disappear with the end of free labor, the ferociousness with which the zombie guards the jar of gold “discouraged the béké himself, who didn’t even try to recover his treasure after his first fears of abolition had passed (aside from the chains, nothing was really different)” (106).90 Instead, the former enslaver finds it easier to rebuild his fortune with the labor of the newly freed. This sense of exploitation under colonial rule is reflected in Martinique’s neocolonial present in Chronicle as well. Indeed, the other zombies in Chronicle—the spectral women who appear in the marketplace—interrogate the departmental status of Martinique and what it means for both the island’s identity and economy. While Pipi converses with Afoukal, a series of strange events occurs in the marketplace: among other things, a group of “zombi-vendors” (148) appear and frighten the other vendors and patrons.91 Unlike Afoukal, they never speak, they appear to have no material form, and they pose no physical danger, although they still provoke an emotional shock. (The voicelessness of these zombie women, in contrast with Afoukal’s loquaciousness, is notable given the accusations of gender bias leveled against the foundational texts of créolité.92) Although they offer no verbal discourse on the past, the zombie women of the marketplace offer a mnemonic corrective through their clothing. When they first appear, they are described as “[t]hree chabine peddlers, in a haze of dust motes, wreathed in an aura of eternity, for they were dressed in garments more ancient than our dreams” (151).93 These clothing items represent Martinique’s sartorial traditions: “turbans of cheerful madras,” “Creole princesse gowns adorned with flounces and laces,” “chemises of embroidered batiste trimmed with wide bands of lace 90 “découragea le béké lui-même qui, revenue de sa crainte de l’abolition (chaînes mises à part, rien n’avait véritablement changé), n’essaya même pas de récupérer sa fortune” (145). 91 “marchandes-zombis” (207). They are also called “marchandes spectrales” (210). 92 See Arnold. 93 “Trois chabines, auréolées de poussières fines, dépositaires d’un aura d’éternité grâce à leurs vêtements plus anciens que nos rêves” (210–11). On the concept of the chabin/chabine, see Delaville.

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and pleated around golden buttons” (151).94 Highlighting this clothing signals their status as “exhibitions of a vanished life” (154).95 Specifically, these clothes represent the “bygone era” of the market’s glory days, before the 1946 departmentalization (which followed a period of relative independence during World War II) led to the decline of the local economy.96 Moreover, the clothing represents creolized fashions unique to the island, such as Madras fabric, which originated in India. The zombi-vendors also intervene in contemporary narratives about Martinican identity. Eventually, their appearances so disrupt the day-to-day operations of the marketplace that the “the municipal guardian had to call in the police and then the archbishop, since they were zombies, I’m telling you…” (152).97 In a comical passage, the police arrive and attempt to arrest the spectral figures: When they materialized the officers rushed at them angrily, as though to roust out a tribe of Rastas. In the name of the French people and the clacking of handcuffs, they enlivened the stroll of the Eternal Ones with a furious struggle that didn’t jar the ladies’ serenity one jot. The policemen clutched right through the apparitions as though grasping the air itself. (152)98

Beyond the absurd image of police officers attempting to handcuff these immaterial, ghostly figures, this passage represents the policing of narratives of identity. The fact that the arrest is attempted “in the name of the French people” suggests that their presence is disrupting the national narrative that deems the inhabitants of Martinique undifferentiated “Frenchmen” after 1946. The allusion to the police furiously chasing the zombies as though driving out Afro-diasporic Rastafarians 94 “des turbans de madras joyeux,” “des gaules princesses, pourvues de volants et de dentelles,” and “[des] chemises de batiste brodées, agrémentées de larges dentelles” (211). 95 “exhibitions d’une vie révolue” (215). 96 See Granvisir-Clerc on creole fashions and their decline after World War I in Martinique. 97 “le gardien municipal dut faire appel à la police, puis à l’archevêque, puisque ce sont des zombis, je vous dis…” (212). 98 “Quand elles se matérialisaient, les policiers s’élançaient rageusement comme pour déloger une tribu de rastas. Au nom du peuple français, dans des claquements de menottes, ils accompagnaient la traversée des éternels par une lutte furieuse qui n’altérait pas la sérénité de ces dernières. Les grappins policiers traversaient les apparitions, comme voulant crocheter l’air lui-même” (213).

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only highlights their drive to control the narratives of identity in Martinique. Immediately following the attempted arrest of the zombi-vendors— indeed, in the same paragraph—the narration abruptly shifts to “news of Pipi […] brought to us by Rastas who’d come to hawk bamboo sculptures at the market” (152)—specifically, news of his conversations with Afoukal.99 This sudden transition suggests a connection between these distinct zombie figures. While Afoukal subsequently rejects the prospect of a return to Africa as a solution to Pipi’s quest for identity, his representation of the horrific and painful yet formative experience of slavery and the zombi-vendors’ evocation of the market both gesture towards foundational creolizing spaces and moments in Martinique’s past. In other words, these zombies represent buried histories. While, as Maeve McCusker notes, Afoukal and Pipi’s attempts to “create a sense of historical connection” are ultimately “futile in their quest for a continuous historical narrative” (46), the zombie figures in Chronicle nevertheless allow Martinique’s past to resurface in the present, even if in a disturbing, disjointed manner. In doing so, these figures of repressed memory trouble neocolonial French national narratives, which in their unified “universality” preclude the narrative of France’s role in the slave trade and attempt to override the cultural specificity of regional identities. Chamoiseau reimagines the zombie as slave, transforming Afoukal from a silent symbol and allowing him to bear witness to the experience of enslavement nearly a century after abolition. Yet both Afoukal and the zombi-vendors show how the zombie as revenant can be deployed as a discursive vehicle for the resurgence of histories—not symbolically, as in contemporary popular Caribbean imaginaries, or extradiegetically, as in the other novels studied in this chapter, but literally. These zombie figures thereby offer fuller narratives of enslavement that resonate in the present moment. In this way, Chamoiseau reflects on what these revived historical memories might signify for contemporary Martinicans, for whom the author imagines the novel to be a space for the renewal of cultural memory and identity. The zombies in the novels studied in this chapter are victims both of zombification and of the transatlantic slave trade during the period of colonization. Each zombie serves as a vehicle for resisting various forms of colonial and neocolonial discourse that legitimize the transatlantic slave trade or obfuscate its legacy in the French Caribbean. However, 99 “des nouvelles de Pipi […] colportées par des rastas” (213).

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the differences between the zombies’ characteristics reflect the unique ways authors use the living dead to engage with the distinct but related histories of colonial Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique, particularly in relation to narratives of enslavement and resistance. In Quiet Dawn, Toukouma’s band of avenging zombies’ violent dismemberment of white bodies serves as a critique of the structuring legal and political discourses of colonial thought, including the Code noir and Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. By tying these acts to the Haitian Revolution, Jean-Claude Fignolé transforms the zombie into a figure of slave revolt, rather than passivity, questioning the “unthinkability” of successful slave resistance five years before Michel-Rolph Trouillot did so in his seminal history Silencing the Past. In contrast, A Woman Named Solitude represents an important slave revolt with a very different outcome: the 1802 Battle of Matouba, which was followed by the reinstatement of slavery in Guadeloupe under Napoleon’s orders. While Solitude presents an embodied, often passive resistance to colonial narratives, she ultimately fights against the Napoleonic forces that are attempting to re-enslave Guadeloupeans. Solitude’s failure to conform to images of the iconic revolutionary hero reflects the ambivalent history of Guadeloupe’s 1802 revolt, and her story as imagined in A Woman Named Solitude suggests that even the most traumatized and outwardly obedient individuals are able to resist enslavement. The Schwarz-Barts’ novel, moreover, transformed Solitude into an iconic resistance figure even while imagining her as a zombie. Whereas Solitude is nearly silent, in Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, the zombie slave Afoukal offers an entirely discursive resistance. Afoukal’s personal story of closely missing the post-emancipation period in Martinique echoes the earlier history of interrupted would-be abolition in Martinique, as the 1794 decree ending enslavement led French planters to collaborate with the English occupation of the island. Yet his narrative and that of the zombi-vendors represent a form of resistance to dominant histories and the occupying French national narrative post-1946, sharing memories of Martinique’s past that may contribute to its identity formation in the present. In these ways, these writers do more than just interrogate narratives of enslavement, resistance, and abolition. They also reimagine the zombie’s function as a vehicle for these histories in the present. They question the zombie’s categorical passivity even as they use it to consider the conditions and stakes of enslaved revolt. They use the zombie’s dehumanization to question Enlightenment-era narratives about liberty

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and the humanity of the enslaved and to represent the trauma of enslavement. Perhaps most significantly, by situating the zombie within the historical period it evokes no matter the context, they critique the zombie’s function as a silent reminder of haunting and repressed histories—suggesting instead that the living dead can serve as vehicles for bringing more detailed, nuanced, and widely known narratives of the historical period to light. While the subsequent chapters in this book deal specifically with Haitian or Haitian diaspora fiction, this chapter suggests how the zombie works across the French Caribbean as a vehicle for the historical memory of colonization and enslavement. Although the zombie is endemic to the French Caribbean, where it reflects the context of enslavement and colonization, in the French Antilles it is typically said to symbolize not the enslaved, but rather the threats posed to the maroon or freedom runner. And yet the works representing the context of Martinique and Guadeloupe in this chapter reflect the influence of the zombie–slave avatar embodied by the corporeal Haitian zombie. In the case of A Woman Named Solitude, this inspiration can be seen directly through the clear intertext with Alfred Métraux’s anthropological description of the zonbi kò kadav in Voodoo in Haiti. In contrast, the influence of the zombie–slave avatar is more metanarrative in Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows—that is, while Afoukal does not reflect many of the typical conventions that define the kò kadav, as a zombie–slave he embodies, in the contemporary moment, the historical memory of enslavement. While all of these writers are inspired by the zombie–slave avatar that originated in Haiti (emerging from African beliefs), they adapt it to represent and critique historical narratives and lacunae in Martinique and Guadeloupe as well as Haiti. These writers thus transform the zombie–slave from a narrative vehicle for reflecting on the legacy of enslavement and colonization within Haiti into a tool for interrogating these historical narratives across the French Caribbean. Whereas the zombie represented in the French Caribbean is closely tied to the history of both oppression and revolution in the region, the apparent mindlessness of the Romero-style zombie might seem to preclude any potential for resistance. In addition, the preconception that the anthropophagic creature is a threat to humans, and not vice versa, suggests that these zombies are not unjustly persecuted beings who might rise up against their tormentors. Both of these ideas have recently been contested. In George Romero’s 2005 Land of the Dead, his first zombie film following the Night of the Living Dead trilogy, the

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ghouls evoke the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo under the George W. Bush administration. As the non-zombified human population resides safely within a walled complex, the living dead intramuros are forced to fight for sport, and outside the walls they are drawn by fireworks and killed. In the 2022 Netflix series All of Us Are Dead, the zombie’s role as subaltern is evident in the creation of a zombifying virus: a science teacher tries to replicate the drive to fight—rather than flee—when faced with danger so that he can help his son who is bullied to the point of suicidal ideation. Yet this class of once-bullied high school students does not form an organized resistance. In contrast, in Land of the Dead, the dehumanized subaltern class defies the human characters’ belief that they are merely mimicking the gestures of life. A Black zombie whose mechanic’s jumpsuit is emblazoned with the nametag “Big Daddy” rallies the other living dead to storm the humans’ walled compound, which they do in a highly organized manner. Evocative both of class struggles, given Big Daddy’s previous working-class profession, and of the Civil Rights movement (a subtext of Night) given Big Daddy’s racial identity, this revolt suggests a new step in the transformation of the zombie from drone worker (White Zombie) into capitalist consumer (Dawn of the Dead)—the zombie has now experienced a political and social awakening. Indeed, this seemingly unimaginable resistance echoes the “unthinkable” revolution and its allegorization as a zombie uprising by writers such as Fignolé and the Schwarz-Barts. While the zombie’s symbolic connection to the enslaved is specific to the Caribbean, with its history of colonial chattel slavery, it seems that the zombie has a broader capacity to represent political revolts, even by unspeaking subalterns.

chapter two

The Zombie as Figure of Mental Illness The Zombie as Figure of Mental Illness

In 1929, the first institution dedicated to treating the mentally ill was opened in Haiti, under the aegis of the US occupation of the island nation (1915–1934). The “Camp de Beudet,” as Haitians called it, seems to have done little beyond housing “violent or otherwise bothersome mentally ill patients” (Farmer 257). Prior to Beudet’s opening, there was no systemic medical or psychiatric intervention for the mentally ill; rather, they were cared for by family, at times with the help of Vodou practitioners, because mental illness was often presumed to be a spiritual disorder. Conditions at Beudet were poor and patients were overseen by nurses from the occupying forces, with no doctors on site and little offered in the way of treatment. This description indicates the troubling realities behind narratives about the benevolent “civilizing” presence of the United States. The example of the Camp de Beudet is indicative of the ways occupying forces sought to import Western ideas about mental illness to Haiti. It also suggests a desire to control, pathologize, and diagnose Haitian bodies and minds, a desire that reverberated not only in psychiatric practices, but in popular culture as well. These preoccupations are echoed in early zombie narratives by writers from the United States, which attempt to “diagnose” purported zombies, suggesting that they are merely mentally ill individuals rather than living dead. In 1929, the year the Camp de Beudet opened, William Seabrook published his popular travelogue The Magic Island, which introduced the zombie to a broad audience in the United States. The Magic Island was one of the first and most popular works to exploit the fascinating figure in the service of US occupation ideology.1 Seabrook tells a number 1 Lafcadio Hearn’s essay “La Guiablesse” (given the title “The Country of the Comers-Back” by Peter Haining in 1986), published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1889, and reprinted in the essay collection Two Years in the French

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of zombie tales. One of them, which the author relates second-hand, ostensibly took place on the Cul-de-Sac plain—coincidentally, where the Camp de Beudet was located. (In The Magic Island, the zombies toil in the Hasco sugar cane fields located there.) This story explains the zombies’ existence in supernatural terms: they accidentally ingested salt, which made them return to the cemetery, “each before his own empty grave […] clawing at the stones and earth to enter it again” (99). In another story, Seabrook reports his encounter with a small group of zombies on the island of La Gonâve. In contrast with the first tale, Seabrook hesitates between deeming these zombies simply mentally ill or truly living dead. He sees them in broad daylight, using machetes to work the earth. At first, the author finds them “unnatural and strange,” terms that suggest a supernatural origin. However, he later concludes they are “poor, ordinary demented human beings, idiots, forced to toil in the field” (102).2 In the early twentieth-century context of Seabrook’s travelogue, the terms idiocy and dementia evoked intellectual disability and mental illness, respectively. They allowed Seabrook to offer a natural explanation for the seemingly “unnatural” creatures, diagnosing them through the lens of Western psychiatric medicine rather than understanding them through Vodou beliefs. Seabrook’s was one of many works published toward the end of the occupation and in the following decades that cultivated and cashed in on the fascination of audiences in the United States with Haitian “voodoo,” and more specifically with the zombie.3 Scholars have noted that the Seabrook-inspired White Zombie (1932)—the first featurelength zombie film—casts Haitians as superstitious, and thus “justifies” the need for paternalist neocolonial governance.4 In works such as West Indies (1890), describes stories of “zombis” in Martinique—referring to the malevolent spirit that changes its appearance to trick solitary wanderers at night. However, his writing did not have the same broad impact as The Magic Island, which inspired White Zombie and would go on to be cited by numerous anthropologists, including Alfred Métraux in Voodoo in Haiti (1958). 2 Métraux similarly describes zombies as people found “in a state verging on idiocy” (281) (“dans un état voisin de l’idiotie” (249)). 3 See Ramsey on the legal origins of this fascination. 4 Fay argues that White Zombie “performs curious racial reversals that […] suggest that U.S. citizens may themselves be susceptible to America’s degrading Haitian policy” (83). Hurbon writes: “This very simple thesis, namely that Vodou is a hub for cannibalistic practices, and therefore for the savagery and the tyranny of Blacks left to their own devices—sums up the varied discourses that American

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White Zombie, John Cussans writes, “the Classic Cinematic zombie introduces hypnotic and narcotic accounts which attempt to reduce the category of supernatural phenomena to the psychological and pathological in ways characteristic of a modern, scientific episteme” (118). However, these attempts often fail, leaving an enduring and troubling (if fascinating) ambiguity. This ambiguity is central to films such as I Walked with a Zombie (1943), in which it remains uncertain whether the zombie character Jessica contracted a tropical fever that left her catatonic or was transformed into a member of the living dead by her mother-in-law. Similarly, Zora Neale Hurston affirms the “reality” of zombies in her ethnographic travel narrative Tell My Horse (1938), yet the case she encounters in a hospital yard—a woman named Felicia Felix-Mentor—appears to be as much a victim of trauma as a zombie. In fact, Alfred Métraux interprets Hurston’s meeting in terms of intellectual disability, writing, “it really seems that the woman concerned was an imbecile or a moron” (281).5 As Glover has noted, these representations can be tied broadly to the ongoing pathologization of Haitians in popular and journalistic narratives through a discourse of “Afro-abjection” (“Flesh Like One’s Own” 237). Indeed, the attempt to explain zombies as individuals with some form of mental illness or intellectual disability was revived, in a slightly altered form, in the 1980s. Around the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, Wade Davis published his controversial research into a purported “zombie powder” that ostensibly contained a toxin capable of inducing a comatose state mistaken for death.6 His study represents another attempt to contain and diagnose the zombie through Western thought. For Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Davis’s research represents a drive to explain the zombie phenomenon through empirical and authors published in Haiti on the eve of the US occupation” (“Cette thèse toute simple—à savoir que le vodou est un haut lieu de pratiques cannibaliques, donc de la sauvagerie et de la tyrannie des Noirs livrés à eux-mêmes—résume les divers discours que les auteurs américains ont diffusés en Haïti à la veille de l’occupation américaine” (Le Barbare imaginaire 99)). Translation mine. 5 “il semble qu’elle ait eu affaire à une folle ou à une idiote” (249). 6 Davis wrote both a scholarly account of his research, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988), and a popular account, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985). The latter was adapted by the horror film director Wes Craven, as I will discuss in the first section of this chapter. More recently, the French coroner and forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier published Zombis: Enquête sur les morts-vivants (2015).

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material realities, rather than through the symbolic truths and beliefs that are central to the zombie as it is understood in Haiti (243). The first section of this chapter examines how early US prose and cinema representations of the zombie not only unsettle “‘scientific’ system[s] of thought”—revealing the limits of empirical ways of thinking—but also expose “troubles” that were already present within the nascent field of psychiatric medicine. The zombie challenges empirical classifications, yet the representations studied in this chapter show thinly veiled anxieties about the effects of Western psychiatric “treatments,” such as controversial psychosurgeries and psychiatric medications. If representations of the zombie by US writers and filmmakers challenge rational knowledge and reveal psychiatric medicine’s complicity in exploiting neuro-atypical individuals, Haitian writers indicate that scientific thought cannot supersede the many ways the zombie is understood in the Caribbean, and they critique the pathologization of Haitians and Vodou in many US zombie narratives. In sections two through four of this chapter, I explore the reimagining of zombies in three works by Haitian writers: Jacques Stephen Alexis’s short story “Chronicle of a False Love” (“Chronique d’un faux-amour”), from the collection Romancero aux étoiles (1960); René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (1988)); and Gérard Chenet’s novel Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie (2009). These works share a common intertext, the story of Marie M., a “young upper-class woman” in Haiti (Paravisini-Gebert 40). According to Hurston, Marie M. died in 1909—the beginning of her zombification—and was freed when her captor died: his wife took her to a church, from which, “dressed in the habit of a nun she was smuggled off to France where she was seen later in a convent by her brother” (194). As Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert notes, this apparent fait divers seems to be the origin for most tales of zombified young women.7 The story also echoes the Haitian writer Ignace Nau’s 1836 story “Isalina, ou, une scène créole.” Nau’s story describes the young Isalina’s “ensorcellement” (85) by a scorned suitor, whose apparent use of sorcery plunges her into a fearful hallucinatory state. After her lover Paul overhears two passersby discussing her fate (one asks, “Do you think zombies are mixed up in this?” (85)), he enlists the aid of a papaloi or Vodou priest to save Isalina.8 7 Hurston notes that Marie M.’s was “the most notorious case in all Haiti and people still talk about it whenever Zombies [sic] are mentioned” (195). 8 “Il y a des zombis dans ceci, qu’en pensez-vous?”

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Métraux similarly describes a “girl from Marbial, engaged to a young man with whom she was much in love, [who] was unwise enough to reject—rather sharply—the advances of a powerful hungan” (284).9 She died inexplicably and was found years later after the oungan freed his zombies during the antisuperstition campaign; the girl lived with her family for some years afterwards, albeit “without ever recovering her sanity” (285).10 These early models of zombified love-interests are echoed in the representation of the zombie in the three works discussed in this chapter.11 They also underscore the ways gender inflects discussions about mental illness—for example, at times these works parallel depictions of “hysterical” women. When the three texts by Haitian writers studied in this chapter are read in relation to works by US writers and artists, it becomes clear that Alexis, Depestre, and Chenet propose nuanced ways of understanding how Vodou and psychiatric medicine can help to diagnose and perhaps cure the zombie. Alexis’s “Chronicle of a False Love” never fully resolves the lingering hesitation between understanding the zombified narrator as living dead or as mentally ill, but it suggests that the zombie narrative represents a way for her to understand past traumas. This depiction is consistent with the function of the zombie legend in Haitian culture as a way of giving voice to moments of unspeakable violence. In Hadriana in All My Dreams, Depestre represents the zombie as a “real” figure of the living dead, created through a ritual involving both spirit theft and a powder that induces catatonia, but he implies that the zombie can be cured by preserving the individual’s imagination—which is stolen as part of the zombification process in Hadriana—as well as through the intervention of psychiatric medicine. In this way, Depestre both foregrounds the significance of the imagination to the zombie legend and indicates that the figure cannot be understood through one epistemology alone. Chenet reimagines the zombie in yet another way, returning to the trope of the zombie as a figure of mental illness by making the titular protagonist of Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie into an apparent rather than a “real” zombie, but curing her using “Vodou 9 “jeune fille de Marbial, fiancée à un jeune homme dont elle était fort éprise, [qui] eut l’imprudence de rejeter avec quelque vivacité les avances d’un puissant houngan” (252). 10 “sans retrouver la raison” (252). 11 See also Mayra Montero’s short story “Corinne, muchacha amable” [“Corinne, Amiable Girl”].

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psychotherapy.” Chenet thus offers a corrective to the association of Vodou with superstition and zombification, suggesting that the religion is capable not only of treating individual and collective traumas, but also of performing tasks that in epistemologies of the Global North require more rational forms of knowledge. In these ways, I argue, these writers push back against the idea that scientific knowledge alone can “diagnose” the zombie, asserting that to privilege science in this way erases the multifaceted social, political, and historical realities that created and continue to shape the legendary living dead figure as it is understood in Haiti and the diaspora. Mental Illness in Early US Zombie Narratives As a figure of psychic splitting, created in Haitian beliefs through the theft of the ti bon anj or the portion of the soul containing personality, the zombie evokes altered mental states.12 It also speaks to the way Haiti has long served as a foil for the United States, shoring up the latter’s self-perception as a civilized nation. However, as several of the works studied in this section illustrate, while narratives by US writers and filmmakers often represent attempts to use rational, scientific methods to interpret the zombie figure, ultimately they cannot categorically rule out the possibility of supernatural explanations for the phenomenon. In addition to challenging the supremacy of rational thought, the Haitian zombies studied in this section mirror back fears about dehumanizing practices in Western psychiatric treatments. These zombies appear in works by US writers and filmmakers that span six decades and represent diverse narrative forms: Seabrook’s travelogue The Magic Island (1929); the films White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943); and two purported ethnographies—Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) and Wade Davis’s Passage of Darkness (1988). Through their representation of the zombie figure, these texts suggest the struggle of early psychiatric science to fully understand, not to mention effectively treat, the conditions of those who lie outside the bounds of the neurotypical. Specifically, these representations of the living dead allude to a variety of treatments that emerged as the field of psychiatry developed starting in the early nineteenth century, 12 For instance, Glover calls the zombie “lobotomized, depersonalized, and reduced through black magic to a state of absolute impotence” (Haiti Unbound 59).

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from hypnotism and mesmerism—the former of which Jean-Martin Charcot used to treat hysteria at Salpêtrière hospital in Paris during the late nineteenth century—to lobotomy, insulin shock treatment, and Thorazine. Many of these treatments created a zombie-like state: hypnotism rendered the individual obedient to commands; lobotomy excised part of the individual’s intellectual and affective response; and the so-called “Thorazine shuffle” translated the popular perception that anti-psychotic medications could have numbing side-effects, making patients easier to control. The zombie as an avatar of mental illness, as represented in twentieth-century US narratives, thus represents not merely a rational explanation for the zombie’s state, but also anxieties about how Western psychiatric medicine may “zombify” patients as well. Perhaps the eerie, inexplicable nature of early displays of hypnotism and mesmerism are what led the creators of Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) to meld these popular pseudosciences with lesser-known ideas about Vodou in their tale of an American couple, newly arrived in Haiti, that falls prey to an evil sorcerer (Murphy 49). If the concept of the “zombie” was still relatively new, the image of the bòkò (a Vodou priest who, among other things, makes zombies) Murder Legendre controlling enthralled subjects with his hands might have been familiar to audiences. When he kills and resurrects Madeline, the recently arrived and newly married American woman, his gestures echo visually those that the inventor of mesmerism, Franz Mesmer, used when manipulating what he believed was the attractive force or “animal magnetism” within all living beings (Rhodes 29). Although the film does not indicate that Madeline is mentally ill rather than returned from the dead, her appearance and movements offer visual and thematic echoes with the hypnotized subject or the somnambulist—vacant eyes, mechanical movements, arms occasionally outstretched. Sleepwalking was considered a symptom of hysteria, and both hypnotism and mesmerism were used at points to treat the disease. In this way, Madeline evokes the hysterical patients of doctors such as Charcot, who famously hypnotized purported hysterics in amphitheaters at Salpêtrière hospital. Charcot put on public displays of hypnotism that, as Rae Beth Gordon notes, functioned at once as “scientific demonstrations, supposed manifestations of supernatural phenomena, and popular spectacle” (30). In this context, the melding of zombification and hypnosis points towards the uncomfortable (if fascinating) coexistence of science and superstition in the European late nineteenth

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century, a discomforting tension that the zombie figure revived for early twentieth-century US audiences. This example also suggests a thematic connection between hysteria, sexuality, and spectacle that runs throughout early representations of female zombies. By overlaying the representation of the Haitian zombie with that of the female hysteric, however, the film replaces one set of socio-political realities with another. This substitution overshadows the zombie’s commentary on enslavement and colonization (see Chapter 1) with, as scholars have noted, a preoccupation with white women’s sexual purity, but it also substitutes fears about the potential of these pseudosciences to be used to exploit and control hapless victims.13 Where White Zombie freely appropriates and changes the zombie legend, Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) represents zombification in a nuanced manner, anchored in Vodou beliefs, even as it relates the zombie to more contemporary psychiatric practices. Yet Tourneur’s film also preserves the ambiguity between the supernatural and the medical explanation for the zombie. When the Canadian nurse Betsy Connell arrives on the fictional island of Saint Sebastian to care for the beautiful but catatonic Jessica, the wife of the sugar plantation owner Paul Holland, he tells Betsy that Jessica is “a mental case.” Her doctor says she is the victim of “a tropical fever” that burned “portions of the spinal cord,” making her “a woman without any willpower, unable to speak or even act by herself, although she will obey simple commands.” This description directly parallels that of a zombie, a term that superstitious locals use to describe Jessica; the implication is that the same zombie-like state can be explained through different belief systems. I Walked with a Zombie also reflects fears about an emerging medical treatment, insulin shock therapy, that was used in the United States and Europe during the 1940s and 1950s to treat disorders such as schizophrenia. Betsy initially sides with the rational, medical explanation for Jessica’s state and proposes insulin shock therapy to try to cure her. Jessica’s doctor describes the treatment as providing a “shock [that] can kill, but […] can also cure.” When Paul Holland balks at the decision—the choice to allow Jessica to live or die—Betsy argues, “Your wife isn’t living. She’s in a world that’s empty of joy or meaning.” Because Jessica appears affectless and non-emotive, she lacks an inner life and may therefore be killed without doing harm, as 13 On the former, see, for instance, Paravisini-Gebert.

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long as the attempt is made with the aim of restoring her. This idea, however, is arguably belied, or at least complicated, by the inscrutable stare of both Jessica and the other zombie figure, Carrefour (who, as a Black zombie named for the crossroads—a symbol of the lwa Legba— evokes both Vodou and enslavement),14 because their uncanny gazes suggest that we cannot really know what is behind the blank zombie exterior.15 The insulin shock treatment fails to cure Jessica (although it does not kill her, either). As a result, Betsy takes her to the Vodou temple to try a magical cure instead. Later, Mrs. Rand, Paul Holland’s mother, claims she used Vodou to make Jessica into a zombie, to keep her from leaving her son for his brother. The film never definitively reveals the cause of Jessica’s mental state. Yet the representation of psychiatric medicine is clear: it fails to appropriately diagnose or cure Jessica, and the treatment that may result in death is applied based on assumptions about the patient’s mental state, since she cannot express herself. The two zombies, Carrefour and Jessica, represent two legacies of scientific and pseudoscientific thought on marginalized groups—the Black zombie a haunting symbol of how theories of humanity legitimized enslavement, and the white, female zombie a symbol of the mental and sexual control long imposed on women through psychiatric treatments. Thus, while I Walked with a Zombie reflects anxieties about one of the physical psychiatric treatments that were the norm in the first half of the twentieth century, and more broadly about the rights of patients unable to express their needs and desires, it also probes dehumanizing discourses such as those used to legitimize the colonial slave trade. Another form of psychiatric treatment that created controversy was the psychosurgical treatments developed and implemented during the early twentieth century. Perhaps the most controversial of these treatments were the lobotomies performed in the United States and Europe primarily during the 1940s and 1950s.16 There is an anticipatory reference to 14 The film insists on the inability of the white colonizers to properly see the realities of descendants of enslaved Africans on the island. For instance, when Betsy’s driver describes how his ancestors were brought to the island “chained to the bottom of the boat,” she carelessly responds, “They brought you to a beautiful place, didn’t they?” 15 For more on the zombie’s blank gaze, see Swanson. 16 According to Johnson, “In the United States alone, tens of thousands of women, men, and even children were subjected to some form of lobotomy” (2).

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lobotomy in Seabrook’s The Magic Island, which was published six years before the first lobotomy was undertaken on a human, in 1935, by the Portuguese doctor Egas Moniz, and a decade before the procedure became used more widely. When Seabrook encounters a group of zombies, he has a moment of panic while gazing at their dead eyes, until he decides they are intellectually disabled. The panic subsides as he recalls “the face of a dog [he] had once seen in the histological laboratory at Columbia,” whose “entire front brain had been removed in an experimental operation weeks before” (101). The eyes of the zombies remind him of this lobotomized dog, reassuring him that there may be a natural explanation for their blank gazes. Although part of the shock value of Seabrook’s description lies in the comparison between Haiti and the scientifically cutting-edge New York, the idea that such a person exists in Haiti frightens Seabrook because it might mean that “this stuff”—Vodou and the existence of humans returned from the dead—“is really true” (101). In an Ivy League lab, the same kind of living automaton—the dog—is less frightening because it has an undeniably rational explanation (and perhaps also because it is not human, although the idea that such experiments can be “reassuring” might give the reader pause). Yet Seabrook’s story, with its oddly prescient suggestion of lobotomy as a psychiatric treatment for humans, anticipates a terrifying, dehumanizing reality: the effective “zombification” of non-neurotypical individuals that would take place in the name of curing psychiatric ailments. When the zombie is viewed as a figure of mental illness, The Magic Island, White Zombie, and I Walked with a Zombie reveal a new aspect of the widespread fascination among US audiences with the living dead figure, especially during the early twentieth century. Beyond the zombie’s function as an embodiment of Haitian superstition and barbarity, it also serves as a screen for another set of fears: those pertaining to the threat of mental illness and to the danger that new psychiatric “treatments” posed to individual sovereignty, since they often seemed to harm as much as they helped. Descriptions such as Seabrook’s replace the horror of slavery and colonization with fears of the limits of psychiatric medicine—and the realities of patients cognitively scarred by treatments such as lobotomies. In contrast to contemporary works such as The Magic Island, Zora Neale Hurston’s description of a zombie woman in Tell My Horse (1938) seems to critique psychiatric medicine’s treatment of the mentally ill without occluding the gendered and racialized valence of this dehumanization. Hurston’s meeting with the purported zombie

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Felicia Felix-Mentor is organized by “Dr. Rulx Léon, Director-General of the Service d’Hygiene” (195) and takes place in the hospital in Gonaïves. Hurston states that Felix-Mentor is an “authentic case” (182), although the author indicates that a drug provoked her apparent (false) death (196). Yet Hurston’s description of Felix-Mentor also alludes to more banal abuses and traumas. The author describes how Felix-Mentor “hovered against the fence in a sort of defensive position,” “broke off a limb of a shrub and began to use it to dust and clean” as soon as she saw Hurston and the doctor, and “huddled the cloth about her head more closely and showed every sign of fear and expectation of abuse and violence” (195). These actions evoke both zombification and more pedestrian forms of abuse, as the woman’s attempts to clean— seemingly to avoid punishment—suggest both the historical context of enslavement and the contemporary forced labor of the restavèk.17 At another moment, Hurston describes the doctor’s disregard for Felix-Mentor’s wishes: while Mentor “kept on trying to hide herself,” the doctor “uncovered her head,” causing her to “[clap] her arms and hands over it to shut out the things she dreaded” (195). “Finally,” Hurston notes, “the doctor forcibly uncovered her and held her so that I could take her face. And the sight was dreadful. That blank face with the dead eyes. The eyelids were white all around the eyes as if they had been burned with acid. It was pronounced enough to come out in the picture” (195). Through this portrayal of forced visibility, and the resulting photograph of the abject face—her eyes bringing to mind the vacant zombie stare that defines Solitude in Chapter 1—Hurston paints herself as complicit in Felix-Mentor’s unwilling display. Hurston thus evokes the spectacularization of the mentally ill in contexts such as the displays described by Gordon, in which “hysteric” patients were observed as both popular and ostensibly medical spectacles.18 In this passage, Hurston also critiques the societal forces that lead to such dispossession and trauma—from these psychiatric spectacles to the forced labor and perhaps even physical abuse (her eyes appear “burned with acid”) that apparently traumatized Felix-Mentor, whether or not she was an “authentic” zombie. 17 Restavèk are children placed into forced labor conditions with another family when their birth family is unable to pay to raise them. 18 Emery has suggested this passage represents “an allegory about the nature of anthropology […] about the parasitic speaking of the anthropologist through the abject body of the other” (331–32).

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In Hurston’s description of Felix-Mentor, then, we can read a pathologization not of the zombie woman’s mental state, but of the social forces that exploit her labor and the medical establishment’s participation in putting non-neurotypical individuals on display. Although she describes herself as complicit in this act of display, Hurston does not reduce the living dead to being “merely” mentally ill. Rather, she suggests that Felix-Mentor’s trauma is a legacy of gendered violence and psychiatric spectacle, as well as of the colonization and enslavement—including the othering and dehumanization of Black Africans—that led to the formation of the zombie myth. Although the zombie experienced a heyday in US popular culture of the 1930s, during the 1950s and 1960s, the zombie figure’s association with colonial enslavement and Vodou largely disappeared from zombie films, to be replaced by fears about nuclear technology and other dubious scientific “advancements” of the space age.19 A few decades later, though, the Caribbean origins of the zombie resurfaced in narratives of the living dead. In the 1980s, the Haitian zombie regained traction in the US popular imaginary with the controversial work of Wade Davis. This resurgence reflected new socio-political and medical contexts: the end of the bloody Duvalier regime, with the ousting of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and the HIV/AIDS crisis. (In the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the disease was identified with the “4 H’s”: Haitians, homosexuals, heroin addicts, and hemophiliacs.) Both of these phenomena led to an increased interest in Haiti in the US media, but also a return to the discursive “Afro-abjection” so often used to dehumanize Haitians. As J. Michael Dash noted in Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination, “It is perhaps not too far-fetched to imagine that the image of the zombi became even more credible [as a reflection of Haitian realities] because of Haiti’s general association with contaminated, ravaged physicality, the most visible symptom of the AIDS epidemic” (142). Wade Davis’s studies fueled this renewed interest in the Haitian zombie and returned to the occupation-era desire to determine whether the Haitian zombie was in fact “real.” (This approach to generating interest in the living dead disregards, of course, the existence and lived realities of the purported zombies—which often suggest very real abuse and trauma, as is evident in the story of Felix-Mentor—as well as a 19 As Lauro puts it, at this moment “the Caribbean and its complex history drop[ed] out of the new cinematic zombie narrative” (98).

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failure to accept the myth on its own terms.) Davis famously attempted to identify the active components in a zombie powder, arguing that it produces a catatonic state and lowered heart rate that leads victims to be pronounced dead and buried alive, with the reduced oxygen in the coffin leading to brain damage and thus creating their zombie-like state.20 He refers to the development of psychiatric medications in his discussion of the zombie in Passage of Darkness, the scholarly account of his research. This work put him in touch with a Haitian psychiatrist, Lamarque Douyon, who was completing his residency in Canada at McGill University in the 1950s during “the heyday of early psychopharmacological research” (Passage of Darkness 78). In Passage of Darkness, Douyon is doubly accredited by his studies at a prestigious North American university and his native informant status. According to Davis, Douyon began studying the zombie after he witnessed experiments “with a number of potent psychotropic substances on human subjects” that “reminded him of accounts of zombies he had heard as a child” (78). In this way, Davis relates the “discovery” of the zombifying powder to the development of psychopharmacology in North America. Yet this connection also points to the less desirable effects of the psychiatric treatments of the time through its evocation of zombie-like test patients at the university in Montreal. This interest in psychopharmacology as an empirical explanation for the zombie is both echoed and countered with a heavy dose of the supernatural in the 1988 movie adaptation of Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985). Subtitled A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic, the book gives Davis’s popular account of his quest for the zombie powder. In the cinematic adaptation, the horror director Wes Craven (known for A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Scream franchise) interprets the work liberally, eventually turning the film’s protagonist Dennis Alan (Bill Pullman) into a zombie himself. However, when he first arrives in Port-au-Prince in search of “a totally new anesthetic that could revolutionize medicine,”21 he visits a purported zombie at a mental hospital in the heart of the city, where he meets Dr. Marielle 20 His work was widely criticized for lacking scientific rigor. 21 It is striking that this drug ostensibly had health benefits when the film was released around the time that fear about the AIDS epidemic, then thought to have originated in Haiti, was rampant. Inglis makes the connection between AIDS and the zombie (44–45).

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Duchamp. She and Alan pass by a handcuffed patient who is having a psychiatric episode, to whom Dr. Duchamp administers some of her “week’s supply of Thorazine,” before she leads Alan to Marguerite, “a classic zombie”—buried fifteen years earlier after a sudden illness and then discovered by her brother sometime later in a marketplace. Dr. Duchamp’s allusion to Thorazine is striking, given popular representations of over-medicated patients exhibiting a zombie-like gait called the “Thorazine shuffle.” (Coincidentally, Thorazine is often prepared as a salt—an interesting contrast to the myth that salt leads to dezombification.) However, Dr. Alan’s encounter with the zombie does not suggest a medical explanation for her state. After he asks her “Est-ce que tu te rappelles ce qui t’es arrivé,” a series of increasingly close counter-shots of Marguerite and Alan juxtapose the pained grimace of the former zombie woman with the horrified understanding of the American researcher. The encounter takes place, furthermore, against the aural backdrop of eerie non-diegetic music, including what sounds like a woman’s screams. This image of a traumatized zombie woman recalls Hurston’s unsettling encounter with Felicia Felix-Mentor. Yet a key difference between the two encounters lies in the film’s mention of modern psychiatric medications. If the film seems to offer a new take on the trope of the zombie encountered in a Haitian hospital, it also suggests that while Thorazine can treat madness, it cannot help to diagnose or treat the woman, who, it is implied, is very much a real zombie. In this way, Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow reverses the demystification that is the purported goal of Davis’s book of the same title. Diagnosing the zombie, as Seabrook and Davis do, reduces it to a rational, natural phenomenon. In contrast, Hurston’s representation of her meeting with a zombie evokes the figure’s historical resonance, even while the author alludes to psychiatric trauma. The Haitian writers studied in the final three sections of this chapter take up the avatar of the zombie as a figure of mental illness to reveal an even greater range of cultural factors that may be negated by the narrative of the zombie as mentally ill. Far from categorically rejecting the idea, though, Alexis, Depestre, and Chenet complicate the distinctions between Vodou and psychiatry and between natural and supernatural phenomena, revealing them to be both causes and cures of the zombie state.

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Alexis’s “Chronicle of a False Love” (1960) Like I Walked with a Zombie and Tell My Horse, Jacques Stephen Alexis’s “Chronicle of a False Love” (“Chronique d’un faux-amour”) blurs the distinction between interpreting the zombie as mentally ill and interpreting it as returned from the dead. Alexis’s short story is presented as the first-person narrative of a woman who describes how she was turned into a zombie on her wedding day, yet it unfolds in a way that implies a parallel between her zombification and the resurfacing of a traumatic memory. In this way, Alexis indicates, similarly to Zora Neale Hurston, that the zombie as a figure of mental illness is not necessarily an either/or proposition. That is to say, diagnosing the zombie as mentally ill need not make it any less a victim of psychic and corporeal control. Where Hurston’s story posits the trauma of enslavement and forced labor as a root of the zombie legend, however, Alexis’s short story presents physical captivity and sexual violence as central to zombification. Although it is unclear whether the narrator is truly a zombie or “merely” mentally ill, precisely because the symptoms of mental illness and the psychic state of the zombie resemble one another, the zombie narrative represents a way for the narrator to interpret her own trauma and descent into madness. Indeed, “Chronicle” on the one hand suggests that zombification is not distinct from mental illness. Yet on the other hand, the short story gestures towards the zombie’s use in Haitian culture as a symbolic narrative vehicle for representing and interpreting psychic shock in response to traumatic events, from the colonial-era enslavement implied by the zombie–slave avatar to more contemporary forms of oppression and violence. “Chronicle of a False Love” unfolds in alternating sections: in the present day in a convent in France—where the narrator’s mechanical movements are intended to stave off sleep and, with it, remembrance— and in suppressed memories of the narrator’s past in Port-au-Prince, including the events that led up to her apparent zombification ten years earlier. The narrator describes herself in the flashbacks as a young, beautiful, and light-skinned member of the capital’s upper class. After she falls in lust with a man her father claims is her bastard half-brother, her father finds her an acceptable fiancé, but the latter’s wealthy peasant uncle transforms her into a zombie on their wedding day. It is only at the very end of the short story that the narrator realizes that she is a zombie, as her memories resurface. However, earlier moments evoke mental illness in a way that parallels the passage describing her zombification,

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blurring the lines between her psychological state before and after her metamorphosis and thus casting doubt on the veracity of her belief that she has been zombified. Indeed, Colette Maximin argues that the story pushes the reader to understand the flashbacks as “a sick mind’s reconstruction, through the realm of dreams, of a nightmarish reality” (111).22 In addition, because the story calls to mind gendered representations of hysteria, it creates a parallel between the narrator’s madness and her zombification, perhaps even indicating they are one and the same, although it maintains a notable ambiguity. This hesitation between interpreting the zombie as mentally ill or as undead reflects Alexis’s background: on the one hand, he first theorized marvelous realism in a Haitian context; on the other, he studied neurology at the Hôpital Necker in Paris.23 A tension between a supernatural interpretation of the zombie and a psychiatric, scientific one runs throughout “Chronicle.” In fact, the story’s representation of zombification aligns it more with the fantastic genre—with its hesitation between natural and paranormal explanations for strange phenomena— than with the unqualified representation of the inexplicable often associated with marvelous realism.24 Yet “Chronicle” reflects the political engagement of Alexis’s conception of réalisme merveilleux (evident in his celebrated novels, such as General Sun, My Brother (Compère Général Soleil, 1956)). The short story has been read as a critique of the Haitian mulatto elite.25 “Chronicle” might also be viewed as anticipating Duvalier’s consolidation of power because it was published as part of the short story collection Romancero aux étoiles in 1960, as 22 “une reconstruction, opérée en rêve par un esprit malade, d’un réel cauchemardesque.” 23 Alexis presented his “Prolégomènes à un manifeste du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens” at the first Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs in 1956, drawing on Alejo Carpentier’s conceptualizing of “lo real maravilloso” in the prologue to El Reino de este mundo (1949) and positing that the incorporation of supernatural and marvelous elements might be combined with the Haitian literary tradition of social realism. 24 The accuracy of viewing the zombie, broadly, as a “marvelous” figure is up for debate. As Glover notes in her seminal essay “Exploiting the Undead,” both Lucas (65) and Antoine (56) posit the zombie as antithetical to the liberatory ideals of réalisme merveilleux. However, Glover convincingly counters this assertion through an examination of the trope of salt—said to free zombies from their catatonic state—in the works of writers such as Frankétienne. 25 See Asibong and Glover.

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Papa Doc was asserting his increasingly dictatorial authority. This use of literature as a vehicle for social criticism reflects a longstanding political engagement outside the theorization of marvelous realism. In addition to co-founding with René Depestre the journal La Ruche, the censure of which led to a revolt against president Élie Lescot in 1946, Alexis was active in the communist movement until 1961, when he returned to Haiti from Cuba and was discovered by the tonton makout—François Duvalier’s militia—who, it is believed, tortured and killed the writer. Romancero aux étoiles was Alexis’s final book-length work. In Romancero aux étoiles, “Chronicle of a False Love” is presented as one in a series of tales told by the primary narrator, a conteur or storyteller, and the great “Old Carib Wind” (“Vieux Vent Caraïbe”), who embodies the Caribbean imaginary. Even before “Chronicle” begins in earnest, the primary narrator presents the zombie woman as a puzzle. In the short dialogue that precedes “Chronicle,” the narrator tells the Old Carib Wind that he found the document containing the narrative in an attic. He claims that it is a true story, unlike most zombie stories, which have never held up to scrutiny. “It was always a case of someone who’d lost his memory, an amnesiac, a mentally retarded person, or else a deaf-mute who was more or less a cretin” (304).26 This explanation refers to memory disorders, diminished intellectual capacity (including the term cretin), and visual and aural impairment, explaining that purported zombies are merely mental cases. In this way, the frame narrator seems to understand the zombie myth as a supernatural explanation for natural phenomena. Yet the conteur in this frame narrative asks the Old Carib Wind if there is more to the story: “Are there really sorcerers or man-eating warlocks who are able to make a living person look dead, call him back to life, and do with him as they will?” (304–5).27 Although in this question the zombie is not presented as truly returned from the dead, Alexis’s story emphasizes this tension between the misapprehension of the mentally ill and the ability of sorcerers to create zombies, attuning the reader to the ambiguity between natural and supernatural explanations for the 26 “Il s’agi[t] toujours d’individus ayant perdu la memoire, d’amnésiques, de sujets mentalement diminués, sinon de sourd-muets plus ou moins crétins” (99). All quotations in English come from the translation by Sharon Masingale Bell. 27 “existe-t-il vraiment des sorciers ou des loups-garous qui auraient le moyen de faire passer pour mort une personne vivante, de la rappeler à la vie et d’en disposer à leur gré?” (100).

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zombie phenomenon in Haiti and sowing doubt about the living dead narrator’s origins. The central first-person narrative also alludes to the potential madness of the zombie woman. In the present-day sections, the zombie woman narrator repeatedly refers to madness at the lexical level, as well as to automatic gestures of the kind often associated with representations of the mentally ill. She describes the land where her narration begins as “this land of vertigo where I have perhaps gone mad…” (309).28 If the explicit reference to becoming “mad” implies the narrator’s conscious awareness of her own mental state, the mechanical gestures repeated throughout indicate the enduring repression of traumatic memories. During the sections in the convent, she repeatedly states, “For hours I shall tap the silver spoon against my gold ring, without stopping, to frighten sleep away” (312).29 The nervous tapping allows her to delay, if not fully avoid, the memories that come with sleep, personified here as a threat to be driven away. Yet the interspersed present-day and flashback sections imply that the narrator fails to keep the past at bay. This behavior brings to mind iconic images of hysteria produced during the late nineteenth century. During this period, as Gordon has noted, convulsive, automatic movements and other symptoms associated with hysteria became part of the aforementioned spectacles—both scientific and popular—in France and elsewhere.30 Doctors such as the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot attributed an “extraordinary array of hysterical symptoms” to the illness, including “double consciousness; somnambulism; motor disturbances; hallucinations; digestive problems; fugue states; intellectual, language, and visual disturbances; yawning; laughing; and hiccups” (Gordon 5). Beyond these varied diagnostic applications, hysteria has had a wide-ranging cultural and discursive function. As Janet Beizer notes, for millennia, “the discourse of hysteria manifested an essential continuity in its association of the disease with femininity, sexuality, mobility, fluidity and aphasia” (8). More specifically, during hysteria’s peak in France, the term served “a wide and often contradictory range of aesthetic and political purposes,” including as an “instrument of misogyny, agent of differentiation, [and] magnet 28 “ce pays du vertige où je suis peut-être devenue folle…” (105). 29 “Pendant des heures, je vais taper la cuiller d’argent contre mon anneau d’or, sans arrêt, pour effrayer le sommeil” (108). 30 Hysteria also played a prominent role in French literature by the 1880s (see Beizer).

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diagnosis of society’s multiple ills” (Beizer 8). Like the zombie, then, the hysteric is a figure of somnambulism and the fugue state (the temporary loss of memory and personality), of othering and social marginalization. These qualities and functions are echoed in Alexis’s short story, in which the central narrator’s sexuality and femininity cause the aphasia that leads to her burial and, it seems, to zombification. The passage describing the beginning of her zombification also evokes the onset of catatonia. After she meets her new fiancé’s adoptive uncle—a wealthy peasant who, she notes, does not speak French—the “gorilla with brickcolored skin” (339) offers her a bouquet for her civil marriage.31 As she smells it, she begins to hallucinate: “The crowd grows larger and smaller by turns before my eyes. […] My cousins’ heads are walking along the ceiling; my flower girls become sardonic gnomes” (342).32 These visual disturbances evoke the world of fairytales (gnomes) or perhaps Alice’s Wonderland (growing/shrinking)—indicating a passage beyond the real. In addition, the narrator describes how “Voices swell monstrously and become caverns of dissonance, echoes, aphonic cyclones” (342).33 Following these auditory distortions, she loses the ability to speak or move, and is mistaken for dead. The visual and aural hallucinations indicate a loss of control over the senses that may be interpreted as a classic part of the zombification process (in which the zombified individual first suffers an apparently sudden, inexplicable death). Yet the first-person narration of the experience of zombification—including the inability to speak—also suggests a change in mental state that echoes the “silences and incoherences of hysteria” (Beizer 9). In other words, “Chronicle” represents the process the narrator later identifies as zombification in a manner that strikingly resembles descriptions of mental illness. Yet in “Chronicle” the narrator’s symptoms begin even before she falls into a catatonic stupor at the altar, specifically during the early flashback sections when she describes herself as a young, nubile lightskinned member of the Port-au-Prince elite. The narrator first exhibits 31 “gorille à la peau de brique” (136). See Asibong on the racialized implications of the narrator’s discourse. 32 “Voici que tour à tour la foule se rapetisse et grandit démesurément à me yeux! … […] Les têtes de mes cousines se promènent sur le plafond, mes anges d’honneur deviennent des gnomes sardoniques” (139). 33 “Les voix s’enflent monstrueusement et deviennent des cavernes de dysharmonie, des échos, des cyclones aphones!” (139).

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traits historically associated with hysteria after her father beats her for her would-be sexual transgressions. During the second flashback, she attends a dance at the exclusive Bellevue Circle Social Club (Cercle Bellevue), where she meets a handsome man to whom she almost loses her virginity. Her father forbids her to see him, in response to which, she states, “I scream like a woman demented” (325); she thus labels her own actions using terms designating mental illness.34 When the narrator’s father says the man is her half-brother, she refuses to believe him, and he beats her. At the end of the passage detailing her father’s abuse, she exclaims: “I am nothing but an epileptic puppet, a lugubrious tumbler, a dead doll, without strength, and yet, an eternal grasshopper!” (328).35 By calling herself an epileptic puppet and a doll—inanimate objects that move mindlessly, miming life but without consciousness—she offers a vision of herself as responding physically and involuntarily to her father’s assault. This suggestion that she has been transformed into an automaton of sorts echoes her mechanical gestures in the convent. In the subsequent flashback, moreover, she alludes to “my nervous breakdown of these last weeks” (336).36 This allusive way of describing her response to her father’s beating suggests that her mental transformation started prior to her “zombification”—and as a result that the latter may be the culmination of her descent into madness. The discourse of mental illness and automatism appears to give way in the end as the idea of zombification enters the narrative. The final flashback portrays the narrator’s resurrection and enslavement by her fiancé’s uncle, ending with her realization that “… My eye is mournful and indifferent. The food never has any salt … I am a ZOMBIE” (349; emphasis mine).37 This memory of her unseasoned food and vacant gaze, both indicating zombification (since salt releases zombies from their undead state), triggers her realization that she is a zombie.38 In the 34 “je hurle comme une démente” (122). 35 “Je ne suis qu’un pantin épileptique, qu’un saltimbanque lugubre, qu’une poupée crevée, sans force, et cependant sauterelle éternelle!” (125). “Sauterelle” here might have a double meaning: while it can be translated as “grasshopper” (which seems fitting here with the references to an “epileptic” puppet, etc.), it also can be used to refer to a prostitute or “loose” woman, which might reflect the narrator’s voracious sexual appetite. 36 “ma crise nerveuse des semaines dernières” (134). 37 “Mon œil est morne et indifférent. Mes mets n’ont jamais de sel. Je suis une ZOMBIE” (147). 38 See Chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion of the zombie’s blank gaze.

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final present-day section that immediately follows, the narrator finally understands her state, realizing that she was found by her fiancé when his uncle, her captor, died: “I was a ZOMBIE” (350; emphasis mine).39 Yet it is not clear whether her zombie-like state is something fully of the past: “I’m not a ZOMBIE anymore! I don’t want to be a ZOMBIE anymore! I’m not a nun!” (350; emphasis mine).40 She is thus apparently aware now that she is in the convent not because she is a nun, but because she was sent there after her fiancé found her in front of his uncle’s corpse. The final image of the central narrative is of the narrator’s automatic gestures as she awaits her fiancé’s return: “Tonight I shall tap my silver spoon against the gold ring my husband gave me …” (351).41 In contrast to her statement that she is no longer a zombie, which implies she has had a breakthrough, these automatic gestures indicate that she remains in an altered mental state. Her newfound awareness that she is a zombie cannot stop her from fruitlessly hoping that her fiancé will save her from the convent where she resides. These enduring symptoms of mental illness suggest that the narrator views her madness as zombitude. In this way, it might seem that Alexis is interpreting the narrator’s state as the result of mental illness, rather than zombification. Yet whether she was truly zombified—her mental illness paralleling her transformation by her fiancé’s uncle into a disinterred automaton—or whether her memory of collapsing on the altar represents a descent into catatonia that she retroactively ascribes to zombification, her traumatized psyche exhibits similar symptoms. This trauma begins when her expression of sexual desire is met with her father’s physical abuse, and continues with her captivity and, it is suggested, her sexual violation by her captor. As a narrative of psychic violation and forced confinement, zombification is an apt metaphor through which the narrator can begin to understand her transformation and the experiences she has repressed. Indeed, it might seem that zombitude is a vehicle with which the narrator can name unspeakable sexual and physical violence, the memories of which resurface, perhaps in altered form, in her flashbacks.42 39 “J’étais une ZOMBIE!” (147). 40 “Je ne suis plus une ZOMBIE! … Je ne veux plus être une ZOMBIE! Je ne suis pas une nonne!” (147–48). 41 “Ce soir, je taperai ma cuiller d’argent contre l’anneau d’or que mon époux m’a donné…” (149). 42 Maximin notes that this is suggested through the doubling of characters and motifs (the father and father-in-law, Vodou and Catholicism, etc.) (111).

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After the conteur finishes his story, the Old Carib Wind states: “If the zombie stories are legends, blessed is the people who has such great and living legends!” (352).43 To know if these stories are real, though, he states “just go and become a zombie yourself[!]” (352).44 The Old Carib Wind’s playful suggestion that one must become a zombie to know the truth about zombitude means that the zombie thus retains its opacity in “Chronicle of a False Love,” as the reality behind the story is never fully revealed. More than simply explaining the zombie legend by replacing it with a psychiatric diagnosis, Alexis melds the two ways of understanding the narrator. Ultimately, the ambiguity of the ending suggests that zombification and traumatic shock are one and the same—be it the shock of sexual violence or the historical shock of enslavement and colonization. Alexis’s short story points out the complex cultural forces that shape the narrative of the female zombie and shows that the term zombie can signify a specific kind of traumatic memory.45 If zombification and trauma are not mutually exclusive diagnoses, but rather may resemble each other or appear indistinguishable, how might it be possible to “cure” the zombie? Might salt, popularly believed to awaken the zombie or send it to its grave, revive the living dead? Or could psychiatric treatment help a zombie who is traumatized by their transformation? Whereas Jacques Stephen Alexis leaves the zombie woman in limbo, unable to come to terms with her new reality even as she comes to terms with her past, René Depestre tells stories of zombie women revived. In Hadriana in All My Dreams, both the eponymous heroine and a character in an embedded narrative are freed from their partially or fully zombified states. However, their cures take different forms, which allows Depestre to reflect on the effects of zombitude—as a psychic, physical, and/or symbolic state—and on 43 “Si les histoires de ZOMBIS sont des légendes, heureux sont les peuples qui ont d’aussi grandes et vivantes légendes!” (151). 44 “tu n’as qu’à te faire ZOMBI! …” (151). 45 Along similar lines, Asibong argues that “[t]he sorcerer’s fantastic collision with the narrator may bring to the fore her sexual state of bondage in traumatic, unspeakable fashion, but what is also magically teased out through interaction with the shifting blackness of the witch doctor, then, is the repressed structure of the narrator’s own status as pathologically racialized being” (204). He thus explores both the trauma of the narrator’s enslavement and her own internalization of racist and colonial hierarchies that have shaped her consciousness as a member of Haiti’s elite.

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ways of counteracting them. That is to say, studying the zombie cure offers insight not only into the causes of zombification—which are often reduced to either “natural” or “supernatural” causes—but also into the myriad other ways zombitude can be understood, including its historical resonance, traumatic effects, and place within the Haitian imaginary. Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (1988) In his Prix Renaudot-winning 1988 novel Hadriana in All My Dreams (Hadriana dans tous mes rêves), Depestre moves beyond the either/ or proposition of the zombie as a figure of mental illness by curing not one but two women of zombitude. Depestre ultimately leaves no doubt at the diegetic level about whether the eponymous heroine is subjected to zombification through sorcery (including both spiritual interventions and a zombifying powder that has physiological effects). However, much of the novel is structured around the primary narrator Patrick Altamont’s rehashing of the puzzle of what happened to Hadriana when she appeared to fall dead on the altar on the day of her wedding. Years after the event (in the novel’s third “movement”), he encounters Hadriana in Jamaica, and she recounts her escape. Two moments are implicitly tied to her escape from zombitude: a Vodou carnival held by the citizens of Jacmel that serves as Hadriana’s wake, and Hadriana’s descent into memories of a childhood steeped in the Caribbean and Vodou imaginaries. Moreover, Hadriana recasts the ti bon anj—the portion of the soul typically said to contain personality and will—as containing imagination. Indeed, diving into the imagination is tied to preserving Hadriana’s ti bon anj and thus allows her to evade the fate of the zombie.46 On the other side of the same coin, Depestre rejects the capacity of the medical gaze to assess the zombification process when doctors examine and fail to identify Hadriana’s state as a pre-zombification catatonia, rather than death. In this way, he contests the new attempts to offer a rational, scientific explanation for the zombie figure. Yet if Depestre suggests that this medical approach to understanding the zombie reduces the figure’s symbolic significance and as a result fails to “diagnose” it, he indicates that psychiatric medicine is a valid way of understanding the aftermath of zombitude. As I demonstrate 46 See Glover’s discussion of Hadriana’s “self-possession” in A Regarded Self.

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in my analysis of an embedded narrative within Hadriana that refers intertextually to “Chronicle of a False Love,” Depestre suggests that psychiatrists can cure former zombies, and therefore does not offer a singular way of understanding and intervening in zombification. Ultimately, I argue, Depestre reinstates the plenitude of the zombie’s symbolic function through a complex representation that allows both supernatural and rational interpretations of the figure and its cure to coexist within the discursive and diegetic space of the novel. The connection between Hadriana and “Chronicle” mentioned above can be understood intertextually, in light of Depestre’s references to Alexis’s short story, as well as aesthetically and biographically. The aforementioned acceptance of Hadriana’s zombification as spiritual (if also physiological) in nature aligns with Depestre’s use of a marvelous realist aesthetic in the novel.47 In fact, Hadriana accepts the supernatural and liberatory aesthetics often associated with marvelous realism more fully than “Chronicle” does. Depestre’s allusions to Alexis’s short story might suggest that Alexis was a literary forefather of sorts for Depestre. However, the two men were of the same generation. Both were involved in the journal La Ruche, which led to their arrest by president Lescot in 1946. Yet, as Martin Munro puts it, Depestre’s work “cuts across generations,” and his “first novel [The Festival of the Greasy Pole] in many ways picks up where Alexis signs off” (32)—that is, after Alexis returned to Haiti in 1961 and was killed by Duvalier’s militia. Although he escaped with his life, Depestre found himself exiled again when, following his return to Haiti in 1958–1959, he became fully disillusioned by Papa Doc’s descent into fascist noirisme. This Duvalier-induced exile has been read by scholars, including Munro, as a central theme of Hadriana. As a poet, author, and political activist, Depestre has interpreted the zombie in a multitude of ways. Whereas he uses the legendary figure to evoke Haiti under the dictatorship in an allusive way in Hadriana, in The Festival of the Greasy Pole (Le Mât de cocagne, 1979), the author makes the allegorical function of zombification more explicitly emblematic of totalitarianism. The protagonist of the novel, Henri Postel, struggles against “[a]uto-zombification” (6) propagated under a despotic dictator resembling François Duvalier, who finds 47 Whereas Alexis theorized this aesthetic for the first time in a Haitian context thirty years earlier (as discussed in the previous section), Depestre himself theorizes marvelous realism in Bonjour et adieu à la négritude (1980).

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that the old methods of zombification “don’t fit in with our electronic times” (6).48 Postel dezombifies himself by completing the test alluded to in the title, in which he must climb a large greased—and of course clearly phallic—pole to prove his virility. The Festival of the Greasy Pole thus mixes zombification, rationality (“our electronic times”), and Vodou (the greasy pole). Before writing The Festival of the Greasy Pole while living in France and working for UNESCO, Depestre worked for Castro’s government for several years, living in Cuba for nearly two decades. There, Depestre used the metaphor of the zombie to describe a different form of hegemonic power, stating: “The history of colonization is that of a process of generalized zombification of man” (“Déclaration à la Havane” 20).49 It follows that dezombification—or stealing salt—is equated with the resistance of the colonized, “a vast syncretic movement of marronnage that has often managed to change the social and psychological function and meaning of Western values” (20).50 Whereas dezombification in The Festival of the Greasy Pole represents resistance to a modern form of hegemonic power that emerges from within the nation, here the metaphor looks back to the context of enslavement and freedom running. This resistance is also, notably, a way of challenging the “psychological meaning” of “Western values”—much as the zombie legend itself is used by Depestre and others to challenge the primacy of empirical thought. In Hadriana, this marronnage can be seen in the form of Hadriana’s thwarting of her transformation into a living-dead sex slave. Hadriana notes, “Something had gone wrong in Papa Rosanfer’s calculations” (245), such that the bòkò who attempts to capture her ti bon anj is incapable of doing so.51 (As a reminder, in order to make a zombie, the sorcerer must steal this portion of the soul, which typically contains personality and volition.) The first potential barrier to Hadriana’s zombification is, as Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken notes, “the ceremony that the local Vodou 48 “[l]a zombification par soi-même”; “ne cadrent pas avec notre âge électronique” (12). This speaks to the ways the zombie has evolved to reflect new socio-political realities. 49 “L’histoire de la colonisation est celle d’un processus de zombification généralisée de l’homme.” 50 “un vaste mouvement syncrétique de marronnage qui souvent est parvenu à changer la fonction et la signification sociales et psychologiques des valeurs occidentales.” 51 “Quelque chose a foiré dans les calculs à papa Rosanfer” (204). All quotations in English come from the translation by Kaiama L. Glover.

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priestess has conducted to safeguard Hadriana from zombification” (257). After her false death, Hadriana’s body is displayed in the middle of a huge carnival led by the manbo—Vodou priestess—Brévica de Losange. The festivities include the burning in effigy of the rapist butterfly Balthazar Grandchiré and the appearance of a young and beautiful Haitian woman possessed by the lwa or spirit Erzulie Fréda; Hadriana recognizes in the young woman (or, at least, her breasts) a Black double of herself (178). This much-discussed carnival passage, which reflects the marvelous real and surrealist aesthetics that inspire Depestre, is not explicitly said to lead to Hadriana’s dezombification. Yet it offers a corrective to the nefarious image of Vodou associated with the zombie figure, giving a more celebratory and vibrant vision of the religion.52 Memory and imagination are central to the second event that is tied to Hadriana’s escape “safe and sound from [her] zombification” (245).53 After the carnival she is buried, and in order to “[escape] the rigid walls of the coffin, [her] cadaverous stiffness, the horror of [her] zombie death” (228), she turns toward her memories of her upbringing in Haiti.54 “Victory was still possible over the diabolical forces that had zombified me,” Hadriana states. “I just had to listen carefully to everything that had constituted my life up until that point […] Nothing was more pressing than for me to gather together any memories still capable of resisting” (226).55 These memories—personified as agents—are thus clearly associated with resistance to zombification. Although, as Elena Pessini notes, Hadriana turns towards “a memory that serves as an identity for her” (109),56 it is important to specify that Depestre ties this memory to the Caribbean imaginary, including Vodou. 52 Although Paravisini-Gebert rightly notes that, “in Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, Vodou does not fulfill its metaphorical function as the expression of the people’s thirst for freedom, a connection established at the fabled meeting at Bois Caiman that started the Haitian Revolution” (49), I do not fully agree with her assertion that “Vodou, usually a path to revolt and rebirth, surfaces only as the evil power threatening a beautiful white woman” (49). 53 “saine et sauve de la zombification” (204). 54 “échappe[r] aux parois rigides du cercueil, à la rigidité cadavérique, à l’horreur de la mort zombie” (190). 55 “La victoire était encore possible sur les forces démoniaques qui me zombifiaient. Il fallait prêter l’oreille à tout ce qui avait constitué jusque-là la trame de mes jours. […] Rien n’était plus pressant que de rassembler les souvenirs encore en état de résister” (189). 56 “une mémoire qui lui tient lieu d’identité.”

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Hadriana remembers in particular her childhood home in Jacmel, where her father created a garden reflecting the flora of the Caribbean, from Hispaniola to the lesser Antilles. “All the flora of the Caribbean imaginary was in my sight and within my reach” (229), she explains.57 While this phrase appears to refer literally to the fantastical plants in the garden, it also suggests that the garden itself is an allegory for the florid Caribbean imaginary. At the end of Hadriana’s recollections of her childhood home, she turns towards another form of imagination: the stories about Vodou her family’s Haitian servants told her during her childhood to satiate her “daily hunger for a dose of something marvelous” (232).58 Out of the stories told to me day and night, the mythology of Vodou entered into my life. The gods, the dances, the drums—none of it held any mystery for me until the moment when one of its lecherous butterflies, controlled by some secret society, poured zombie poison into some icy lemonade on my wedding day. (233)59

While Hadriana evokes the connection between secret societies and zombification, she also evokes another side of Vodou: the familiarity of its mythos even to a “French fairy” like Hadriana (204).60 This other vision of Vodou, whose rich imaginary is reconstituted for Hadriana through her memories, helps Hadriana resist her captors: “the tangled skein of my happy memories unraveled slowly and completely, pressing me to embrace hopefulness and to stay vigilant as I waited for whatever was to come that night” (234).61 Indeed, when she hears the sounds of their shovels above her coffin, she is ready. Once the sorcerer trying to zombify her, Rosalvo Rosanfer,62 administers the antidote that is meant 57 “Toute la flore des imaginations caraïbes étaient à la portée de mes yeux et de mes mains” (191). 58 “la fringale de merveuilleux quotidien” (193). 59 “Avec les belles histoires du jour et les contes du soir, la mythologie vaudou était entrée dans ma vie. Ses dieux, ses danses, ses tambours n’avaient pas de mystère pour moi jusqu’au moment où un de ses papillons lubriques, manipulé par des sociétés secrètes, a versé du poison à zombie dans la limonade glacée de mes noces” (194). 60 “fée française” (168). 61 “l’écheveau des souvenirs heureux s’est dévidé lentement, complètement, m’invitant à l’espoir et à la vigilance, dans l’attente des événements de la nuit” (195). 62 His first name is the same as that of Rosalvo Bobo, the opposition leader prior to the US occupation of Haiti.

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to revive her from her false death, she is able to run, escaping the bòkò if not (as Benedicty-Kokken and others have noted) the fate of a social zombie.63 It is all the more likely that these memories—and the Caribbean and Vodou imaginaries they carry—are at least partially responsible for Hadriana’s evasion, given that Depestre transforms the ti bon anj from a receptacle for personality into a metaphor for individual imagination. Indeed, imagination is highlighted in Hadriana as a constituent element of the ti bon anj stolen by the bòkò. While Hadriana’s body is on display, she dreams she is in a “penitentiary for souls on a mountain in Haut-Cap-Rouge” (211), her ti bon anj and gwo bon anj separated.64 The sorcerers appear and explain that this prison contains souls stored in bottles: “The cellular process consists of bottling up the imagination of individuals transformed into the living-dead” (212).65 By thus conflating the ti bon anj with the imaginary, Depestre departs from the typical association in Vodou thought of this portion of the soul with personality.66 Hadriana’s earlier statement that Papa Rosanfer “had not managed to capture [her] petit bon ange” (244)67 thus takes on new significance, indicating that exercising her imaginary and exerting the memories “still capable of resisting” (226) protect her ti bon anj from capture.68 In contrast with this power of the imaginary to revive Hadriana enough to escape zombification, the medical sciences utterly fail her. After she appears to fall dead on the altar, but before her own attempts to revive herself, Hadriana undergoes a medical examination by Drs. Sorapal and Braget. They examine her breasts, noting, “It’s like they’re still alive!” (197).69 Yet when she attempts to convey her consciousness through her eyes, which she hopes will be revealed to them in “the flicker of an eyelid” (197), they do not recognize her attempts as a sign she is 63 See Glover, “Exploiting the Undead” 118–19. 64 “pénitencier d’âmes dans la montagne du Haut-Cap-Rouge” (175). 65 “Le régime cellulaire consiste à mettre en bouteilles l’imaginaire des individus changés en morts-vivants” (175). 66 See, for instance, Ackermann & Gauthier 469 and Desmangles 171. At times, as Ackermann & Gauthier note, the opposite is said to be true: the counterpart of the ti bon anj, the gwo bon anj, is said to be the portion of the soul stolen to make a zombie. 67 “papa Rosanfer […] n’est pas arrivé à capturer mon petit bon ange” (204). 68 “encore en état de résister” (189). 69 “On les dirait vivants!” (161).

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catatonic, not dead.70 These doctors’ medical gaze is thus incapable of accurately capturing the reality of zombification. This is particularly significant given Hadriana’s publication amidst the renewed fascination with the zombie in the late 1980s. When the novel first appeared in 1988, it followed the release of Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986). As previously stated, Davis’s popular account of his scientific search for a zombifying powder represents the imperialist attitude that the zombie must be “explained” rationally. Therefore, the inability of the medical gaze to understand and stop the zombification process here functions as an indictment of this approach to understanding the zombie legend. However, Depestre does not fully reject the role of rational epistemes in diagnosing the zombie. While Hadriana’s story shows that Depestre returns the weight of the imaginary to the zombie narrative, the relatively brief tale of Gisèle K. privileges a psychiatric cure for the zombie in a way that suggests the author resists aligning interpretations of the living dead with one specific mode of thought. After Hadriana disappears, the narrator Patrick’s uncle Ferdinand, or “oncle Féfé,” gives him this narrative “proof” that zombies exist—“the most tangible proof of the phenomenon of false death in Haiti” (139), according to Féfé.71 Gisèle’s story is prefaced by other zombie tales, in a series of chapters laden with intertextual references to Jean Price-Mars’s seminal Ainsi parla l’oncle (So Spoke the Uncle) and Seabrook’s The Magic Island (Féfé retells the story of the zombie HASCO workers and tells Patrick that he knew Seabrook’s native informant) (106–9). The most significant intertext of oncle Féfé’s stories is Alexis’s “Chronicle of a False Love.” Féfé’s description of zombies working for HASCO (à la Seabrook) is described as “a ‘classic’ of zombie mythology [du romancero des zombies]” (133 [106]). Depestre thus evokes Alexis’s collection Romancero aux étoiles, in which “Chronicle of a False Love” appeared. Féfé’s tale of his former love Gisèle also echoes “Chronicle” in a number of ways. Gisèle was, similarly to the narrator of “Chronicle,” a “gorgeous sixteen-year-old girl, [who] came from a family of wealthy exporters, part of the capital’s high society” (137) when she suddenly died of an embolism.72 Gisèle is 70 “l’espace d’un cillement” (162). This evokes the title of Jacques Stephen Alexis’s 1959 novel about the love affair between two Cuban immigrants to Port-au-Prince, the prostitute La Niña and the trade unionist El Caucho. 71 “la preuve la plus palpable de la mort apparente en Haïti” (111). 72 “splendide adolescente de seize ans, appartena[n]t à une famille de riches exportateurs de la capitale” (110).

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also described dancing and losing her virginity at “the famous Bellevue Circle Social Club” (138)—the site where Alexis’s zombie woman dances scandalously with her half-brother.73 Moreover, like the narrator of “Chronicle,” following her zombification, Gisèle becomes a nun in France, where “she entered a convent under the name of Sister Lazara of the Christ Child” (138).74 (Lazara of course refers to the biblical figure revived from the dead, Lazarus, suggesting her full recovery from zombitude.) The similarities between Gisèle K.’s story and that of Alexis’s zombie woman suggest Depestre’s desire to intervene in Alexis’s zombie narrative.75 As a mise en abyme, Gisèle’s story also prefaces and complicates the ideas about the zombie represented in Hadriana’s narrative. Indeed, while Hadriana’s tale ties the zombie to the imaginary, Gisèle’s reflects on the relationship between the zombie and mental illness. Uncle Féfé’s preface to Gisèle’s story clearly presents the zombie’s catatonic state as distinct from any psychiatric disorder. Whereas “Chronicle” is presented with the caveat that most “zombies” are really mentally ill or intellectually disabled individuals, uncle Féfé’s description of the zombie phenomenon states precisely the opposite. Before he tells Patrick the zombie tales mentioned above, he describes how zombies are made.76 The subchapter, entitled “The Zombifier’s Secret Code, or a Zombiferous Pharmacopoeia” (129),77 ends with a stipulation: the zombie is “as docile as a mule, totally dependent on the witch doctor, without being, however, what you might otherwise take for a schizophrenic in a state of hysterical catatonia” (132).78 The terms schizophrenic, catatonia, 73 “un bal du célèbre Cercle Bellevue” (111). 74 “elle […] prit le voile sous le nom de sœur Lazara de l’Enfant-Jésus” (111). 75 As stated in the introduction, the narratives draw on the Marie M. story that gave rise to so many of these zombie women tales (see Paravisini-Gebert). This trope is also taken up in Reflections of Loko Miwa (Les Chemins de Loco-Miroir, 1990). Lilas Desquiron portrays a rebellious young woman from the mulatto elite of Jérémie. I do not analyze the work in depth here because Violaine is not explicitly described through the theme or lexicon of mental illness. Nevertheless, her zombification is tied to the policing of female sexuality that was often associated with hysteria: after she falls in love with a darker-skinned, working-class political organizer, her wealthy image-conscious family and jealous would-be fiancé decide that zombifying Violaine is the only way to control her rebellious spirit. 76 See Izzo on Depestre’s use of ethnography. 77 “Codex du faiseur de zombie ou pharmacopée zombifère” (103). 78 “aussi docile qu’un âne, dans une totale dépendance à l’égard du sorcier,

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and hysterical all evoke mental illness. Yet this interpretation of the zombie’s psychological state is rejected, and uncle Féfé instead highlights the zombified individual’s lucid awareness and simultaneous inability to resist their captor. Far from creating ambiguity about whether the zombie is a victim of sorcery or a figure of mental illness, then, uncle Féfé insists on the reality of the zombie phenomenon and sharply distinguishes it from mental disorders. It is therefore all the more surprising that Gisèle is cured by psychiatric medicine. Despite the similarities between her story and that of the narrator of “Chronicle of a False Love,” Gisèle meets a quite different fate: eight months after a sudden embolism apparently killed her, Gisèle’s former classmates discover her in the countryside, wandering in a zombified state. She is returned to her family, and they send her to the United States to convalesce. “But her mental state was quite grim. She was sent to Philadelphia, where the eminent American psychiatrists who had taken charge of her care managed to completely restore her to health within a year” (138).79 After starring in a silent zombie film, she moves to France, where she joins a convent (by choice). While Alexis’s zombie woman is stuck in a convent that represents a kind of mental purgatory, Gisèle makes a complete recovery through the work of “eminent American psychiatrists.” Although Féfé asserts that the zombie is not mentally ill, the aftermath of zombification is akin to psychological trauma, since psychiatric professionals are called upon to heal the damaged psyche that results from Gisèle’s experience. This embedded narrative thus represents a corrective to the seemingly eternally zombified narrator of “Chronicle.” Whereas Alexis’s zombie woman appears stuck in a mental loop, Depestre offers Gisèle an exit from the zombified psychological state. In contrast with Hadriana, who escapes the fate of the zombie through the imagination, Gisèle is dezombified through psychiatric medicine. Thus, even as Depestre seeks to restore the place of the imaginary in the zombie myth, he does not fully reject the role of psychiatric medicine in curing the zombie. In other words, the author suggests that even if zombification is a process that includes a supernatural component, it may impact the zombified individual in sans être, pour autant, un schizophrène en état de stupeur catatonique de type hystériforme…” (105). 79 “Son état mental était très préoccupant. Envoyée à Philadelphie, les éminents psychiatres américains à qui elle fut confiée parvinrent, en moins d’un an, à la guérir tout à fait” (110–11).

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ways that can be reversed through rational intervention. Therefore, in contrast to “Chronicle,” in which zombification is a metaphor through which the narrator identifies her trauma, in Hadriana psychiatry is a way of understanding how zombification affects its victims. Depestre thus indicates that zombification is both physiological and spiritual: his zombie is cured by psychiatric medicine, and a woman who cannot be saved from zombification by medical professionals is ultimately able to prevent her own transformation into a living dead sex slave. Although the author rejects the medical interpretation of the living dead, he avoids offering a single unifying epistemology of the zombie. As Benedicty-Kokken notes, Depestre “does not want the reader to resolve the mystery [of Hadriana’s zombification], for to do so would be to privilege the rational order over the magico-sacred” (230). Instead, Hadriana emphasizes the zombie’s ability to symbolize Haitian realities and imaginaries in multiple ways. Similarly to the way Alexis’s zombie in “Chronicle of a False Love” troubles the distinction between the zombie and the figure of mental illness, making it difficult to know which interpretation of the narrator is “correct,” Depestre’s novel allows for the coexistence of multiple ways of understanding—and therefore curing—the zombie. Yet whereas Alexis’s text offers an ambivalent answer to the question of the zombie’s roots in Vodou or mental illness—and leans toward the latter interpretation, with the zombie imaginary apparently translating the narrator’s experience—Depestre suggests that both interpretations of the zombie are accurate. That is, in Hadriana, the zombification process is spiritual in nature, but its effects on the psyche are very real, and diagnosing the former zombie through the lens of psychiatric medicine can lead to a cure. At the same time, Depestre seeks to reinvest the zombie myth with the full weight of the imaginary rather than reduce its significance by subjecting it to the rationalizing discourse of medical examination. Indeed, Hadriana symbolically restores the imaginary to the zombie legend, even as retreating into imagination revives the would-be zombie Hadriana—that is to say, as imagination saves her from zombitude. In another way, Depestre’s representation of Vodou serves as a corrective to images of the zombie in Western media that associate Vodou or “voodoo” with death. Hadriana celebrates the religion’s vibrant expression in dance and carnival. Yet Vodou is not explicitly represented as a clear cause of the eponymous heroine’s dezombification. What if Vodou were represented as a means of curing the zombie as well?

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Chenet’s Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie (2009) René Depestre suggests that the zombie, though created through both natural and supernatural means, can be cured by psychiatric intervention. In contrast, Gérard Chenet portrays a “zombie” created by psychiatric trauma but healed by Vodou. In this way, Chenet’s novel Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie (Haitian Vodou Trances for Dearest Amélie, 2009) reimagines yet again the relationship between the zombie, Vodou, and mental illness, suggesting that the zombie myth can reflect the psychic trauma caused by neocolonial rule and sexual violence, but also firmly positing Vodou as a means of curing, rather than creating, the living dead. This is true even though the work affirms the spiritual reality of zombies. It positions Vodou and psychiatry as compatible, and even as parts of the same whole in Haitian culture. It also reimagines the zombie’s ability to symbolize the colonial enslavement of Black and Indigenous bodies by making the purported living dead character the victim of a US government agent. The zombie is thus represented as a byproduct of US neocolonialism, in a way that intervenes in the occupation-era evocation of zombies as a creation of Haitian superstition—suggesting, on the contrary, that it is imperial intervention that “zombifies” Haiti and Haitians. In Transes, Chenet draws on the trope of the zombie bride found in Depestre’s Hadriana. The connection between the authors is not purely literary—Chenet was involved alongside Alexis and Depestre in launching La Ruche, the journal that critiqued Lescot’s presidency. Lescot’s repressive government serves as the backdrop for Transes, which begins on November 1, 1944. In the Fort-Sinclair marketplace in Port-au-Prince, gossip turns to the disappearance and reappearance of the eponymous protagonist. Amélie, who was presumed to have died in a car crash on her wedding night, is found walking by the exit of the market, “head lowered, looking haggard […] in her wedding dress” (9).80 The vendors believe only one explanation is logical: Amélie has been turned into a zombie. In fact, the night of the crash, Amélie walked away from the burning vehicle and was picked up by a CIA agent who was passing by in his car. Mac Byron, realizing that Amélie is in a fugue state and unable to resist him, makes her his sex slave. These double traumas—the car crash and the rape—are what make Amélie into a 80 “la tête baissée, l’air hagard […] dans sa robe de mariée.” All translations of Transes vaudou into English are my own.

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mental zombie. The rest of Transes revolves around Amélie’s healing and rediscovery of her true identity (lost by retrograde amnesia) through “Vodou psychotherapy” (83).81 Amélie’s altered mental state is described consistently in Transes with the language of psychiatric trauma, but in ways that specifically mirror the mental state of the zombified individual. After an automobile accident that throws Amélie and her husband from the vehicle, she suffers “a retrograde amnesia” (32).82 She leaves the site of the accident and walks “a good half-hour in a sleepwalking state” (32) before Mac Byron finds her.83 The reference here to “a sleepwalking state” links somnambulism to mental trauma. (Moreover, as explained in the first section, above, the sleepwalker’s gait has defined the zombie since Vodou, hypnotism, and mesmerism were melded on screen in White Zombie.) This altered consciousness is only deepened after Mac Byron rapes Amélie: her mind is “blocked by a double emotional trauma that plunge[s] her into a vegetative state” (34).84 These references to the discourse of psychiatric trauma continue to define Amélie’s experience as a captive of the CIA operative, who makes her fall “under the effect of Stockholm syndrome” (51).85 Stockholm syndrome—the psychological dependence by a captive on their captor—is a psychological equivalent of the zombie’s obedience to its master. While Amélie is not a zombie in the sense she has not been transformed by a bòkò into a figure of living death, she has nevertheless lost her memory, personality, and volition. At one point, Amélie wonders: “How, based solely on her loss of memory, had she ended up meeting the same fate and suffering the same symptoms as the legendary zombie? Had the people wandering on roadsides believed to be zombies in fact been, all along, the victims of physical and sexual abuse that caused traumatic 81 “psychothérapie vaudou.” 82 “une amnésie rétrograde.” 83 “une bonne demi-heure dans un état somnambulique.” 84 “l’esprit occulté par un double traumatisme émotionnel qui l’[a] plongé dans un univers végétatif.” 85 “sous l’effet du syndrome de Stockholm.” The novel implicates the neocolonial relationship between the United States and Haiti as reflected in the zombie–master dynamic: “what could she do, left to her own devices and under the political regime of the dictator at the time, against someone whose contacts reached back to Washington?” (“que pouvait-elle faire, livrée à elle-meme, sous le régime politique du dictateur d’alors, contre quelqu’un dont les accointances remontaient jusqu’à Washington” (40)).

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memory disorders?” (154).86 The description of the fate and syndromes of the zombie deconstructs the myth in an interesting way, indicating how the symptoms associated with zombitude may be seen to cluster in ways that suggest the reality of certain kinds of zombies. In this way, the novel both equates Amélie’s psychological state with zombitude and suggests that the zombie legend itself may be a means of interpreting and narrating trauma. However, unlike Seabrook’s tales, which imply that the living dead are people who were already mentally ill, Chenet’s description speaks to the abuse and mistreatment that might have created the zombie; in this way, it echoes Zora Neale Hurston’s encounter in the hospital yard with Felicia Felix-Mentor (or Solitude’s trauma as described in Chapter 1). While Vodou is dissociated from the creation of the zombie in Transes, it explicitly cures Amélie, even though she was “zombified” through trauma. In other words, Chenet’s novel posits Vodou as a remedy for trauma, rather than its cause. After she becomes aware of her docile, zombie-like state, Amélie begins the process of regaining her memories and consciousness through “Vodou psychotherapy” (83)—that is to say, “Amélie’s approach to seeking treatment within the framework of mythical rites, in tune with the local context: the country, its history, its approach to psychological phenomena” (90).87 Possession by the lwa or gods plays a central role in Amélie’s metaphorical dezombification. (This is logical because, as Benedicty-Kokken notes, possession and zombification can be seen as counterparts.88) The particulars of Amélie’s rehabilitation are described at length in the following passage: 86 “Comment, du seul fait de la perte de sa mémoire, avait-elle fini par connaître le sort et les syndromes du zombi des légendes? Les personnes errant sur les routes, prises pour tel, avaient donc été victimes d’abus et de sévices graves qui seraient à l’origine des traumatismes de la mémoire?” The connection between the zombie and social death is further emphasized when Amélie seeks psychiatric and social rehabilitation: she is condemned by the lwa Baron la Croix to “three months’ wandering, without a roof over her head, clothed in the rags of a zombie” (“trois mois d’errance, sans toit, revetue des guenilles d’un zombi” (155)). 87 “psychothérapie vaudou”; “la démarche d’Amélie de se faire soigner dans le cadre de rites mythiques, en phase avec le contexte local, le pays, son histoire, sa façon d’aborder les phénomènes psychologiques.” 88 Benedicty-Kokken writes that “zombification is the stealing of a person’s essence, of his/her soul, of his/her gwo-bon-anj, sealing it in a bottle, entrapping it; while possession is the displacement of a person’s gwo-bon-anj by a lwa’s energetic strength” (223). In Haitian Vodou, to be possessed by a lwa or god is akin to becoming that god.

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction The therapeutic practice often consisted of a simple retreat to the Ounfor, to allow the patient, especially in Amélie’s case, to relive, through the experience of a trance, the surfacing of past events stuck in her subconscious. These diverse experiences constituted attempts to approach the epicenter containing the bulk of forgotten memories. They worked to prime her memory. In this way, over the course of the possession ceremonies, Amélie recovered fragments of memory, like a motor that’s been turned on and is about to start moving. (97)89

The use of psychiatric discourse to describe the Vodou ceremony is striking, the blending of two distinct lexicons explaining what may seem like a supernatural phenomenon (“a trance,” “ceremonies of possession”) in relation to memory and the psyche (“the subconscious,” “the epicenter containing the bulk of forgotten memories,” etc.). In this way, Chenet suggests that Vodou is far from incompatible with psychiatric theories. He also rehabilitates Vodou’s relationship with the zombie, showing that the religion can serve as a source of healing. Chenet’s description echoes the ideas propounded by the Haitian psychiatrist Louis Mars. The son of the ethnographer Jean-Price Mars, Louis Mars developed theories of ethnopsychiatry that offered an alternative to Euro-centric psychiatric concepts. If the opening of the Camp de Beudet in 1929 described at the beginning of this chapter represented an official start to Western psychiatric treatment in Haiti, Louis Mars’s return to Haiti in 1936 after his psychiatric studies in France marked a new era in Haitian psychiatry—both in the treatment at Beudet and in the advent of a modern form of psychiatry that respected and accounted for Haitian culture (Farmer 259–60). Specifically, Mars studied the relationship between psychiatry and Vodou, including the role of spirit possession in the religion.90 Whereas European thought has conceived of possession as either an overtaking of individual personality by a demon (in Catholicism) or a kind of 89 “La pratique thérapeutique se résumait souvent en une simple retraite dans le Ounfor, pour permettre au patient, surtout dans le cas d’Amélie, de vivre, à l’occasion d’une transe, la remontée des événements du passé demeurés dans son subconscient. Ces diverses expériences constituaient des tentatives d’approche de l’épicentre où se localise la masse des souvenirs oubliés. Elles agissaient comme un amorçage de la mémoire. Ainsi, au cours des cérémonies de possession, Amélie récupérait-elle des bribes de souvenir, comme un moteur activé, sur le point de démarrer.” 90 See, for example, La Crise de possession dans le vaudou (1946) and Témoignages I: Essai ethnopsychologique (1966).

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hysteria (in psychiatry), Mars argued that because the personality is not conceived in the same way in Haitian thought, Vodou possession should not be viewed as a disorder. For instance, in Vodou, the ti bon anj in which personality resides is mobile. Spirit possession allows the individual’s personality to be displaced by a lwa (a spirit or god), such that the body possessed “becomes a god, it is the god in flesh and bone” (Témoignages 40).91 Therefore, in Vodou, spirit possession— more commonly described in terms of the practitioner or “horse” (chwal) being “mounted” by a lwa—is far from pathological. Instead, it is conceived of as a mystical experience. In fact, for those who serve the lwa, possession is often viewed as a means of confronting and healing trauma on various levels and in various forms.92 Chenet’s novel considers individual and collective traumas: both the concept of the zombie as metaphor for traumatic dispossession and the concept of possession as a means of healing are extrapolated from the personal to the societal level. The young boys who were once tutored by Amélie publish an article on “Zombie States”— nations, including Haiti, that are controlled subversively by the Invisible Empire (171).93 Yet Amélie retrieves her memories partly in relation to an earlier trauma—Haiti’s subjection to colonial rule—and through the rejection of this trauma, in the form of a reenactment of the Bois Caïman ceremony that launched the Haitian Revolution. As part of the yearly ceremony commemorating the event, Amélie is mounted by the warrior lwa Ogou, “who presided over the combat against the Napoleonic Army sent from old Europe, with the mission of reestablishing slavery” (149).94 As a fierce fighter, linked here with the Haitian Revolution, Ogou is in many ways the antithesis of the typically passive zombie. Once Amélie, possessed by Ogou, cries the revolutionary slogan “Liberty or death!” to those assembled, she retrieves her lost memories (150).95 By becoming the powerful, rebellious lwa, Amélie reverses her zombified psychological state, remembering her past and recovering her individual identity. Yet 91 “devient dieu, il est le dieu en chair et en os.” 92 For example, Benedicty-Kokken describes possession as “one of the privileged spaces through which the victims of trauma, individual traumas, collective traumas, find a way to process suffering” (5). 93 “États Zombis.” 94 “qui présida au combat mené contre l’armée napoléonienne dépêchée depuis l’Europe ancienne, ayant mission de rétablir l’esclavage.” 95 “Liberté ou la mort!”

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she does so as part of the revival of the collective memory of the Haitian rejection of imperialism. In this way, these personal and collective traumas—Amélie’s near-death experience and sexual assault, as well as the legacies of colonization, enslavement and imperialism—are linked not only through the concept of the zombie but also through the act of working through these memories. Whereas Alexis blurs the lines between the zombie as a traumatized victim and as the “real” living dead in “Chronicle of a False Love,” and Depestre indicates that neither the rational nor the irrational holds a monopoly on diagnosing and curing the zombie in Hadriana in All My Dreams, Chenet offers yet another way of understanding the zombie. His protagonist Amélie was not zombified by a Vodou sorcerer; her “zombitude” is a catatonic state caused by trauma. While Chenet might thus seem to affirm occupation-era narratives that suggest that the zombie can be explained rationally by diagnosing it as mentally ill, the author critiques these narratives’ use of the presumption of Haitian inferiority to justify US interventionism. In fact, although Chenet suggests Amélie is mentally ill rather than zombified, he does not deny the existence of the living dead; according to an oungan who helps heal Amélie, one of the other causes of her psychic zombification is that she made Baron Samedi, lwa of death and the cemetery, angry by denying the reality of zombies. As a result, the oungan tells Amélie, “he wanted to teach you a lesson” (117).96 Therefore, even as Chenet indicates that the Vodou ceremony is based in psychiatric realities in the passages describing Amélie’s “Vodou psychotherapy,” he does not fully demystify the religion. On the contrary, Transes suggests the importance of respecting Vodou’s supernatural manifestations. The occupation-era US zombie narratives analyzed in this chapter present the living dead in ways that call to mind the long history of the use of psychological and medical inquiry as an empirical tool used on marginalized bodies, as the references to a range of troubling psychiatric treatments suggest. The zombified figures echo at times the objectification of enslaved Africans under colonial rule, and at others the display of “hysterical” or otherwise mentally ill individuals in the amphitheaters of Salpêtrière in Paris; sometimes both visions coalesce, as in I Walked 96 “il a voulu te donner une leçon.” This might bring to mind Antoine Innocent’s Mimola, ou l’histoire d’une cassette (1906), in which two individuals afflicted by mysterious illnesses are cured by a pilgrimage to the Saut-d’Eau in northern Haiti, which holds special significance for Vodou practitioners.

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with a Zombie and Hurston’s encounter with Felix-Mentor. If this displaying of the zombified body begins to be critiqued in those works, in the literary fictions of Alexis, Depestre, and Chenet the epistemological underpinnings of this desire to display, diagnose, and cure are debunked, both for their complicity in the zombie’s spectacularization and for their inability to account for the myriad ways the zombie can be interpreted in Haitian culture. These authors not only complicate the representation of the zombie as “either” mentally ill or living dead and represent Vodou as both the potential cause of and the cure for zombification, but also contest the idea that the “truth” behind the zombie can be found in scientific or psychological systems of knowledge. Instead, these works argue the Haitian zombie cannot be understood without accounting for the complex nexus of social, aesthetic, spiritual, and historical factors that led to its creation and continue to inflect its constant metamorphosis. If this specificity to Haitian and Caribbean culture is central to the Haitian zombie myth, the avatar of the zombie as mentally ill also speaks to a relatively recent trend of humanizing the anthropophagic living dead.97 For decades the cannibal avatars of the living dead seemed to be guilt-free targets for violence in films and video games—after all, they want to eat us and our loved ones. We were given carte blanche to relish their destruction, an idea that has been connected to Agamben’s discussion of bare life and the homo sacer. Yet a number of recent works have reinterpreted the living dead’s otherness as a distinct form of ontological difference, rather than as a license for their annihilation. S. G. Browne’s 2009 novel Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament represents zombies as an initially innocuous group relegated to the social margins (the title is a play on the derogatory term “breeders,” used to refer to heterosexuals) until eating human flesh causes them to regain characteristics of the living. The novel and film Warm Bodies (2010 and 2013, respectively) transformed the zombie—long overshadowed by the erotic and romantic vampire—into a potential love interest. Whereas Warm Bodies predicates the zombie’s redemption on the characters’ potential for dezombification (achieved through romantic love in the case of the protagonist, R—an allusion to Romeo and Juliet), the 2015 crime procedural iZombie reimagines zombitude as a means of understanding the dead: the zombified medical examiner Liv gains access to the 97 Kee deems these figures “extra-ordinary zombies” (3). See her work for more on these humanized living dead.

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memories of the recently deceased by eating a portion of their brains. In the 2016 film The Girl with All the Gifts, a group of children who were in utero when a zombifying fungus began to spread are uniquely able to retain most of their human qualities when exposed to the spores, without becoming “hungries.” While occasionally they exhibit the drive to consume non-zombified human flesh, the final scene shows them listening to their non-“hungry” schoolteacher, gathered around a window looking into her airlocked bunker. This scene suggests that the children are the future of humanity in its new form—a humanity merged with zombitude, which is transformed from a kind of ontological alterity into a new form of life following ecological disaster. These works from the US and British contexts of the 2010s all think beyond the surface of the zombie, reconsidering the figure’s alterity and subjectivity—humanizing, as it were, the zombie figure. This trend follows the earlier drive in Haitian fiction to understand the zombie’s experience. Whereas the zombie as a figure of mental illness initially attempted to divorce the legend from the complex historical and social context that led to the myth’s creation, Haitian writers used the avatar to restore this connection and to understand the forms of exploitation that create such figures of otherness. These works thus predate and anticipate the recent turn towards humanizing the post-Romero zombie.

chapter three

The Zombie Horde The Zombie Horde

“Is it possible my homeland was some sort of collective zombie?” René Depestre, Hadriana in All My Dreams, 1651

George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead features now-iconic images of masses of anthropophagic “ghouls” that have risen from the dead. They surround the farmhouse in which most of the film takes place, where a group of strangers seeks shelter from a growing mass of homicidal sleepwalkers with a hunger for human flesh. Both physically and intellectually slow, these zombies appear easy enough to elude when they are alone or in small groups. They pose a threat primarily because of their large numbers—characters in Night and similar films often meet their fate because they are simply surrounded. This representation of the zombie as a horde profoundly transformed the zombie figure of French Caribbean folklore, which was born of the adaptation of African spirit beliefs to reflect the New World realities of enslaved captives in the colonies. Since its release, Night has spawned innumerable movies in which a virus or radiation causes the exponential proliferation of the living dead. Although the term “zombie” is never uttered in Night of the Living Dead (the “ghouls” in Romero’s film contain visual echoes with earlier cinematic zombies that led critics and audiences to apply the term after the fact), Night is widely considered the point of origin of the “Western” zombie.2 Although this designation has recently been 1 “Mon pays natal ne serait-il pas un zombi collectif?” (134). 2 Sheller suggests the zombies in films like Night are “a kind of cannibal– zombie hybrid” (146)—referring to the way it melds myths about the Caribbean as inhabited by violent cannibals and passive slaves.

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contested, Night remains a touchstone of a certain apocalyptic vision of the zombie horde.3 Indeed, a defining feature of the zombie as it is now represented in visual culture outside Haiti is its ability to transform others to resemble it ontologically, often through a bite. This trait—the “cannibal” zombie’s capacity to replicate itself in others—is responsible for the zombie’s proliferation at the level of plot in Night (and perhaps metanarratively in the numerous films it inspired). In Night these throngs represent the idea of a nation at war with itself, echoing the social upheaval in the United States during the late 1960s, from protests against the Vietnam War to the Civil Rights Movement. (The film’s final images, in particular, evoke the violent repression of Black bodies.) The horde has continued to represent similar concerns about societal division and decay in zombie films, television shows, and video games in the half-century since Night first shocked audiences with its graphic gore and images of family members killing one another. In narratives of the Haitian zombie, the figure rarely appears en masse before the late twentieth century. Indeed, kò kadav—the Creole term used for Haitian corporeal zombies—are most often represented individually or in small groups, likely because they are created through complex spiritual and/or medical rituals. And yet, roughly around the time Romero directed Night—specifically, beginning in the early 1970s—the zombies in novels by Haitian authors began to expand into horde-like masses. This chapter explores this proliferation of zombies within a trio of novels by Haitian authors published between 1974 and 1996, examining these works’ distinct literary portrayals of the zombie horde and their function as allegories of the Haitian socio-political contexts of the era. Why and how, just as Romero’s metamorphosed zombie turned the figure into a multitude symbolizing tensions in the United States, did the zombie horde emerge as a socio-political allegory within the context of the Duvalier regime in Haiti? The trope flourished as a representation of Papa Doc’s totalitarian regime, reflecting the psychic control held by the autocrat over his militia and the fear the militia incited in the Haitian populace. As Glover and Lauro have noted, the zombie served as a vehicle for incisive critiques of this mental and physical violence, its symbolism veiled enough to protect authors like Frankétienne, who 3 Lauro suggests this appraisal needs to be reevaluated, arguing instead that Romero’s film is a culmination of the process of erasure and reinscription through which the Haitian zombie was appropriated by Western cinema (98).

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wrote within Haiti, from reprisals. However, while specific to Haitian politics, the Duvalier dictatorship was also tied to the global political context of the Cold War. The United States did not intervene in Duvalier’s rule, viewing it as a way to prevent the spread of communism in the Caribbean. Therefore, I argue, the appearance of the zombie horde trope in Haitian literature represents both a reimagining of earlier ideas about the Haitian zombie and a reflection of national and international politics at the time, as Cold War relations divided the world’s nations (and factions within those nations) into opposing blocs. The seemingly fundamental distinctions between “us” and “them” inherent in zombie fictions became massive allegories for these political divisions, whether in narratives of the Haitian zombie or its appropriated US “cannibal” form. As indicated above, and as discussed in Chapter 2, early representations of the Haitian zombie, including popular films, travelogues, and ethnographic texts from the 1930s and 1940s, tend to represent zombies individually or in small groups. For example, in a much-cited tale from The Magic Island (1929), William Seabrook describes nine zombies accidentally revived by salt. (In Haiti, zombies are forbidden to eat salt, which is believed to awaken them.) Similarly, the film White Zombie (1932) depicts one to two dozen zombies toiling in a sugar mill, and the zombie master Murder Legendre is served by six undead henchmen (played by actors in blackface). Yet even these small groups are subordinated in White Zombie to the most obvious living dead figure, the titular heroine Madeline. Indeed, other prominent works from the early twentieth century privilege individual zombies. The film I Walked with a Zombie (1943) features two fascinating living dead figures, a white woman (Jessica) and a Black man (Carrefour). While Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) includes numerous zombie stories, they primarily describe individuals, such as the purported zombie Felicia Felix-Mentor. Hurston mentions only in passing that occasionally a bòkò—a sorcerer who creates zombies—is converted by missionaries and subsequently “frees his captives if he has any” (197). Contemporary anthropological writing tends to discuss “the zombie” as an individual entity as well.4 The same can be said of literary fiction by Haitian writers, including the early examples of Magloire-Saint-Aude’s short 4 Métraux reiterates Seabrook’s tale, while Ackermann & Gauthier’s exhaustive overview of other scholarly writing on the zombie refers only to one dubious hypothesis offering an “endless supply of potential zombis” (478).

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story “Vigil” (“Veillée,” 1956) and Jacques Stephen Alexis’s “Chronicle of a False Love” (1960), both of which portray the apparent death of a young woman who, it seems, subsequently becomes a zombie.5 In contrast, the Haitian sociologist Laënnec Hurbon notes a relative proliferation of zombies in his 1988 study Le Barbare imaginaire: “Over the course of recent years, it is rumored that hundreds of zombies have appeared, some have been displayed to groups of pastors, when not examined by psychiatrists” (83).6 While Hurbon describes the growing emergence of former zombies, his description suggests they appear individually, with the phrase “quelques-uns”—a few—highlighting the discrete nature of these “hundreds” of zombies. Given this predominance of solitary zombies, it is all the more striking to note the living dead hordes that began to appear in fiction by writers from Haiti during the Duvalier era, multiplying exponentially at the level of plot. The most iconic horde in Haitian literature famously appears in Frankétienne’s tale of a zombie uprising, first published in Haitian Creole as Dézafi (1975) but rewritten by the author in French and published as Les Affres d’un défi (“The Throes of Defiance”) in 1979. Les Affres describes “thousands of zombies” (59) created by a bòkò to work in his rice paddies.7 One year before the publication of Dézafi, the exiled Haitian writer Gérard Etienne described an even larger proliferation of zombies in his Crucified in Haiti (Le Nègre crucifié, 1974). In Etienne’s novel, a dictatorial President creates a massive zombie militia: “Twenty thousand zombis are surrounding him” (136), helping to maintain his authoritarian power.8 The number grows yet again in Dany Laferrière’s 1996 novel Down Among the Dead Men (Pays sans chapeau). The narrator returns to Haiti after twenty years in exile to find his mother afraid of a huge zombie army that patrols the country in tandem with the occupying US forces: “The zombie army […] There are tens of thousands of them” (42).9 In each of these works, the zombie horde is part of a political allegory—allegories related to the dictatorship 5 The zombie army in Fignolé’s Quiet Dawn would not appear until 1990, a decade or more after the two Duvalier-era works studied in this chapter. 6 “Au cours de ces récentes années, des centaines de zombis, dit-on, sont apparus, quelques-uns sont exposés à des groupes de pasteurs, là où ils ne sont pas examinés par des psychiatres.” 7 “des milliers de zombis.” 8 “Vingt mille zombis l’entourent” (119). 9 “L’armée des zombis […] Ils sont des dizaines de milliers” (49).

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of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in the first two works, and to the first presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the third. Yet these multitudes offer distinct ways of reflecting on political power, collective uprisings, and national narratives. This chapter teases out the differences in the literary forms and symbolic functions of these zombie hordes. Despite the zombie horde’s utility as a unique vehicle through which Haitian authors critique totalitarianism and imagine collective consciousness, scholarship has yet to elucidate this specific trope’s role in Duvalier-era fiction and beyond. Critics have, however, established the zombie figure’s broad significance as a literary vehicle for Haitian writers during this period, including in relation to the Duvalier regime’s widely known use of Vodou iconography. Glover argues that “the rehabilitation of Vodou initiated by the Indigenist movement, then affirmed under the Duvalier regime, created an atmosphere in which the zombie became exceedingly useful to Haitian writers”—a uniquely Haitian way of interrogating political power (“Exploiting the Undead” 107). Indeed, Glover and Sarah Juliet Lauro note the zombie’s potential to represent both servitude and resistance to authoritarian power. For Lauro, the zombie is reclaimed under Duvalier by the people, in a way that evidences “the zombie’s late twentieth-century metamorphosis into a narrative technology by means of which Haitian identity could be solidified” (111).10 The living dead’s function as a vehicle for articulating Haitian identity is certainly at play in the trope of the horde. Haitian writers use the zombified multitudes to represent political factions and imagine the potential for collective consciousness in the mid- to late twentieth century. However, I argue that the zombie horde avatar specifically points towards the zombie’s limit as a symbol of socio-political realities. Whereas for certain authors the horde represents the terrorized populace, for others it allegorizes nearly the opposite—namely, the complicity of Duvalier’s militia, the tonton makout. Ultimately, through the zombie horde trope’s repetition and reiteration, it reaches the end of its capacity to represent Haitian realities in new ways. While critics have yet to account fully for the zombie horde’s function in fiction by Haitian writers, elsewhere they have broadly tied the emergence of the zombie horde trope to various moments of 10 Lauro refers specifically to the way zombification becomes associated with a form of social sanction in the post-Duvalier period, transforming it from a symbol of the power of the few over the many into a way to reinforce the needs of the people.

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social upheaval. John Cussans traces connections between the Haitian zombie’s emergence as a mindless figure in colonial Saint-Domingue and theories of mass crowd psychology that emerged in response to the Age of Revolutions. These theories posited the idea that human beings “allegedly become increasingly somnambulistic, automatic and savage when they are part of crowds” (94).11 Although this claim reflects how enmeshed the ideas of slavery and revolution were in philosophical and even (pseudo-)scientific thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the zombie figure itself did not come to serve as metaphor or allegory for the masses until after World War II. For Roger Luckhurst, the “massification” of the zombie occurred after 1945 in response to post-World War II and Cold War socio-political contexts in US popular culture. The zombie then became “one of the exemplary allegorical figures of the modern mass,” although “the lone Caribbean zombi never goes away” (109).12 If these drone-like masses seem to have emerged as a means of understanding various aspects of Western modernities, from widespread philosophical shifts to human rights atrocities legitimized by the exclusion of certain social groups, in the works of Haitian writers these zombified hordes similarly reflect internecine struggles, albeit within the distinctly Haitian political context of the Duvalier dictatorship (which was, however, connected to the global realities of the Cold War). This chapter studies three novels that use the zombie horde to represent national struggles and imagine the potential for collective uprisings. It examines how the authors’ tinkering with the literal traits of the zombie myth transforms these traits’ literary function—that is to say, their allegorical representation of the socio-political realities of Haiti under Papa Doc and during the first Aristide presidency. Frankétienne transforms the mythic function of salt, giving it the power to fully revive the zombified masses in Les Affres d’un défi. His novel envisions the collective potential of the living dead to rise up against 11 Cussans also notes, “The correlation of a mass-form of automated crowd psychology with the new conditions of life brought about by the developments of industry and science, created the cultural conditions for the folkloric zombi to elide with those iconic machine-age agents-without-autonomy: the slave, somnambulist and robot” (Undead Uprising 99; emphasis in original). 12 Specifically, Luckhurst ties this massification to the dehumanization of Nazi death camp victims, the Red Scare, suburban American homogenization, and mass popular cultures of the Cold War period.

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their master in an allegorical tale that evokes both the fight against the Duvalier dictatorship and more universal struggles. Because it shows the transformation of a passive zombie herd into a vengeful horde, in this chapter Les Affres will also serve as a case study of the characteristics that make a horde. In contrast, Gérard Etienne represents the zombie horde in more ambivalent terms. In Crucified in Haiti, the living dead serve as henchmen for the autocratic president, suggesting that the zombies are enslaved victims even as they terrorize the narrator and other inhabitants of Port-au-Prince. If Gérard Etienne’s novel uses the zombie horde to offer a clear indictment of Duvalierian totalitarianism, and Frankétienne’s novel makes a veiled if no less incisive critique, Dany Laferrière revisits the significance of the zombie horde for the Aristide era. His Down Among the Dead Men is even more ambiguous than Etienne’s, using the reanimated multitudes to embody the divergent socio-political movements found in Les Affres and Crucified in Haiti. Ultimately, I argue, even though the horde afforded Laferrière’s predecessors the means to critique Duvalier from within Haiti and to represent the all-consuming nature of totalitarian ideology, the author suggests a limit to the trope of the zombified masses—indicating its exhaustion through repetition and transformation.13 Awakening the Horde: Frankétienne’s Les Affres d’un défi (1979) What characteristics define a horde? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term may designate a “large group of people, esp. one which is disorganized, disorderly, or threatening,” or alternately, a “large (moving) group of animals, typically one considered as dangerous or destructive.” In addition to its considerable numbers, then, the horde lacks a clear organization and is violent towards other people or things. In Frankétienne’s Les Affres d’un défi, the zombified masses are initially passive and non-volitional. Beasts of burden that toil ceaselessly in the fields, they reflect the idea of the zombie as an obedient victim galvanized only by its master’s commands. This docile herd speaks to one difficulty of imagining a horde made of Haitian zonbi kò kadav—the fact they are not “threatening,” “dangerous,” or “destructive.” Yet Frankétienne 13 Lanzendörfer suggests that “zombies are capable of carrying an impressive number, perhaps any number, of metaphorical and symbolic connotations” but also argues, “the zombie, as a trope, is barely in need of explication” (95).

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reimagines the idea that salt will revive corporeal Haitian zombies and make them aware of their living dead state, such that they fully recover their consciousness and volition. This transformation of the physical conventions defining the zombie make possible the symbolic transformation of the passive zombie herd into a vengeful horde. However, this horde eventually gives way to a revolutionary mass. Thus, in Les Affres, we can trace the evolution of the zombie masses from passive herd to violent mob-like horde, and finally to a coalition based on a collective awareness of past oppression. Although Frankétienne renews the Haitian zombie legend by transforming salt into a medium for reviving the figure, his novel echoes earlier accounts of zombies revived, including travelogues and ethnographically inflected accounts. The main distinction between Les Affres d’un défi and its narrative intertexts lies in the fact that the latter do not all grant the living dead the kind of full revival found in Frankétienne’s work, and none unleashes a revolt through the power of salt (a particularly striking transformation in the context of the first nation born of a slave revolt in the western hemisphere). William Seabrook’s often-cited story of a group of zombies forced to toil in the Hasco sugar cane fields recounts how, after they accidentally consumed salt, “they knew they were dead” and rushed to the cemetery, cognizant only of the need to return to the grave (98–99).14 Similarly, Louis Mars writes that zombies who consume salt “become conscious of the state of their abnormal existence and are therefore likely to desert their masters” (“The Story of the Zombi in Haiti” 39–40). Neither of these descriptions indicates that the zombie may fully regain its living status. Yet other narratives parallel Les Affres more directly by suggesting that the salt does truly return zombies to their normal state—so writes Katherine Dunham in regard to the zombie created by a potion (rather than by black magic).15 The stakes of this revived zombie consciousness are raised by Zora Neale Hurston, who notes that zombies given salt may write the name of their zombifier (Tell My Horse 183)—thus ostensibly identifying the culprit. In these citations predating Les Affres (Seabrook wrote in 1929, Hurston in 1938, Mars in 1945, and Dunham in 1969), there is no mention of zombies killing their master after ingesting salt. 14 This story is repeated by Métraux in Voodoo in Haiti 283 (Le Vaudou haïtien 251–52). 15 Hurbon similarly suggests that zombies return to normal after eating salt in Le Barbare imaginaire (193).

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In fact, only after the publication of Les Affres is it noted that the zombie may murder its master, in Wade Davis’s Passage of Darkness (61), a fact he attributes to “innumerable tales” (61). This suggests that despite the highbrow and dense nature of Frankétienne’s Les Affres, its reimagining of the zombie figure rippled out beyond its pages: it appears that the novel did not merely draw on folklore, but also influenced other stories of the zombie. Frankétienne reimagined the zombie figure from a prominent place in Haitian arts and letters; he was rumored to have been a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature in 2009.16 His creative innovations in literary works like Les Affres as well as in theater and the visual arts can be interpreted in relation to the Spiralist movement (also discussed in Chapter 1), which Frankétienne envisioned with Jean-Claude Fignolé and René Philoctète, all of whom wrote from within Haiti during the Duvalier era. Spiralism theorizes an aesthetic based on the repetitions and ever-expanding spheres of relation of the spiral, and its founders’ literary works are marked by discursive ruptures and parallels that connect discrete temporal moments and geographical locations. As a figure of narrative and temporal return, the zombie was thus of clear interest to the Spiralists.17 In Les Affres, the spiral manifests itself in various ways at the levels of text, plot, and symbolism. It is evident in the vignettes—alternately in regular, bold, or italic typeface—that initially seem to form distinct narratives. These apparently disconnected passages slowly coalesce into a broader vision of life in Bois-Neuf, a town terrorized by the bòkò Saintil and his henchman Zofer. Although the zombies are initially the most obvious figures of dispossession in the novel, their oppression ultimately mirrors that of other characters, from the broad reference to the townspeople of Bois-Neuf to more specific characters such as the restavèk Rita.18 The influence of Spiralism on Les Affres d’un défi can also be understood intertextually, through the lens of rewriting. Much as Frankétienne participates in broader narrative reimaginings of the zombie figure, with Les Affres the author revises his own earlier text, 16 See Archibold. 17 See Glover’s analysis of Spiralist fiction, Haiti Unbound. 18 Glover writes: “in addition to Saintil and Zofer’s violent physical subjugation of their zombie slaves, the reader encounters a whole gamut of symbolic zombifications, including censorship, starvation, illiteracy, and dispossession” (Haiti Unbound 66).

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the Creole-language novel Dézafi. Like Les Affres, which is far from a simple translation of its literary predecessor,19 Dézafi is concerned with the zombies’ uprising against their master.20 In 2002, Franétienne offered yet another rewriting of the narrative, this one entitled Dezafi—a work that has been described as the third marasa twin to the earlier versions of the story.21 All three versions describe how the bòkò’s daughter falls in love with one of the zombies and feeds him salt, thus enacting a cyclical renewal and bringing about the transformation, alluded to above, of the zombie herd into an active horde. The zombie herd—a passive mass of the living dead—is created in Les Affres through the subsuming of the individual’s personal identity and will. This reflects Haitian Vodou beliefs, which indicate that zombification takes place in part through the theft of one of the five parts of the soul—either the ti bon anj or the gwo bon anj, which have respectively been said to contain individual personality and will, the elements that effectively make someone human.22 This dehumanization of the zombies is reflected in Les Affres through a lexicon of bestiality that appears at the discursive level. A striking illustration is the zombification of Clodonis, who is targeted for his intellectualism and pride. Clodonis is disinterred and forced to walk down the streets of his town while crying out “Here comes Clodonis!” (75)—a naming process that functions as a reverse baptism of sorts, signaling his departure from the human social realm— before he is incorporated into the zombie masses, a process described in animalized terms.23 When preparing Clodonis for his integration into the horde, Saintil states that “the new zombie will need to be harnessed, saddled” (89).24 Thus, once his human identity has been stripped from 19 See Rachel Douglas’s comparative analysis of Les Affres and Dézafi in Frankétienne and Rewriting. 20 The title “dezafi” refers to another recurrent motif in the works—the cockfight. 21 See Douglas’s discussion of Chamoiseau’s and Confiant’s observations on this question (Frankétienne and Rewriting 31–32). The marasa are powerful twin spirits, and the sibling who is born after them (called dossou if male or dossa if female) “unites in its person the power of both twins” (147) (“unit en sa seule personne la puissance des deux” (Métraux 132)). 22 See Ackermann & Gauthier’s review of how anthropologists define these terms (469–73). 23 “Voilà que passe Clodonis!” Translations of Les Affres into English are my own until noted otherwise. 24 “Le nouveau zombi devra être harnaché, sellé.”

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him, he is prepared by his master to work like a domesticated animal. There is also a pervasive lexical insistence on the zombies’ bestiality when describing them as a group, as the following examples illustrate: “Saintil settles into an armchair. At his feet, a herd of zombies on their knees under the peristyle” (8);25 “thousands of zombies swarm in his rice fields” (59);26 “They cooped up thousands of zombies in cramped cells deprived of any lighting system or ventilation” (168);27 and, although the zombies are not directly referenced: “The earth has been profoundly turned over, plowed and labored upon by a horde of ravenous beasts” (113).28 While pulluler (to swarm or proliferate) suggests the threat of a swarm of insects, parquer (to pen or coop up) and troupeau (herd) connote the passivity of domesticated herds.29 The reference to a “horde of ravenous beasts,” however, seems both to describe the forced labor performed by the famished, enslaved zombies and to anticipate the zombies’ later hunger for vengeance after they regain their individual consciousness.30 In other words, Frankétienne’s zombified herd is defined by passive compliance and dehumanization, yet it also leaves open the potential for a new horde to form. The process of dehumanization that creates the herd of zombies in Les Affres is reversed through the medium of salt, in a transformation that is portrayed as an awakening of individual memory, albeit at the collective level. This fundamental shift in the living dead occurs when the bòkò’s daughter Sultana, motivated by her desire for Clodonis and the attempts of her father’s henchman Zofer to blackmail her over this desire, feeds Clodonis the salt that awakens him. Clodonis’s transformation takes the 25 “Saintil se carre dans un fauteuil. À ses pieds, un troupeau de zombis à genoux sous le peristyle.” 26 “des milliers de zombis pullulent dans ses champs de riz.” 27 “Ils ont parqué des milliers de zombis dans des cellules exiguës privées de tout système d’éclairage et d’aération.” 28 “La terre a été profondément remuée, labourée par une horde de bêtes affamées.” 29 The zombies, as part of an overarching order defined by domestication and stable hierarchy, are thus far from the rhizomatic form of what Deleuze & Guattari define as the devenir-animal—a concept that privileges heterogeneity, multiplicity, and horizontality and highlights the amorphous and teeming nature of the pack (13). 30 Indeed, there are other moments when we see the glimmer of consciousness and revolt in the zombies, specifically in scenes depicting Saintil and Zofer torturing the zombies.

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form of a delayed recognition of his repressed past, which was inaccessible to him in his zombified state: “In a series of blurry, disjointed scenes, he watches the film of his life once more” (186).31 The text transcribes this resurgence in the first person, without punctuation, reflecting his stream of consciousness at the discursive level. In particular, he is able to recollect the events that led to his zombification, memories that push Clodonis to revive his fellow zombies: Reconstituting, in scattered fragments, the suffering he experienced like a long nightmare in the clutches of Saintil and Zofer, Clodonis breaks free of his chains, bellowing like an enraged bull. […] Then, he bounds into the courtyard, smashing open all of the cell doors and distributing the salty broth to all of the zombies on the plantation. (189)32

This transformation from passive beast of burden to active, enraged “bull” is thus provoked by Clodonis’s recovered memory of his zombification. After it leads him to feed salt to his fellow zombies, their dezombification is represented in a passage that parallels Clodonis’s own slow recovery of memory: “voices are unleashed, fed by a stream of vague thoughts where reason looks to escape the veneer of delusion in a jumble of words spoken and cried out” (189–90).33 The following passage mirrors the stream-of-consciousness style and lack of punctuation used to recount Clodonis’s awakening, but, unlike the latter, this one simultaneously interprets the individual testimonial narratives of numerous members of the group as they recollect their mistreatment by Saintil and Zofer, using both the first-person singular “I/je” and the collective “we/nous.” The zombified herd is thus revived—transformed into “new-wood” or “bois-nouveaux,” as Frankétienne calls them—through Clodonis’s individual revival, and as this metamorphosis ripples out through other individual zombies.34 31 “Sous forme de séquences discontinues, il revoit, de manière floue, le film de sa vie.” 32 “Reconstituant, en fragments épars, les souffrances vécues comme dans un long cauchemar sous les griffes de Saintil et de Zofer, Clodonis se déchaîne en beuglant, tel un taureau enragé. […] Puis, il bondit dans la cour, défonce toutes les portes des cellules et distribue le bouillon salé à tous les zombis de l’habitation.” 33 “des voix se déchaînent nourries par un flux de pensées imprécises où la raison cherche sa route hors de la gangue des fantasmes, dans un enchevêtrement de cris et de paroles.” 34 Here, I am drawing on the terminology of Kaiama Glover’s translation of an excerpt of Les Affres in “From Dezafi.”

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Before the zombie herd transforms into a new collective, the order previously imposed on the zombies dissolves into chaos. This new kind of mass is horde-like, driven solely by unbridled anger, and leaves a path of destruction in its wake—thus echoing the homicidal horde of Night of the Living Dead. The disarray is evoked both thematically and formally when the former zombies destroy their master’s house: “Revived by salt and carried away by their vengeful rage, the former zombies— now new-wood—become agitated, destroy, pillage, turn Saintil’s home upside down from top to bottom. Pandemonium. Toppling the gates of hell. Fire spreading across the fields” (191).35 They are “carried away by vengeful rage”—driven solely and uncontrollably by this single emotion. The long string of verbs (“become agitated, destroy, pillage, turn upside down”) emphasizes the totality of the destruction, while the nominal sentences that follow (“stampedes,” “toppling the gates of hell”) reflect the immediacy and chaotic simultaneity of their actions. After the complete demolition of the house, “the new-wood, like ravenous dogs in a fit of rabid fury [pris de rage], rush out of the house in a horrible anarchy” (193).36 The beasts of burden have become a hungry pack of rabid dogs—still animalistic, if no longer passive. The expression “a horrible anarchy” and the subsequent assertion that “reason is lost and dark urges emerge at the very moment that everything becomes possible” confirm that the horde is driven by base instinct rather than a logic of resistance (193).37 The description of destruction following the former zombies’ awakening—including “barbary, rape, solitary flight, familial refuge, pillaging, blind destruction, mayhem” (193)—also seems to anticipate the violent period of dechoukaj—uprooting—that followed the fall of Baby Doc in 1986.38 Yet Frankétienne looks beyond this violent 35 “Revivifiés par le sel, les anciens zombis, devenus bois-nouveaux, emportés par la rage vengeresse, s’agitent, détruisent, fouillent, bouleversent de fond en comble l’habitation de Saintil. Bousculades. Reversement des murs de l’enfer. Le feu se propage à travers les champs.” 36 “Les bois-nouveaux, tels des chiens affamés pris de rage, se précipitent hors de l’habitation dans une horrible anarchie.” Frankétienne plays on the polysemy of the word rage in French: while the term usually refers to rabies in relation to dogs, the expression “pris de rage” is most often used for human emotion. 37 “La raison s’égare et les pulsions ténébreuses émergent, l’instant même où tout devient possible.” 38 “la barbarie, le viol, la fuite solitaire, le refuge familial, le pillage, la destruction aveugle, la pagaille.” Douglas argues that the corresponding scene from Les Affres’s sister text Dezafi, the Creole text rewritten in 2002, was reworked

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horde as he imagines the forms the formerly passive zombie herd can take. It is not merely salt that allows the new-wood to overthrow their former oppressor; rather, Les Affres imagines an end to authoritarianism and a way beyond it through a collective body driven by shared motives. To elucidate the final form taken by this collective, as it shifts from passive herd to dynamic, dezombified horde at the end of Les Affres, it is necessary to return to the concept of the “mass” as it relates to the living dead. As previously noted, the idea of a mass psychology has been tied by critics such as Cussans and Luckhurst to the way the zombie represents the subsuming of individual will—whether to the bòkò in the case of the Haitian zombie, to the popular crowd of the Revolutionary period, to totalitarian rule in the post-World War II context, or ultimately to the drive to consume human flesh in the case of the post-Romero zombie. In contrast with this vision of the mass as overtaking individuality, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have conceptualized another form of mass. They describe the “multitude” as a collective based in “singular and determinate bodies that seek relation” (30). That is to say, it is created from distinct subjects (or smaller collectives) that seek to work together without the loss of individual will. While the zombies in Les Affres initially form a passive and thus non-hordelike mass, and then a vengeful horde that mirrors the destructive masses described by Cussans and Luckhurst, they ultimately form a multitude—a collective driven by shared objectives. This collective, which includes the former zombies and the inhabitants of the town of Bois-Nouveau (New-Wood), unites around the individual memories that reflect their former servitude—whether their literal enslavement as Saintil’s zombie or the fear created by the bòkò. The zombie horde in Les Affres is thus no longer zombified, but rather represents the overcoming of servitude and, symbolically, totalitarianism, through an awakened collectivity rooted in individual will. This final form—the new collective mass—is guided by reason rather than by the “dark urges” that drove the mob-like horde. Clodonis stops the former zombies as the inhabitants of Bois-Neuf become aware of the movement. He asks, “Why do we continue to wander aimlessly in the night?” and exhorts his fellow new-wood, saying, “We must avoid scattering and gratuitous violence” (Frankétienne, to function as a critique of the process of “déchoucage” that followed the Duvalier regime and “came to be associated with disorganized, widespread, and frequently gratuitous violence” (Frankétienne and Rewriting 57).

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“From Dezafi” (69)).39 Hearing Clodonis’s speech, the fellow former zombies and their compatriots band together. This new collectivity is described as a “community on its feet—standing against tyranny” (71).40 Together, the group exacts vengeance on Saintil, killing him in the cockfighting arena. Following this vengeance, the collective is “[i]n the middle of [the] storm,” once again threatening dispersal and chaos.41 In response, Clodonis, Jérôme (a student tortured for his suspected political leanings), and another character, Alibé, work to coordinate “the coalition of peasants and new-wood” (71).42 Jérôme addresses the masses, channeling the energy of the multitude: “when he at last manages to find the right words to express the truth and to convince his listeners, he feels himself permeated by an immense heat, the heat of a crowd aware of its strength” (71).43 Thus, while this new collective body is formed by the discursive power of the few, it is predicated on the power of the many (in distinct contrast to the order imposed on the zombie herd). Moreover, as he rallies the multitudes, Jérôme states: “Many other zombies are crumpled over in misery and ignorance at the foot of mountains, in the vastness of the plains, and well into the cities. Let us awaken them with salt. To guarantee the [free passage] of the dawn, let us be indefatigable sowers of salt” (73).44 Here, the borders of the coalition are seen as permeable, allowing for an influx of new members, with an awakened consciousness through salt representing free entry into the collectivity. Whereas the zombie herd was based in the annihilation of individual will and memory, the collective is created not merely through the restoration of this individual volition, but also through the will to revive others from their zombified state. In other 39 “Pourquoi continuons-nous à errer sans objectif dans la nuit? Nous devons éviter la dispersion et la violence gratuite” (198). Henceforth, all translations come from Glover’s translation, Frankétienne, “From Dezafi.” 40 “communauté debout contre la tyrannie” (198). 41 “En pleine tempête” (198). 42 “la coalition des paysans et des bois-nouveaux” (198). 43 “quand il parvient à trouver les mots-clés pour exprimer la vérité et convaincre son auditoire, il sent alors s’infiltrer en lui une chaleur immense, la chaleur d’une foule consciente de sa force” (198). 44 “Beaucoup d’autres zombis croupissent dans la misère et l’inconscience […] Allons les réveiller par le sel. Pour garantir les visas de l’aube, soyons d’infatigables semeurs de sel” (199). The reference to “sowers of salt” suggests a counterpoint to Depestre’s description of himself as “un grand voleur de sel marin” (Poète à Cuba 37, qtd. Morrison 497).

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words, because of this shift in focus from the individual to the collective, from vengeance to construction, Frankétienne’s dezombified horde is distinct from those of Seabrook (who seek their graves) or of Wade Davis (whose “subservience gives way to a murderous disposition” (61)). While the salt that awakens memory and volition is a prerequisite for belonging to the new revolutionary mass, the discursive intervention of Clodonis and Jérôme makes the crowd aware of its combined power and directs this power outward to build the collective consciousness that unites the dezombified, liberated multitude. Given the broad symbolism of these passages, it is clear that the zombie horde allegory in Les Affres may represent a range of sociopolitical situations. Indeed, the statement that “other zombies languish in misery and unconsciousness” suggests the widespread use of zombification as an allegory. Furthermore, the 2002 rewriting of Dezafi (over fifteen years after “Baby Doc” was ousted from power) suggests that “the need for ‘dezombification’ persists long after the end of the Duvaliers’ rule” (Douglas 58). Yet it is significant that Frankétienne’s dezombified multitude serves as a vehicle for achieving collective consciousness and offers a template for resistance to totalitarian power structures—a template Frankétienne created as he wrote from within Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship. Moreover, the use of bòkò Saintil to critique “Papa Doc” Duvalier is particularly compelling given the latter’s appropriation of Vodou to cement his power (from his Indigenist review Les Griots to his co-opting of the iconography of Baron Samedi). In using the zombie to critique and challenge the Duvaliers (among other perpetrators of injustice), Frankétienne takes an aspect of the zombie narrative—the Haitianness of the zombie master—and gives it new relevance at the symbolic level. In nearly all the works studied in this monograph, the bòkò is Haitian, and yet zombification itself often symbolizes the alienation of enslavement or of occupation (forms of dispossession enacted most often by white European or US imperialists). In contrast, in Les Affres, the zombie is an allegory for internecine conflict. By reimagining the potential of the zombie, Frankétienne seeks new kinds of narratives about Vodou, deploying the horde to challenge a totalitarian power that comes from within the nation. Sarah Juliet Lauro argues that zombification as a form of social sanction emerged as a concept under the Duvalier regime, such that the zombie is “wrested from Papa Doc’s legacy and turned against him” (114). Frankétienne imagines a literal version of this reappropriation in Les Affres d’un défi, turning an allegorical army of those formerly under

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Papa Doc’s thrall into a collective revolutionary mass. Yet if we read Saintil and his henchman Zofer as symbols for Duvalier and the tonton makout, the zombie horde must be seen as a powerful collective facing only a few individuals, whom they can easily overpower. How might this representation shift if the zombie horde is not opposed to the autocratic ruler, but rather complicit with it, symbolic of the Duvaliers’ militia? This is the form taken by the zombie horde in Gérard Etienne’s Crucified in Haiti, in which the revolutionary masses are opposed by a living dead army serving an authoritarian president. Rather than symbolizing the coalescence of a collective consciousness, the zombie horde in Etienne’s novel interrogates the opposition of political factions and ultimately suggests their paradoxical conflation under a totalitarian regime. Fighting the Horde: Gérard Etienne’s Crucified in Haiti (1974) Whereas Frankétienne’s zombie horde is passive until its power is unleashed by salt, and is not complicit with the bòkò that controls life in Bois-Neuf even in its brief appearance as a chaotic mob, Gérard Etienne reinterprets the traditional image of the Haitian zombie as a non-violent victim. Published in Montreal in 1974 (the year before Dézafi was published in Port-au-Prince), Crucified in Haiti uses the zombie horde to represent Haitian society under Duvalier in a very different way than Frankétienne does in Les Affres. In Les Affres, the zombies remain submissive and nonthreatening until they are revived and turn on their former master; in contrast, the hordes in Etienne’s novel protect and fight for the dictatorial “Chief” (“Chef”). These violent mobs are often associated with the President’s militias at the discursive level, replicating the obedience of the zombie to its master but not its typical passivity. Even more strikingly, the zombified armies in Crucified in Haiti ultimately become conflated with the revolutionary masses that oppose them, in a manner suggesting the inescapability of totalitarianism. Gérard Etienne’s zombies serve as an ambivalent allegory for authoritarianism in a number of ways. First, the novel’s unnamed narrator, a Christic figure tortured by members of the President’s militia, describes his tormentors in ways that evoke both zonbi kò kadav and spirit zombies or zonbi astral (Ackermann & Gauthier 482). While the corporeal zombie is typically passive, the spirit zonbi is often used to exact revenge. Similarly, the zombies in Crucified in Haiti are henchmen for the President, and are thus both his victims and victimizers of

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the Haitians whom they terrorize. Because of this ferocity and their widespread proliferation, these zombies also parallel in a striking way the internecine conflicts allegorized by the zombies in films such as Night of the Living Dead. Indeed, Etienne’s zombies are opposed to a revolutionary mass created by the narrator’s double, whom he calls “my character” (“mon personnage”). As I will show in this section, the two groups are equated with one another at the discursive level in the novel’s climactic battle. Etienne’s zombie horde, though not anthropophagic like Romero’s zombies, similarly allegorizes a nation at war with itself. The apparent viciousness of the zombies in Crucified in Haiti can be explained in part by understanding them as versions of the spirit zombie, rather than as bodily zonbi kò kadav. Elizabeth McAlister describes zonbi as “spirits of the recently dead who are captured and thence owned by a ‘master’ and obliged to work” (102). These zombies are gwo bon anj taken from the grave—the portion of the soul containing personality that remains near the body of the newly deceased (although sometimes they are defined as ti bon anj). These zonbi also function as a counterpart to the bodily zombie because the gwo bon anj is removed from living individuals in order to create kò kadav. McAlister describes the kò kadav as “a less frequent (and criminal) practice of poisoning people to induce a lowered metabolic rate so that they appear dead, and then reviving them after they are buried in order to force them into physical labor” (103). While the zombie described here—the corporeal zonbi kò kadav—is typically represented as nonviolent unless fed salt, the same is not true of the spirit zombie, which is often associated with more violent tasks. In “The Ways and Nature of the Zombi,” Hans Ackermann and Jeanine Gauthier note that, according to their review of anthropological literature, “a spirit zombi may be dispatched to kill, to inflict disease on people or livestock, or to destroy harvests” through an “expédition—black magic at its worst” (483). In Crucified in Haiti, the zombie hordes echo both descriptions of the spirit zombie and of the corporeal zombie. In the culminating battle between the zombies and revolutionaries, the narrator’s description evokes both avatars simultaneously: “It’s a battle between the living-dead and the zombis. People are being hit with the butts of rifles. He can’t see who is doing the hitting. These zombis really are the dead that the President has brought back to life. He alone can see them and talk to them” (137).45 45 “Une bataille entre morts vivants et zombis. On reçoit des coups de crosse de fusil. On ne voit pas ceux qui les donnent. Ces zombis sont vraiment des morts

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The zombies are described here as invisible to all but the President, suggesting what McAlister calls “the invisible enslaving of the community’s recently dead [the spirit zonbi]” (87). Yet the idea that they are “truly members of the dead that the President brings back to life” evokes, on the contrary, the revival typically associated with the bodily kò kadav. This is indicative of the broad ambiguity that defines the zombie in Crucified in Haiti. Unlike Frankétienne, who used the zombie horde to allegorize dictatorship while writing from within Haiti, Gérard Etienne wrote Crucified in Haiti in Quebec, where he lived in exile after fleeing persecution by François Duvalier in 1964. Etienne was tortured both by Papa Doc’s regime and by that of an earlier despotic Haitian president, Paul Magloire, who had him arrested alongside Windsor Laferrière (Dany Laferrière’s father) during an insurrection in the early 1950s. This political violence forms the backdrop for Crucified in Haiti, which is a more explicit critique of Duvalier than the open-ended Les Affres d’un défi.46 The narrator is the eponymous nègre crucifié, tortured by the President’s henchmen and rendered a social pariah. This physical violence is reflected at the narrative level through the presence of a character referred to by the narrator as “my character”—an apparent double for the narrator or a narrative avatar of his traumatized, split consciousness. The threat of torture and death at the hands of the zombified masses terrorizing Port-au-Prince (which often appear alongside references to “militiamen” (“miliciens”)) hangs menacingly over the narrator and his double throughout the work. This is especially true as “my character” leads his own faction against the zombie army, culminating in the final battle between those resisting and those complicit with the forces of the status quo. The zombified masses in this context seem a clear reflection of the tonton makout, the paramilitary group with which Duvalier replaced the national army after a failed coup attempt against the dictator in 1958, and which is believed to have killed tens of thousands of Haitians and tortured and raped many more. By associating the zombie horde with the makout, Gérard Etienne transforms the ultimate symbol que le Président fait revenir à vie. Lui seul peut les voir et leur parler” (119). All quotations in English come from the translation by Claudia Harry. 46 Gérard Etienne proclaimed in an interview: “my ambition (if you will forgive the expression) is to fix in time and space, to preserve, the hideous, disgusting, barbarous face of the Duvalierist system. I want each one of my novels to be an important part of our collective memory” (Etienne, “Interview” 500).

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of the oppressed and enslaved into a figure that enacts the will of an oppressive government. Zombies abound in Etienne’s novel, often described using hyperbolic numbers and terms that suggest their all-encompassing function in Haitian society. In addition to referring to the “[t]wenty thousand zombis” (136) surrounding the president in the climactic battle scene, the narrator suggests the zombies are everywhere in Port-au-Prince and have infiltrated all levels of society: “The rain is making new zombies grow. You can see them emerging from the crannies of the city. They are hungry. Everybody is there among these zombis: fathers of families, whores. Girls from good families who have to sleep with soldiers for their parents to be released” (105).47 Here, the zombies sprout like mushrooms, suggesting their nearly spontaneous creation.48 They are, strikingly, not the same as the zombies that are described as protecting the president, but rather are individuals transformed by the effects of authoritarian rule (such as the young women prostituting themselves to help their parents). Highlighting the diversity of social groups, they include both fathers and sex workers. “I’m surrounded by a world of zombis” (90), the narrator states at one point, suggesting the pervasiveness of the living dead but also his distinction from them.49 Etienne’s zombies are simultaneously complicit with the political leaders that created them and endowed with their own desire for violence, indicating a transformation of the zombie’s typical passivity and lack of volition. Although at times the term “zombi” in Crucified in Haiti seems to function as an allegory for Haitians under the regime or as a metaphor for the tonton makout, the narrator insists on their living dead status when he maintains: “The zombies really are the dead that the President has brought back to life” (137).50 This phrasing indicates that the president is the bòkò, or master of the zombies, with the sole ability to see and communicate with them. The zombie horde’s complicity with the dictatorial power is clearly emphasized: “The Chief is afraid. It so 47 “Vingt mille zombis”; “La pluie fait pousser de nouveaux zombis. On en voit qui sortent des trous et des recoins de la ville. Ils ont faim. Parmi ces zombis, tout le monde est là: pères de famille, bouzins. Des filles de bonne famille qui doivent coucher avec des miliciens pour qu’ils mettent leurs parents en liberté” (90). 48 This anticipates films and video games including The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) and The Last of Us (2013), in which zombitude is created by a fungus. 49 “C’est un monde de zombis autour de moi” (77). 50 “Ces zombis sont vraiment des morts que le Président fait revenir à la vie. Lui seul peut les voir et leur parler” (119).

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happens that the President of Corilla has just been executed for crimes against the Country. This increases the Chief’s fear two-fold. Twenty thousand zombies are surrounding him. Even if a bullet were fired, it couldn’t reach him. The zombies are there to eat bullets” (136).51 Here, the zombies’ massive numbers result from the President’s fear of losing power; the hyperbolic description emphasizes how they act as an invisible forcefield of sorts between their master and the revolutionary masses that threaten his authority. However, while the President “sends his zombies after the consumptive crowd that is rebelling” (137), at other moments their violent oppression comes from within: “Each of the Chief’s zombis wants a prisoner to kill. The Chief’s zombies know that there is a barrier between nègres and men” (105).52 This description infuses the living dead with a drive and bloodlust atypical of the Haitian corporeal zombie. By extension, it suggests that the zombie horde’s obedience to the President is also motivated by the living dead figures’ own urge to kill. These zombies are thus agents of violence in their own right within the totalitarian political allegory of Crucified in Haiti, seeking to spread their necrotic ontological state to the rest of Haitian society. In this way, Gérard Etienne’s zombies are much closer to the “ghouls” of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead than are most other representations of the Haitian zonbi kò kadav. Before Night, the zombie was almost exclusively a passive victim forced to the social margins. Some early zombie films do show threatening zombies—for example, near the end of White Zombie, Murder Legendre sets his undead henchmen on the heroic Neil, whose bullets do nothing to impede their approach. Yet none is so voracious and pervasive as the reanimated corpses shuffling through Romero’s film as they search for living human bodies to attack and consume. Because these zombies could spread their ontological state through a single bite, films featuring this new avatar of the living dead have emphasized the dichotomy between “us” (humans) and “them” (zombies) through the horde trope.53 While the Haitian zombie 51 “Le Chef a peur. Justement, on vient d’exécuter le Président de la Corilla. Pour des crimes envers la Patrie. Ceci redouble la peur du Chef. Vingt mille zombis l’entourent. Même si on tire une balle, elle ne peut pas l’atteindre. Les zombis sont là pour manger la balle” (119). 52 “lance ses zombis à la poursuite de cette foule de poitrinaires en rébellion” (119); “Chaque zombi du Chef demande un prisonnier à tuer. Les zombis du Chef savent qu’il y a une barrière entre le nègre et l’homme” (90). 53 See Glover, “‘Flesh like One’s Own’” 237.

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also represents a form of social marginality, it is not as widespread, inescapable, and fundamentally menacing as the zombies in films like Night, which threaten to consume human society (both literally and figuratively). In other words, Romero transformed the zombie into a figure of internecine conflict, rather than colonization, using an approach that did not play a significant and explicit role in the Haitian zombie imaginary—until, that is, its emergence in Duvalier-era fiction. Indeed, Crucified in Haiti reflects this fear that non-zombified humans will be overtaken by the living dead. Through a lexicon of death, Etienne establishes a parallel between the President’s zombie army and the groups resisting it. “My character” believes that raising his own army of the dead will allow him to effectively combat the President: “If one single person could cry out the injustice of it all, it would be easy for him to get weapons and create dead people that he would set against the President’s zombis” (105).54 This suggests that in fighting the President’s power, “my character” will come to resemble his oppressor. Indeed, the opposition between the two groups ultimately culminates in the “battle between the living-dead and the zombis” (137) at the novel’s climax.55 The opposition is paradoxical: in French the ontological classification “mort vivant” or “living dead” is often used as a synonym to refer to zombies (although it is also used for vampires and other reanimated creatures). These synonymous terms suggest, once again, the conflation of the two opposing factions. The vision of a nation at war with itself is also echoed in the narrator’s description of his relationship to “my character”: “We are now two. We tear each other apart. We are at war. No winners, no losers. Ever. We assemble our equipment. We occupy two camps. We fight as we run” (110).56 This internal struggle reflects the societal self-destruction allegorized by the “battle between the living-dead and the zombis” at the heart of Etienne’s novel. It suggests a way in which authoritarianism—allegorized by the zombie horde— consumes the entire nation, including the opposition to dictatorial rule. Despite the similarities between Etienne’s zombie horde and that found in films such as Night, Crucified in Haiti is based in a distinctly Haitian 54 “Si un seul pouvait crier à l’injustice, il serait facile pour lui de se procurer des armes, de faire aussi des morts qu’il opposerait aux zombis du Président” (90). 55 “bataille entre morts vivants et zombis” (119). 56 “On se déchire. On se fait la guerre. Il n’y a jamais de gagnant, ni de perdant. Nous assemblons nos matériaux. Nous occupons deux camps. Nous nous bataillons, en courant” (96).

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socio-political context, using ideas about the zombie that originated in the Caribbean to critique the authoritarian Duvalier dictatorship. However, it is significant that the zombie horde emerged in both the US cinematic and the Haitian literary spheres at roughly contemporaneous moments. It is possible that Frankétienne and Gérard Etienne were directly or indirectly aware of the new zombie avatar unleashed after Night, but it is more illuminating to recognize that these works share a political context: not only the national upheavals and uprisings of the 1960s (including the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests in the United States and anti-Duvalier movements such as the one that led to the Jérémie Vespers massacre in 1964 in Haiti), but also Cold War divisions between East and West. Indeed, the Cold War context has been linked to the arrival of the zombie horde on movie screens in the United States soon after reports emerged from the Korean War about “human waves”—massive if poorly trained armies that overwhelmed American troops (Luckhurst 119). In the US cinematic imaginary, the idea that friends and loved ones become so wholly unrecognizable that they want to kill us also reflected the anxieties of the Red Scare. For Haitian writers, Cold War politics seem to have had a similar effect on the representation of the zombie, leading authors to represent large hordes of the living dead, but for different reasons. To prevent the spread of communism, the US government supported the Duvalier regime, and specifically did not intervene in the violent reign of the tonton makout as they terrorized the Haitian populace with acts of torture and murder, both publicly and privately. In this way, Cold War politics affected the national political scene in Haiti in ways that led authors like Frankétienne and Gérard Etienne to use the zombie horde as a representation of intra-national factions. The zombie horde may therefore be interpreted as having emerged transnationally as an avatar representing Cold War politics, its ensuing narrative proliferation evidence of its compelling ability to translate and critique both autocratic rule and the national and international political divisions that marked the period. In Haiti, as in the United States, the zombie horde has continued to evolve, even as it remains an allegory of despotism and political divisiveness for Haitian writers dealing with the aftermath of the Duvalier regime. As the first two sections of this chapter have demonstrated, while both Frankétienne and Gérard Etienne use the zombie horde to represent and critique authoritarian rule, Crucified in Haiti presents a vision of the zombie horde that is very different from the one found in Les Affres d’un

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défi. Whereas the horde in Les Affres is initially passive and seemingly unable to rise up, the revitalizing power of salt awakens the former zombies and allows them to build a collective consciousness that fuels their uprising against the bòkò Saintil. In contrast, the living dead army of the President in Crucified in Haiti possesses its own drive to commit violent acts, which fuels its complicity with the totalitarian regime. It eventually subsumes the opposition to the President, suggesting an outcome that is very different from that of the triumphant multitude in Frankétienne’s novel. If these works offer distinct visions of the zombie horde, they both use this avatar of the living dead—its collective form— as a way of representing and reimagining the socio-political realities of Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship. The idea of Haiti as a nation of zombies subsequently spread beyond the pages of these novels, and beyond the scope of the Duvalier regime. Indeed, in Dany Laferrière’s Down Among the Dead Men, which is set during the reinstatement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency in the early 1990s, the zombie horde proliferates not as a literal multiplying of revived bodies, but rather as an exponential increase in narratives about Haiti as a land of the living dead. And yet, through this very expansion and the divergent uses of the zombie horde to represent social upheavals, Laferrière points towards a limit in the trope’s allegorical function. Seeking the Horde: Dany Laferrière’s Down Among the Dead Men (1996) Roughly twenty years after Frankétienne and Gérard Etienne used the zombie horde as a symbol for political factions under the Duvalier regime, Dany Laferrière revived the trope of the zombie horde in Down Among the Dead Men (Pays sans chapeau, 1996), which is part of his auto-fictional “Autobiographie américaine.” Laferrière used this avatar of the zombie to critique a new socio-political context: the period following Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s first presidency. After Aristide was elected in 1991, his presidency was quickly interrupted by a coup-d’état; he was reinstated by US military forces in 1994 as part of ‘Operation Uphold Democracy,’ which was led by Bill Clinton under the aegis of the United Nations. This military presence is felt in Down Among the Dead Men in ways that echo the US occupation from 1915 to 1934, which was when the zombie arguably first became an allegory for Haiti as a “zombie nation” (see Chapter 2). This section asks what it means

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for literature to represent popular uprisings in a post-Duvalier era—that is to say, after the imagined revolution was finally realized, bringing the end of the totalitarian regime, only to lead to a second US occupation and a coup against a democratically elected president. To answer this question, this section examines how Laferrière reimagines the zombie horde avatar as it is represented in Frankétienne and Gérard Etienne’s novels. The zombie horde in Laferrière’s novel echoes both of these intertexts. Whereas the zombies in Les Affres and Crucified in Haiti are represented as undeniably “real” at the level of plot, they never materialize for the narrator of Down Among the Dead Men, Vieux Os, who, like Laferrière, has returned to Haiti after twenty years in exile. Rather, the zombie hordes appear as a narrative proliferation, as one zombie tale spawns several others. Vieux Os initially “encounters” the multitudes when his frightened mother gives a hyperbolic account of a zombie army terrorizing the country. When he seeks clarification of the zombie army from an expert—the ethnography professor J. B. Romain—he finds another story, this time of a zombie revolt. The hordes in Laferrière’s novel thus function as literary vehicles for stories of both social stasis and resistance (recalling Crucified in Haiti and Les Affres, respectively). Ultimately, I argue that this overdetermination of the zombie horde avatar, coupled with the fact that zombies exist only discursively in Down Among the Dead Men, reveals Laferrière’s meta-narrative critique of the trope—that by force of repetition, it has lost its power to create new national narratives of Haiti. Down Among the Dead Men’s numerous intertextual references— which often veer towards the satirical—fit with Laferrière’s “relentless debunking of Haitian literary tradition” (Munro, “Master of the New” 177). In fact, Laferrière’s work has been widely examined by scholars because of its relationship to a novel published nearly fifty years earlier, Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew (1944). J. Michael Dash and Martin Munro have explored Down Among the Dead Men’s parodic references to Roumain’s canonical novel in order to reconsider the significance of the Indigenist movement, the idea of Haitian exceptionalism, and the preponderant place of Masters of the Dew in Haitian letters. The intertext between Down Among the Dead Men and Masters illuminates Laferrière’s critique of the literary canon and of Western representations of Haitian culture. In contrast, the intertextual relationship between Down Among the Dead Men, Les Affres d’un défi, and Crucified in Haiti has received little attention and speaks to a different set of questions. To be precise,

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studying these works in tandem reveals how Laferrière comments on earlier narratives that allegorize social upheaval through the zombie horde trope. While the canonical texts of Roumain and Frankétienne “perform revolutions,” as Rachel Douglas puts it, proffering solutions to Haiti’s struggles (“Haitian Revolutions”),57 Laferrière both refuses any prescriptive message and demystifies the literary topos of the zombie horde. After all, by the time Laferrière reimagined the zombie’s significance, it had already been appropriated by US popular culture and transformed by Haitian literature into a vehicle for critiquing the Duvalier regime. Down Among the Dead Men begins as its narrator, Vieux Os, returns to Haiti after twenty years in exile from Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s regime (following his father’s exile during the regime of Papa Doc). While many of the narrator’s observations about this return are distinctly quotidian (drinking coffee in honor of his grandmother, writing under a mango tree), his mother, Marie, describes a much greater transformation. After he expresses interest in a story she tells a neighbor about seeing a bizango (a secret society member), she tells him, “You know, Old Bones, the country has changed” (40).58 Among these frightening changes is the emergence of an immense “zombie army” counting “tens of thousands” among its ranks (42).59 She describes the army in expansive terms: “The voodoo priests have scoured the country from north to south, east to west. They dug up every cemetery in this country. They woke the dead who were resting in peace. Everywhere!” (42).60 The repetition of the word “every” (or, in the original French, of “tout”—“tous les cimetières,” “tous les morts,” “partout”)—indicates the hyperbolic nature of the mother’s description. She further emphasizes the national scope of this peril with “her fingers branched out in every direction” (42) and listing the places where those responsible have gone looking for corpses: “In Le Borgne, in Port-Margot, Dondon, Jérémie, Cayes, Limonade, Petit-Trou, Baradères, Jean-Rabel, Petit-Goâve, yes, 57 I use Douglas’s expression loosely, as her article focuses on formal innovations. Yet her introduction hints at the thematic revolutions that I am concerned with here, which inevitably echo the major Revolution in Haiti’s past. 58 “Tu sais, Vieux Os, ce pays a changé” (47). All quotations in English come from David Homel’s translation. 59 “armée de zombis”; “des dizaines de milliers” (49). 60 “Les prêtres vaudous ont ratissé le pays du nord au sud, de l’est à l’ouest. Ils ont ratissé tous les cimetières du pays. Ils ont réveillé tous les morts qui dormaient du sommeil du juste. Partout” (49).

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even in Petit-Goâve […] They went to the northern mountains, all the way to Pic Brigand to bring back the dead” (42).61 This accumulation adds to the effect of exaggeration in her story. Indeed, her description appears highly performative. “She gave me a penetrating look and tried to gauge the effect of her words,” Vieux Os states, adding, “I must have looked captivated; she went on with her story, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth” (42).62 Although the narrator’s mother describes the zombies as appearing “everywhere,” he does not encounter any “real” zombies in the novel (even during his trip to the pays sans chapeau—the country without a hat, or afterlife).63 In fact, despite the narrative proliferation of the living dead (both in the mother’s story and in subsequent iterations discovered by Vieux Os), the horde remains, at the level of plot, within the exaggerated realm of the mother’s imagination. In the mother’s stories, these vast armies represent forces for maintaining socio-political stasis, reflecting the hordes of Gérard Etienne more than those of Frankétienne. However, they differ from both of these literary predecessors in that they protect the status quo from international intervention rather than internal factions, thereby reflecting the Aristide context rather than that of the Duvalier dictatorship. The narrator states, “I remember the zombie army that the old president threatened to use against the Americans if they ever dared set foot on Haitian soil” (54).64 Here, the zombie army seems to be coterminous with the national borders surrounding Haiti. Yet the narrator finds an inconsistency in his mother’s story as it relates to the realties reported in the press: “But where was that army when the Americans landed?” (54). 61 “en pointant ses doigts dans toutes les directions”; “Au Borgne, à Port-Margot, Dondon, Jérémie, Cayes, Limonade, Petit-Trou, Baradères, Jean-Rabel, Petit-Goâve, oui, Petit-Goâve aussi […] Ils sont même allés chercher des morts jusqu’au pic Brigand dans le massif du nord’” (49). 62 “Elle me jette de vifs regards pour tenter de voir l’effet de ses paroles sur moi,” “Je dois avoir l’air fasciné puisqu’elle poursuit avec un léger sourire au coin des lèvres” (49). 63 The zombies’ ephemeral nature in Down Among the Dead Men is further emphasized through the mother’s statement that “Zombies have no reflection” (54) (“Les zombis n’ont pas de reflet” (66)). However, Vieux Os dismisses this as “completely false, since zombies are neither ghosts nor spirits” (55) (“tout à fait faux […] puisqu’un zombi n’est ni un fantôme ni un revenant” (66)). 64 “Je me souviens de cette armée de zombis que le vieux Président avait menacé de lancer contre les Américains s’ils osaient mettre un seul pied sur le sol d’Haïti” (64).

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His mother explains, “They were there. […] They were awaiting their orders. But in the end, the old president signed an agreement with the young American leader. The American army would occupy the country during the day. The zombie army would have domain over the night” (54).65 The zombie army plays a new role in this narrative of international relations. Although the dead militia is described as maintaining the political power of a president within Haiti, it also maintains partial sovereignty for the Haitian state, even as the country is occupied by US forces for the second time in a century. While the story of the zombie army is sensational, it is based in a political reality. Indeed, the narrator describes his memory of the event as it was portrayed in the news media: “I was in Miami at the time, and The Miami Herald reported what the old president had said” (54).66 This reference indicates the circulation of this story within discourses of the “real.” It echoes threats made by Emile Jonassaint—who was president of Haiti following the ousting of Aristide in 1991—against US pressure to allow Aristide to return to serve the remainder of his presidential term. As Lauro notes, at the time articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Miami Herald detailed threats that Haiti would counter the US armed forces with legions of zombies, and even transform the invaders using a zombifying powder (135). The titles of these articles, evoking “Voodoo” and “battalions of zombies,” illustrate the ways even respected newspapers in the United States represent Haiti: as a land of black magic and superstition. Yet, where the imagined threat of Haiti’s savagery to the United States was emblematized by a singular White Zombie during the first occupation, in Down Among the Dead Men it is mockingly portrayed as the superstitious belief that large groups of zombies will protect the nation from one of the world’s largest armies (something that recalls the avenging zombies discussed in Chapter 1). Laferrière’s representation of the zombie horde in Down Among the Dead Men is an indication that even sixty years after the end of the first US occupation of Haiti, these stories continued to circulate both within Haiti and in the international (especially US) popular 65 “Où était donc cette armée quand les Américains ont débarqué?”; “Elle était là […] Elle a attendu les ordres. Finalement, le vieux Président a conclu un pacte avec le jeune Président américain. L’armée américaine occupera le pays durant le jour. L’armée des zombis l’aura la nuit à sa disposition” (64). 66 “J’étais à Miami, à l’époque, et le Miami Herald avait rapporté les paroles du vieux Président” (64).

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imaginaries. Moreover, far from simply populating the literary and popular imaginaries, they have also bled into political, militaristic, and journalistic discourses on Haiti. In Down Among the Dead Men, the zombie horde not only circulates in different kinds of discourse, but also takes on divergent forms. While the narrator’s mother describes a zombie horde that reflects narratives of political stasis, after Vieux Os searches for more information about the sensational story, the horde in Down Among the Dead Men becomes emblematic of revolt. In his quest for more authoritative answers, Vieux Os meets with the Haitian ethnography professor J. B. Romain—an allusion to the anthropologist Jean-Baptiste Romain.67 The intellectual describes a “minor peasant uprising” (62) against a rich landowner in northwestern Haiti with a monopoly on the region’s water supply.68 In response, Romain explains, the landowner “Désira Désilus orders a half-dozen policemen from the Port-de-Paix barracks to nip the rebellion in the bud, as they say” (63).69 This allusion to Roumain’s Masters, which Munro explains in detail (182), is combined by Laferrière with tales of zombie revolt in a sort of literary mash-up. When the soldiers ask the peasants to leave, “The peasants refuse and take out their machetes. The soldiers open fire on them: one volley, two volleys, then a third. The peasants continue advancing” (63).70 This passage evokes iconic images of the zombie marching through gunfire that by the 1990s would have been recognizable to those familiar with either the Haitian zombie or the post-Romero zombie. After Romain explains that a soldier recognized one of the peasants, who had died years earlier—“So he was a zombi,” Vieux Os notes (63)—the narrator argues that zombies are not new in Haiti.71 Romain counters, “But it’s the first time a zombie rebellion has occurred. Normally, a zombie has no will. He can’t even hold his head up. His job is to obey” (63).72 This zombie revolt calls to mind Les 67 Izzo writes that “Jean-Baptiste Romain (1914–94) was a physical anthropologist and former head of Haiti’s Faculté d’Ethnologie” (Experiments 129). 68 “petite révolte paysanne” (73). 69 “Désira Désilus fait venir une demi-douzaine de gendarmes des casernes de Port-de-Paix pour mater la révolte dans l’œuf comme on dit” (73). 70 “Ceux-ci refusent, sortent leurs machettes. Alors les soldats font feu, à hauteur d’homme. Une fois, deux fois, trois fois. Les paysans continuent de marcher sur eux” (73). 71 “Donc, un zombi” (74). 72 “Oui, mais c’est la première fois qu’on assiste à une révolte de zombis […]

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Affres even as it differs from Frankétienne’s account in that the peasant masses are simultaneously zombified (rather than “new-wood”) and in revolt. Romain and Vieux Os’s insistence on the newness of the anecdote underscores that its interest lies in its narrative qualities. In fact, when Vieux Os asks what it means, Romain evades his question, stating, “That’s a state secret” (64).73 Vieux Os is sent by Romain to interview the psychiatrist Legrand Bijou, and the truth behind the story of the zombie revolt remains hidden. Like the story of the zombie army, the zombie revolt appears solely at the discursive level of Down Among the Dead Men, never materializing at the level of plot. When Vieux Os looks for more information about the zombie army described by his mother as a force for maintaining the political status quo, he instead discovers a very different kind of narrative, one in which the zombie horde revolts against a dominant power. In this way, the zombie hordes in Down Among the Dead Men alternately reflect the living dead forces in Les Affres and Crucified in Haiti. That is to say, they function both to represent the ability of those in power to assemble multitudes in their control and to represent the people’s ability to rise up collectively against existing socio-political forces. Yet the myriad zombie horde narratives, which deploy the horde in divergent directions, do not contribute to the narrator’s understanding. Rather, whenever Vieux Os seeks the political and social meaning behind the zombie hordes, he encounters a new narrative iteration in lieu of an explanation. Ultimately, this profusion of zombie tales obscures, rather than elucidates, the narrator’s comprehension of Haitian socio-political realities. In this way, Laferrière points towards the limits of the zombie horde for representing and interpreting the “real.” Indeed, by the time Laferrière wrote his parodic treatment of the zombie horde, the trope had circulated both within the Haitian literary sphere and on movie screens worldwide, where it was transformed yet again by Romero and others into an allegory for new societal ills, from consumerism to the military–industrial complex.74 To be sure, the zombie horde trope proved “highly exploitable as a literary device” (Glover, “Exploiting the Undead” 107) for writers during the Duvalier era, giving Généralement, le zombi n’a aucune volonté. Il n’arrive même pas à tenir sa tête droite. Il ne fait qu’obéir” (74). 73 “C’est un secret d’état” (75). 74 See Dendle, “The Zombie as Barometer of Cultural Anxiety” and Shaviro, The Cinematic Body.

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authors like Frankétienne and Gérard Etienne ways to imagine resistance while writing from within Haiti under the dictatorship or to critique the all-encompassing nature of totalitarianism. Moreover, these authors did so by reimagining this figure rooted in Caribbean narratives of resistance to hegemonic power. Yet by the mid-1990s, the political context in Haiti had changed, as had the zombie itself. First, the hope of the post-Duvalier period—following Jean-Claude Duvalier’s departure in 1986—was tempered by Aristide’s first presidency and the coup against him, which also led to the 1994 US occupation of Haiti (events that inevitably called to mind the first US occupation). The triumphant narrative envisioned through the revival and coalition of the former zombies at the end of Les Affres is thus confronted with the challenges of the post-dictatorship period in Haiti, including the difficulty of finding a presidential figure capable of building widespread consensus and the toppling of the elected official by the remaining Duvalierist figures. Moreover, by the time Laferrière wrote Down Among the Dead Men, the zombie had been irrevocably altered, the one-time symbol of Haitianness in US popular culture (during the US occupation of 1915–1934) fully appropriated and transformed by Western narratives.75 Whereas Frankétienne and Gérard Etienne’s zombie hordes emerged in Haitian literature at roughly the same time as Night, by the time Laferrière published Down Among the Dead Men, hordes of Romero-style zombies had overtaken the global zombie narrative. The zombie horde narrative had, by 1996, been used to reflect numerous conflicting and varied national narratives outside Haiti, the zombie legend losing its Caribbean specificity as it came to represent such US contexts as suburban normativity and the military– industrial complex, among many others. While this kind of cultural appropriation is particularly evocative in the case of a monster born in the context of the theft of human lives, it also indicates that social and political zombification is far from solely within the purview of Haiti, despite the narratives of Haitian exceptionalism that reemerged with a vengeance following the 2010 earthquake.76 But this appropriation of the zombie on the US and global stages has 75 The finance company behind White Zombie tried to sue a competitor for copyright infringement on the term “zombie.” Fay writes: “Claiming to have invented the zombie (or having helped to finance the film that invented it), and thus to have legal ownership of the concept, this company performs a reenslavement of this Haitian figure within the logic of intellectual property” (84). 76 See Clitandre.

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another ramification: if Steven Shaviro writes that Romero’s zombies are “unmoored from meaning” (84), so too has the Haitian zombie become unmoored from its original meaning in Down Among the Dead Men. While Frankétienne and Gérard Etienne’s zombies are sufficiently rooted in the political real to allude implicitly to connections between the colonial past and postcolonial dictatorship (colonial enslavement echoed in the power of totalitarianism), the referents in Down Among the Dead Men are a heterogeneous collection of literary and popular narratives allegorizing political realities. Their recombination and metanarrative function preclude any clear or singular meaning pertaining to the sociopolitical “real.” In this way, Laferrière implies a limit to the zombie horde’s ability to represent and interrogate national narratives of Haiti, suggesting that these zombies are now merely recycling narratives of hope as well as of hegemonic control. Whereas in Chapter 2 I discussed the zombie as a representation of the alienation of the individual through colonial and imperial control (such as the first US occupation of Haiti), in the hands of Haitian writers the zombie horde is a vehicle for considering the formation of national political factions and the means of developing a collective consciousness leading to social change. If the novels studied in this chapter critique the Duvalier dictatorship—an authoritarian power coming from within the nation—they are also concerned with the relationship of this form of political power to international imperialist forces, and particularly with the role of the United States in maintaining the authoritarian regime as a bulwark against the spread of communism. This interest in the power of the collective or of the masses thus offers a way of reflecting on the socio-political realities in late twentieth-century Haiti, even as it participates in broader metamorphoses of the zombie, such as its massive proliferation at the level of plot in US cinema in and following George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Indeed, films featuring this violent cousin of the Haitian zombie began to snowball, with “the zombie [reaching] a saturation point” in the early twenty-first century (Luckhurst 167). Titles such as World War Z (Max Brooks’s 2006 zombie horror fiction adapted to the silver screen in 2013) and All of Us Are Dead (the 2022 Netflix series produced in South Korea) indicate just how widespread this proliferation has become at the diegetic level, as concerns related to globalization and contagion (or the more granular question of bullying in the case of All of Us) are allegorized by ever-growing waves of the living dead.

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In Chapter 4, on the popular zombie, the focus shifts to the representation of these masses by a singular zombie figure. This shift reflects a transition in the Haitian political sphere from the return of Aristide to the post-Aristide quest for an enduring and truly participatory democracy— against the backdrop of newly globalized political interventions (such as that of the UN peacekeeping forces in Haiti). These zombie figures become popular icons and thus move to the center of the national political narrative—immolating themselves for Haiti’s sins, protecting the Haitian cultural patrimony, and even running for president. Yet, much as Laferrière suggests a limit to the zombie’s semantic potential as a national allegory, Gary Victor, whose works I discuss in Chapter 4, warns of the danger of electing a zombie to represent the Haitian people.

chapter four

The Popular Zombie The Popular Zombie

The first three chapters in this book have studied zombies that exist primarily on the socio-political limits. Whether enslaved, presumed mentally ill, or opposed to an autocratic dictator, they reflect but also interrogate the marginality and powerlessness that have defined the Haitian zombie since its inception in colonial-era Caribbean beliefs. These living dead are subject to the power of colonial and imperial forces or to the internal rule of authoritarian dictators, even if they attempt to elude or overthrow their physical, psychological, or social control. In contrast, the zombie occupies a central and at times powerful role in the socio-political sphere in the works studied in this chapter. In the novel La Piste des sortilèges (1997) and the film Les Amours d’un zombi (2009), zombies become popular icons for the Haitian populace. In the two-part Revenant series (published in a collected book form in 2007 and 2009, respectively), the undead protagonist remains on the margins of society but gains superhuman strength that allows him to protect the masses. All three of these works—two novels and one film—were written by Gary Victor, who is regularly cited as the most popular writer in Haiti.1 Victor imbues the zombie, which is typically defined by a lack of willpower, with unprecedented agency and allows it to remain on the ontological margins between life and living death even as it gains social and political power. By extension, the author transforms the living dead’s relationship to the socio-political margins and the people inhabiting those margins, using the figure to critique Haiti’s struggles to achieve a more democratic society in the 1990s and 2000s and tying these contemporary events to historical inequities stemming from the contexts of colonization and enslavement in which the zombie figure originally emerged. 1 See, for instance, Cévaër, “Gary Victor” and N’Zengou-Tayo.

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Gary Victor’s works are widely recognized for drawing on popular narrative forms and genres from the Haitian literary tradition and popular imaginary as well as from global pop culture.2 In the works studied in this chapter alone, Victor alludes to conventions of the lodyans genre, which draws on oral folklore and emerged in serialized early twentieth-century Haitian literature, as well as to those of detective novels and martial arts films.3 This irreverent approach to writing likely contributes to his widespread appeal in Haiti. As Françoise Cévaër notes, “though [Victor] seeks to reject any attempt at restrictive writing through stories that defy classification; celebrate a plurality of genres, tones, and forms; and decompartmentalize cultures, he also revisits abandoned esthetic traditions and makes them palatable to modern readers” (“Gary Victor” 56–57). His zombie fictions also span forms—from the sprawling novel La Piste des sortilèges to the serialized fictions of Le Revenant, first published in installments in the newspaper Le Nouvelliste, and finally to his screenplay for the film Les Amours d’un zombi, a political satire directed by the Haitian filmmaker Arnold Antonin. If these works show a wide range of cultural influences, they are concerned in their political critique with a specific period in Haitian politics, beginning with Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return to the presidency in 1994 (also represented in Dany Laferrière’s Down Among the Dead Men) and running through the late 2000s. Because the Haitian constitution stipulates that presidents cannot serve consecutive terms, after the end of Aristide’s first mandate in 1996, René Préval was elected and served as president from 1996 until 2001. In 2001, Aristide was elected to a second term; he was once again removed from power before the end of his mandate, leaving the country “in circumstances that remain the subject of tremendous controversy” (Dubois, Haiti 364). Following this dramatic exit in 2004, United Nations MINUSTAH forces (the Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti) 2 In this way, they represent a fascinating contrast with the predominantly “highbrow” literature that has been the central focus of the previous three chapters. Victor offers an example of popular zombie narratives written by a Haitian author for a wide Haitian audience. 3 Chris Bongie’s meditations (“Exiles”) on the uneasy coexistence of the postcolonial and the popular—including the academy’s ignoring of writers such as Martinican Tony Delsham—offer an interesting point of comparison with the relatively recent interest in Gary Victor among scholars of French Caribbean literature.

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occupied Haiti for over a decade, and the elections for the next president were delayed repeatedly until 2006, when Préval was again declared the victor. By connecting these contemporary stops and starts in the democratic process to the zombie figure, Gary Victor associates the current political moment with longstanding struggles for equality and dominance that are rooted in the enduring economic and structural legacies of colonization and enslavement in Haiti. In this chapter, I will explore how the zombie represents the political subjugation of the Haitian masses, at the mercy of socio-political elites. However, I argue, Victor’s zombies serve as unexpected avengers for the politically marginalized majority, since they possess a unique volition usually absent in the Haitian kò kadav, or bodily living dead.4 In La Piste des sortilèges, set during Aristide’s first return to the presidency, the zombie becomes the “the Christ of the Trail” (the rhyming in French—“le Christ de la Piste”—adds a touch of humor)—a beloved man of the people who sacrifices himself to zombitude, in a critique of the Messianic discourse with which the priest-president painted himself. In the Revenant series, set after the second coup against Aristide during the UN occupation, the titular zombie remains in the shadows, yet he becomes the only one who can protect Haitians and the nation’s patrimony from the domestic and international groups vying for an object—the pierre de Damballah or Damballah stone—that grants absolute power. Finally, the film Les Amours d’un zombi presents a zombified character who does not challenge the power of the president or the presidency, but rather runs for president himself. The film satirizes both the idea of the puppet president beholden to the socio-economic elite and the difficulties facing presidential candidates who seek to win broad support in Haiti. In this way, Victor’s popular zombie reconfigures the living dead, shifting its marginalized socio-political position to the center of the national narrative. This shift of the zombie—which at its core is an emblem of the politically and socially excluded—represents the living dead figure’s surprisingly renewed usefulness as a symbol of the margins of Haitian society, specifically during this (post-Duvalier) period that allowed many to hope for a more fully inclusive democratic process in Haiti.

4 See Chera Kee on exceptions to the zombie’s typical lack of volition.

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La Piste des sortilèges (1997) In La Piste des sortilèges (“The Trail of Curses”), the would-be zombie character Persée Persifal is a man of the people and a “left-wing activist” (9) who holds “considerable influence over the region’s population.”5 His connection to the nation is so fundamental that, as one character states, “if this country has a soul, it must have some hidden connection to Persifal” (31).6 However, this considerable sway over the masses makes him a sacrificial figure. Persifal’s incorruptible and just nature leads his enemy to have him turned into a zombie and subsequently earns him the title “the Christ of the Trail”: it is said he will expiate the sins of his fellow citizens as he walks the path towards complete zombification.7 This language melds ideas about the zombie, fundamentally a concept from Vodou, with Christian beliefs. Through Persée Persifal’s representation as a Christic figure and the novel’s setting during the period immediately following Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s 1994 return to the presidency, the work establishes a parallel between La Piste’s protagonist and the real-life priest-president, who himself has been portrayed as a Messianic figure. The critique of this contemporary moment is tied to moments in Haitian history through Persée Persifal’s trip along the eponymous “trail of curses,” which winds through locations in the countryside from southern to northern Haiti. Persée Persifal’s friend Sonson Pipirit follows him along the Trail to save him from enslavement and living death, encountering figures from the colonial period through the present whose stories evoke the longstanding struggle for democratic political representation for the Haitian majority. These encounters offer a critique of popular and populist Haitian political leaders. In this way, the zombie figure that originally emerged as a critique of the colonial denial of full personhood to the enslaved is transformed into a narrative vehicle for representing the postcolonial status of moun andeyò—a term that originally referred to the rural, peasant classes that emerged from the enslaved African 5 “activiste de gauche”; “une influence considérable sur la population de la région” (17). All translations of La Piste into English are my own. 6 “Si ce pays a une âme, il ne saurait ne pas y avoir un lien secret entre elle et Persifal.” 7 “I am the amphora containing your crimes thrown in the tides of the Trail” (“Je suis l’amphore contenant vos crimes jetée dans les marées de la Piste” (181)), states Persée Persifal in one of his complaintes.

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majority after independence, and that has evolved to describe the marginalized Haitian masses.8 In addition to the Haitian zombie mythos, the Trail combines other religious and literary traditions. This is evident as Persifal travels through the Haitian countryside with the escort (convoyeur) who is transporting him to his new master near the border with the Dominican Republic. This voyage along the Trail evokes both the Via Dolorosa along which Jesus Christ walked to his crucifixion and the idea that zombies must be carried or forced to walk past their former homes after they have been disinterred.9 The Trail also serves as a sort of purgatory in which time has more or less stopped. Pipirit’s quest to deliver his friend from zombification leads to Dantesque encounters with figures who have committed crimes and are thus stuck on the purgatory of the Trail. In these interactions, Victor draws on the lodyans tradition, which was cemented as a Haitian literary genre in the daily paper Le Soir at the turn of the twentieth century.10 According to Georges Anglade, the lodyans was born “at the confluence of orality and literature” (12) and is “the most wide-spread literary mode, the most popular, also the oldest in its expression of the fiction of this remote people as it is expressed in its remote land” (12).11 The genre emphasizes storytelling and intercalated narrative.12 In La Piste, this influence is particularly evident at the numerous points when Sonson Pipirit must show that his friend Persée Persifal does not deserve to become a zombie by reciting a narrative proving his just nature.

8 Gina Ulysse writes that during the first US occupation, the “geographical split between urban and rural Haiti is best exemplified by the fact that ‘peasant’ and ‘moun andeyò’ (“people born on the outside”) were categories of citizenship used on birth certificates of those born outside the capital. Haitian ruler after ruler—including the brutal Duvalier dictatorships (1957–1986)—favored economic policies that benefited the elite” (55). 9 See, for instance, Hurston, Tell My Horse 183, and Frankétienne, Les Affres d’un défi 78–81. 10 Justin Lhérisson and Fernand Hibbert published their récits in the journal Le Soir between 1899–1908 (Anglade 11). Lhérisson’s incorporation of Haitian culture into the national literary imaginary is now seen as a precedent for Jean Price-Mars and the Indigenist movement in Haiti. 11 “au confluent de l’oralité et de la littérature”; “le mode littéraire le plus généralisé, le plus populaire, le plus ancien aussi dans l’expression du romanesque de ce peuple profond, tel qu’il s’exprime en son pays profond” (12). 12 From a formal standpoint, Yolaine Parisot notes that the basis of lodyans in orality privileges the use of frame narratives within the genre (9).

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It is primarily through connections to the “Christ of the Trail” that La Piste evokes Aristide.13 In fact, the priest-president is not mentioned directly, although the novel begins and ends with a frame narrative told by a US army officer in Haiti as part of the military forces reinstating Aristide to the presidency.14 Rather, Persée Persifal’s laments (complaintes) evoke Aristide’s Messianic discourse and reputation. Indeed, the former member of the Salesian order and proponent of liberation theology was often seen as a sort of Christic figure, at times drawing “an analogy between Jesus Christ and himself” in his writing (Dupuy 85). Before Aristide was elected president, while he served at St. Jean Bosco church, he played a significant role in the fight against the Duvalier regime, which led to the Saint-Jean Bosco massacre in September 1988 and other attempts on his life. His survival was seen “as evidence of divine protection” (Dubois 362) among his followers. While he initially resisted running for president in 1990, he “ultimately came to see his candidacy [for president] as a messianic [sic] mission” (Dupuy 85).15 This is evident in his 1992 autobiography Tout moun se moun: Tout homme est un homme. Although Aristide writes, “I’m not the Messiah,” he also states, “if I am a prophet, there are many other prophets beside me” (143).16 Aristide directly compares himself to Jesus Christ in a paragraph asserting, “Contrary to those who see in Jesus a divine being, I see in him a fully human being. He was so human that he was God” (144, qtd. Dupuy 85), and ending, “If the people muster

13 Martin Munro discusses Gary Victor’s trenchant critique of Aristide in another novel, A l’angle des rues parallèles (2000) in Tropical Apocalypse. 14 Cappelton’s name seems to echo that of William Caperton, the Admiral of the US Navy responsible for overseeing the troops that occupied Haiti in 1915. 15 For Dupuy, this Messianic mission held “the fundamental roots of [Aristide’s] undemocratic, paternalistic, and authoritarian political practice” (85). In contrast, Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment views Aristide as the victim of US imperialism. This distinction has led to significant polemics, as seen in the November 2009 issue of Small Axe, which features opposing reviews by Nick Nesbitt and Lionel Trouillot of Dupuy’s The Prophet and Power and Hallward’s book. Chris Bongie discusses the debate in his article “Universal Envy: Taking Sides in the Trouillot–Hallward Debate,” as does Martin Munro in “Whose and Which Haiti?” Munro notably contrasts Western intellectuals’ utopic vision of Aristide and his Lavalas party with the “the contradictory, paradoxical, complex Haiti that is addressed by Haitian intellectuals” (422). 16 “je ne suis pas le Messie”; “[s]i je suis un prophète, il y a beaucoup d’autres prophètes à mes côtés.”

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so much energy for their priest-candidate, it is because they see in him the human capable of playing a new political role and of progressing towards a land of justice, love and respect.”17 Not only does Aristide establish a parallel between himself and Jesus in this way, but his evocation of a “land of justice, love and respect” indicates his ability to bring about an almost utopic new socio-political reality in Haiti. Indeed, Martin Munro describes liberation theology as a “utopian discourse that has shaped recent Haitian history,” albeit “with apocalyptic results” (Tropical Apocalypse 80). The Messianic narratives associated with Aristide’s first election are echoed in Victor’s transformation of the zombie into a Christic figure. In La Piste des sortilèges, according to the legend of the Christ of the Trail, “One night, as it touches the skin of a living-dead man, the whip will transform into a serpent of flame and the Trail will be closed for all time. This Christ will erase the sins of all the condemned, and from each tear shed on the Trail a tree of hope will spring forth” (455).18 In addition to the apocalyptic language in this passage, which suggests an end of times (the erasing of sins, the end of the Trail, and the serpent of fire), here Victor amplifies and extends the parallels between Jesus Christ and the zombie, making the equivalence between these figures of resurrection into a more explicit part of the zombie mythos.19 This legend of the Messianic undead reimagines the idea, popularized by Wade Davis in Passage of Darkness, that zombification is a form of social sanction.20 Persée Persifal is described as one of the few just individuals left in Haiti, and the social exclusion of the zombie becomes tied to the sacrifice and sanctification of Christ. But where Aristide both denied and played with the idea that he is a sort of Messiah, Persée Persifal proclaims his connection with Jesus loudly, in the short laments he broadcasts at six of the seven 17 “Contrairement à ceux qui voient en Jésus un être divin, je discerne en lui un être pleinement humain. Il était tellement humain qu’il était Dieu”; “Si le peuple mobilise tant d’énergie pour son candidat-prêtre, c’est qu’il y distingue l’humain capable de jouer une nouvelle partition politique et d’avancer vers une terre de justice, d’amour et de respect” (144). 18 “Une nuit, sur la peau d’un mort-vivant, le fouet se transformera en serpent de feu et la Piste sera fermée à tout jamais. Ce Christ effacera les péchés de tous les condamnés, et de chacune de ses larmes sur la Piste jaillira un arbre d’espoir.” 19 For instance, Elizabeth McAlister writes that “For some Vodouists, the resurrection of Christ makes Jesus the first zonbi of all” (110). 20 As Lauro notes, this idea seems to have emerged during the Duvalier dictatorship (111).

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gates along the Trail: “I am the Christ of the Trail. At each station, I expiate the sins of my brothers” (256).21 Victor thus amplifies the idea of a self-sacrificing individual who will transform Haitian society. La Piste des sortilèges suggests, however, that this vision of the zombie Christ figure as redeemer is flawed. Lwa or spirit of the cemetery Bawon Samedi himself states: “Above all else, the Christ must not reach the end of the Trail. He understands nothing about this world. Without the Trail, the men on this earth would become beasts in broad daylight” (465).22 According to the Bawon, then, Haitian society will not change for the better if the Christ of the Trail reaches the end of the trail and manages to sacrifice himself; it will only become worse. In other words, the Christ of the Trail misunderstands his role and the function of his sacrifice. If Persée Persifal is an avatar of Aristide, this misunderstanding suggests that the priest-president mistakenly cast his presidency as capable of fundamentally transforming Haitian society while ignoring the realities of persistent barriers—like injustice and greed—to real democratic change. By extension, Victor critiques the problematic role of religious narratives in Haitian political reform, suggesting that while they may speak to democratic ideals, they do not represent a path to material change or effective socio-economic policy. Moreover, the reference to the unjust becoming “beasts in broad daylight” might be read as an allusion to the enduring role of the tonton makout in Haitian society after the end of the Duvalier regime, indicating that forgiving their past crimes will merely embolden them. This forgiving of those deserving of punishment might, in the context of Aristide’s first presidency, evoke the idea of “linkage”—that “genuinely democratic elections could not be held until the criminals of the Duvalierist regime had been brought to justice” (Dupuy 83). However, according to Dupuy, Aristide ultimately came to see the push to arrest these Duvalierists as “a trap,” and this belief came to represent one of his justifications for running for president after denying vehemently he would do so (83). Read in light of this political context, La Piste’s discussion of the unjust acting with impunity offers a critique of this failure of Aristide to seek justice for crimes committed by the tonton makout. 21 “Je suis le Christ de la Piste. J’expie à chaque station les fautes de mes frères.” 22 “Il ne faudra surtout pas que le Christ atteigne la fin de la Piste. Il ne comprend rien à ce monde, le Christ. Sans la Piste, les hommes sur cette terre deviendraient des bêtes en plein jour.”

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Whereas Persée Persifal is the zombified Christ of the Trail, his former friend Josipierre is his Judas, the man responsible for betraying him and ordering his transformation into a zombie.23 Josipierre is a former syndicalist, and he represents the ability of local activists to exploit political situations for personal gain. Indeed, Josipierre is portrayed as having sold out, “always walking armed with a revolver like the tonton makout that he pretended to be fighting against” and dining with “the American commander,” when he used to scare the bourgeoisie (33).24 These descriptions imply his complicity with both the American occupier and the tonton makout who remained in Haiti after the Duvalier regime’s end. Yet Josipierre’s “kiss of Judas” is what motivates Sonson Pipirit’s quest: every time Sonson Pipirit loses faith, he thinks of this “kiss of betrayal, the betrayal of those who had one day sworn an oath to defend the people and who, as soon as they came to power, rushed to extend the hand of friendship to the torturers—to yesterday’s exploiters—and to cut ties with their place of origin” (479).25 This description could be read as an allusion to Aristide’s transformation from a figurehead for the masses into something much more ambivalent. Moreover, this Judas’s kiss, coming as it does after Sonson Pipirit’s encounter with other figures recounting past events tied to the marginalization of the masses by the elites, evokes the contemporary socio-political context’s relationship to earlier historical moments. The earliest historical figure Sonson Pipirit encounters on his quest to save Persée Persifal is Petit Noël Prieur, who participated in the Haitian 23 Josipierre orders Persée Persifal’s zombification after the two men have an altercation over an owl electrocuted when it got caught in power lines. After several people in the area suggest it is a lougawou—“supernatural female shape-shifters reputed for killing children” (Flaugh 134), Persée Persifal cries, “Comment osez-vous proférer de tels propos, vous qui prétendez lutter pour chasser les ténèbres de ce pays?” (32). When Josipierre accuses Persée Persifal of playing “the intellectual” (“à l’intellectuel”) and of rejecting “our people’s beliefs” (“les croyances de notre peuple”), the latter calls his former friend a demagogue (“démagogue” (33)). By using this term, Persée Persifal condemns Josipierre for appealing to the people’s superstitions for political ends. 24 “se prom[enant] toujours armé d’un revolver à la maniere des tontons macoutes qu’il prétendait combattre”; “le commandant américain.” 25 “baiser de Judas”; “baiser de la trahison, la trahison de ceux qui avaient fait un jour serment de défendre le peuple et qui, une fois arrivés au pouvoir, s’étaient empressés de tendre la main aux bourreaux, aux exploiteurs d’hier, de couper les ponts avec leur monde d’origine.”

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Revolution as one of the African leaders of the resistance against French General Leclerc’s attempt to reinstate slavery in 1801. The events Petit Noël Prieur describes show that the dominance of locally born Creoles over African-born bossales was already evident as a form of elitist political power in Haiti at that moment. The story Petit Noël Prieur tells Sonson Pipirit deals, on its surface, with a terrifying monster, the basilisk of Morne à Cabris. However, it also critiques Toussaint Louverture’s treatment of the African generals after their central role in the defeat of Napoleon’s army. Petit Noël Prieur tells Sonson Pipirit that he and his men, “three hundred valliant Mandinkas,” had to flee to Morne à Cabris after Toussaint “wanted to reincorporate [them] into the plantations where he had instated a form of discipline even more terrible than that of the white colonizers” (87).26 The suggestion that Louverture’s regime is more violent and/or oppressive than that of the white colonizers is striking in its condemnation of the revolutionary hero. Louverture’s tactics to extend his repressive control includes magical interventions—Petit Noël Prieur says he and his men fled to the Artibonite region to escape the “powerful sorcerers” working for Louverture, who could “send malevolent spirits after you that would penetrate your dreams to strip away your vital energy” (87).27 This reference evokes the zonbi astral or spirit zombie, highlighting another way the zombie may represent enslavement and control over others, and is all the more striking because it is a method being used by an iconic general of the Haitian revolution. This story also suggests that the elite—including such revolutionary heroes—have undermined marginalized groups in Haiti since the nation’s inception. Indeed, at the end of his story, Petit Noël Prieur states, “I helped all those who fought against the traitors named Pétion, Boyer, Christophe, all those san manman who used the poor Black Africans to seize power for themselves, to build fortunes more extravagant than those of the white masters” (95).28 This list of “san manman” or 26 “trois cent cinquante Mandingues vaillants”; “voulait nous réintégrer sur les plantations où il avait institué une discipline encore plus terrible que celle des colons blancs.” 27 “puissants sorciers”; “lancer à votre poursuite des esprits malfaisants qui pénétraient dans vos rêves pour dépouiller de votre énergie vitale.” 28 “J’ai aidé tous ceux qui ont eu à lutter contre ces traîtres qui ont pour nom Pétion, Boyer, Christophe, tous ces san manman [sic] qui ont utilisé les pauvres Noirs d’Afrique pour s’emparer du pouvoir, pour se constituer des fortunes plus fabuleuses que celles des maîtres blancs.”

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miscreants evokes Haitian rulers (two presidents and a king) from the early post-revolutionary period who used their political power to enrich themselves via the very system they had sought to overthrow. In this way, Petit Noël Prieur critiques the post-independence failure to establish a truly democratic or republican society. Yet he finishes his story by tying these historical examples to the present: “I’m aware that, to this day, the descendants of these assassins, liars, and felons still make the law in this country. I will always be prepared to support every revolt, every uprising” (95).29 The reference to revolts and (in the French) jacqueries— popular peasant uprisings—calls to mind the ongoing struggle for shared governance in Haiti. This story represents an early way in which the majority (in this case, those who are African-born and thus recently enslaved) remained marginalized after independence, when “these non-property-owning Africans and their descendents [sic] would constitute the earliest generation of the moun andeyo” (Hodgson 184)—those “rural, peasant communities of ‘people outside’ or excluded from the Haitian national body politic” (181). A subsequent encounter between Sonson Pipirit and a historical figure from the late nineteenth century conveys that the fight for a new form of governance has endured since Haitian independence. At one point, Sonson Pipirit encounters Dougan, a former soldier for Boyer Bazelais, who in 1883 led insurrectional forces against the presidency of Lysius Salomon (who was both popular and dictatorial). Ultimately, Boyer Bazelais loses the battle against “the traditional powers represented above all else by the wealthy land owners and the coastal merchants who called the Marines from their homeland for help as soon as their interests were threatened” (197).30 This suggests the political influence of both Haitian land-owning elites and foreign investors. However, his soldier recounts that even as they knew they were losing, We were, nevertheless, well aware that the cause we were fighting for would continue to haunt the dreams of patriots. In a few years, a century and even beyond, our sacrifice would inspire other citizens, other men 29 “je sais qu’aujourd’hui encore, les descendants de ces assassins, de ces menteurs, de ces félons, font la loi dans ce pays. Je serai toujours prêt à appuyer toutes les révoltes, toutes les jacqueries.” 30 “l’expression du pouvoir traditionnel représenté avant tout par les grands propriétaires terriens et ces commerçants du bord de mer qui appelaient à la rescousse la marine de guerre de leurs pays d’origine dès que leurs intérêts étaient menacés.”

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not wanting this country to continue under these archaic governmental structures, which perpetuate a colonial system that our ancestors fought for more than two decades. (197)31

This reference to the fight against an enduring “colonial system” is particularly striking eighty years after Haitian independence, suggesting the roots of ongoing inequality. Indeed, the soldier’s reference to the “sacrifice” of Boyer Bazelais and his soldiers specifically ties this moment to both the past (the revolution—the fight lasting “more than two decades”) and the present (“a century and even beyond, our sacrifice would inspire other citizens”). If the idea of a “sacrifice” creates a parallel between the actions of Boyer Bazelais and his men and those of Persée Persifal, this encounter implies that the present moment reflects a longstanding hope for democratic governance, however imperfectly realized in the post-Duvalier context. In this way, the encounter reflects a Benjaminian Messianic time in which the revolutionary past might be redeemed through the realization of its potential in the present.32 The struggle against Lysius Salomon evokes an early lodyans narrative, Louis Joseph Janvier’s 1884 short story “Le Vieux piquet”—a “brief historical narrative that recounts some of the events in Haitian history as they were experienced by the rural peasants of the extreme Southwest” (Stieber 211). This intertext frames the idea of who and what represent the needs of “the people” from a very different perspective than does the passage from La Piste des sortilèges. In Victor’s work, the soldier for Boyer Bazelais criticizes the Salomon government for working in the interests of wealthy landowners and international economic interests. Boyer Bazelais, for his part, is a failed revolutionary and a would-be modernizer of the Haitian government. In contrast, the Janvier text told from the perspective of a dying piquet—a former member of the rural resistance group in the south—lauds Salomon’s 1883 law granting land to peasants, suggesting that he is a newly arrived hero who finally respects and understands rural farmers; Boyer Bazelais is represented as the descendant of the president who instated the Code Rural, and who has 31 “Nous avions tous cependant conscience que la cause pour laquelle nous nous battions ne cesserait de hanter les rêves des patriotes. Notre sacrifice, dans quelques années, dans un siècle et même plus inspirerait d’autres citoyens, d’autres hommes ne voulant plus pour ce pays ces structures archaïques de gouvernement perpétuant un système colonial que nos ancêtres avaient combattu pendant plus de deux décennies.” 32 See Benjamin.

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returned to attempt, like his ancestor, to keep the peasants from owning land.33 Janvier’s lauding of Salomon’s land-based populism in “Le Vieux piquet” (praise that ignores the latter’s dictatorial tendencies) could be read as the target of Gary Victor’s representation of the 1883 Miragoâne uprising, with its reinterpretation of Salomon as someone in the pockets of the rural elite and external powers rather than as a champion of the little man. This reading seems particularly compelling given Victor’s critique of populist politics elsewhere in La Piste, such as in the figure of Josipierre.34 In this way, while the novel is concerned with the representation of the people through a democratic government, it also condemns populism for offering a deceptive appeal to the masses— whether through landownership or the Messianic narratives favored by Aristide. Indeed, La Piste suggests that populist ideology fails to provide a truly democratic system time and again in Haitian history, whether nearly one or almost two centuries after independence. Victor’s zombie in La Piste des sortilèges serves as a literary vehicle, deployed in the “privileged medium” of the peasant class (Stieber 212), for bringing together discrete moments in the struggle for democracy in post-independence Haiti. This use of the zombie as a plot device creates 33 The Code, created in 1826 in response to Boyer’s agreement to pay France an indemnity for the loss of property (including, of course, enslaved Haitians), “created two classes of citizens in Haiti: urban residents, who were governed by the national laws, and rural dwellers, who were subject to a different, highly restrictive set of rules” (Dubois, Haiti 105). 34 In another way, in Victor’s retelling of the uprising, Boyer Bazelais oversteps in his quest for a revolution. When he is certain of his defeat at Miragoâne, he tells Dougan how he enlisted “the spirits our ancestors had to make a deal with to chase the whites from this land” (“ces esprits avec lesquels nos ancêtres ont dû pactiser pour chasser les Blancs de cette terre” (201)). These spirits “didn’t want our liberation” (“ne voulaient pas de notre libération”), Boyer Bazelais tells Dougan (201). This clear reference to the Bois Caïman ceremony and mythic role of Vodou in the success of the Haitian Revolution offers an ambivalent vision of the role of religion in the political sphere. Indeed, Boyer Bazelais asks Dougan to deliver a Vodou medallion to an old man in Boucan Michel near the Dominican border, in order to prevent him from being “damned for wanting to give this people another history. Another future” (“[d]amné pour avoir voulu donner à ce peuple une autre histoire. Un autre avenir” (201)). Yet Dougan fails and is condemned eternally to fight an enormous serpent. In this way, much as Victor signals the futility of Persée Persifal’s Christic self-sacrifice as useless (and even detrimental) to Haitian society, here the author similarly critiques the manipulation of Vodou, a religion that is central to Haitian national narratives, for political ends.

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echoes between the zombie as a symbol of enslavement—and by the time the novel was published, it was associated with rebellion as well35—and the historical marginalization of the African revolutionaries (such as Petit-Noël Prieur) and of the rural masses known as moun andeyò. That is to say, the zombie is transformed from a symbol of colonial domination into a figure of postcolonial marginality. This marginality is understood in light of efforts to exploit the masses for political gain: for example, Salomon’s populism, Louverture’s attempts to reinstate forced plantation labor, or Josipierre’s readiness to sell out once he has the ear of the new president. Unlike these Judas figures, Persée Persifal is represented as one of the few Haitians who can no longer be bought. Yet his desire to sacrifice himself as a zombified Christ figure to purge the sins of his fellow Haitians is described as, at best, misguided, since zombification is a force for maintaining social cohesion and the sacrifice of the Christ de la Piste would undermine zombification’s function as a mechanism for sanction. The idea that a kind of religious sacrifice can bring social change and democracy (à la Aristide’s choice to run for president as an obligation to the people) is thus strongly critiqued, both in the context of Christian discourse such as that used by Aristide and in that of Vodou, with its fundamental place in narratives of the Haitian revolution. Victor ties both discourses of sacrifice to empty populist promises. Yet if the zombie’s lingering presence suggests that the dream of the Haitian revolution was realized imperfectly in 1995, La Piste indicates that hope lives on in the ongoing fight for democratic principles. Le Revenant saisons I & II (2007 and 2009) In La Piste des sortilèges, Persée Persifal is a zombified Christ figure sacrificed to expiate the sins of the people, and he represents both the dashing of the hopes that Aristide’s first presidency raised and the echoes of different moments of the interrupted struggle for a fully realized democracy in Haiti. In contrast, in Victor’s Revenant series, the zombie fights the enduring exploitation of the Haitian people from a less prominent position, operating in the shadows of a corrupt society. Named Ogou for the warrior lwa, the zombie’s death and revival make 35 I am referring, of course, to Frankétienne’s 1979 Les Affres d’un défi and the 1975 Dézafi, but also to less widely noted zombie revolts such as the one in Jean-Claude Fignolé’s 1990 Aube tranquille.

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him abject, setting him in a place between life and death, but they also give him unparalleled martial arts skills that make him uniquely capable of protecting the people. The Christian overtones of the zombie in La Piste des sortilèges are replaced in Le Revenant with intimations of a Lone Ranger-style maverick or a noir antihero. The socio-political backdrop of the Revenant books reflects a society largely unregulated by governmental and judicial intervention. The works are set after Aristide’s second presidency ended in February 2004: specifically, the first novel, La Vengeance du revenant (“The Revenge of the Revenant”), takes place in the months following his ousting, and the second novel, La Pierre de Damballah (“The Stone of Damballah”), is set in 2007, the year after his successor was elected. In the first installment, the zombie thus operates under the radar in a Haiti ruled by gangs but ostensibly “protected” by largely ineffectual international peacekeeping forces, while in the second, Ogou protects the people from foreign and domestic forces, including the Haitian president himself, attempting to wield the unfettered power offered by possessing the eponymous Damballah stone. While Aristide is not a central figure of critique in the Revenant series, the first novel in particular is rooted in the socio-political aftermath of his second presidency. After his first mandate ended in 1996, Préval was elected as his successor. However, Aristide was reelected in 2000 amid accusations of fraud. In February 2004, Aristide was removed from Haiti by US forces and flown to the Central African Republic in contested conditions (Dubois, Haiti 364). In June 2004, following Aristide’s departure, the United Nations sent peacekeeping forces (the MINUSTAH) to Haiti from Brazil and other countries— forces that would occupy the country for more than a decade.36 This largely ineffectual international presence is felt throughout Le Revenant I: La Vengeance du Revenant, as are the gangs whose presence marked the political sphere during this era.37 In 2005, presidential elections were held in the presence of UN forces, and René Préval was elected to his second presidential term. The second installment of the Revenant series begins in November 2007, in the second year of his mandate. While an unnamed president appears in Le Revenant II: La Pierre de Damballah, 36 During this time, MINUSTAH forces spread cholera (following the 2010 earthquake) and have been accused of numerous instances of rape and sexual assault. 37 This includes pro-Aristide armed gangs known as Chimères.

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the power-hungry politician does not clearly parody Préval, but rather reflects a broader commentary on presidential hunger for power in Haiti. If the Revenant series is set in a clearly globalized Haitian landscape, its socio-political backdrop formed by both local and international actors, so too do the popular culture influences range from the Haitian literary tradition to the wide-ranging transnational influences alluded to earlier. Both La Vengeance du Revenant and La Pierre de Damballah were originally published serially in Ticket Magazine (“Le podium des stars”), an arts and culture supplement to the Port-au-Prince newspaper Le Nouvelliste. They were subsequently combined and published in 2007 and 2009, respectively. This serialized format evokes the aforementioned lodyans style that originated in novels published by Justin Lhérisson in the newspaper Le Soir at the turn of the twentieth century. The first installment, La Vengeance du Revenant, introduces the Revenant, a zombie ninja brought back from the dead by the bòkò who turns out to be his father. The novel follows him as he gets revenge on those who had him killed: the drug dealers who wanted Ogou dead because he was incorruptible, and his former partner in the police force, who is in love with Ogou’s fiancée, police officer Sophia Muffon. In the second installment, La Pierre de Damballah, the Revenant helps his former lover Sophia as she tracks down the Damballah stone—an artifact recently stolen from a museum in London that grants complete power to anyone who possesses it. Both works draw on genres from detective novels and Westerns to martial arts films, as Cévaër has noted (“Contemporary Globalized Popular Cultures”). This mash-up of cultural influences makes Ogou a singular zombie—a kind of Haitian Robocop who operates, after his revival, outside official channels to avenge the m ­ arginalized and protect the masses. Indeed, Ogou’s military past and his zombification, detailed in the first book, La Vengeance du Revenant, make him uniquely able to combat the natural and supernatural forces who have wronged him or who want to exploit the Haitian people.38 Whereas Ogou’s father Loray—a bòkò who resurrected his son after his death—owns numerous passive zombies who “are not masters of their own mind” (Pierre 18), Ogou 38 At one point, Ogou is faced with “Renifleurs”—ghosts who fought “during the battles for the conquest of the Holy City of Jerusalem” (“durant les batailles pour la conquête de la ville sainte de Jérusalem,” Pierre 188) resurrected by the Cardinal working for the Order. All translations of Le Revenant into English are my own.

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clearly possesses his own will, driven by his memories and desire for revenge.39 Ogou tells his mother: “I pity everyone who is going to learn what an innocent man is capable of when darkness [la nuit] and suffering have instilled a thirst for vengeance in him” (Vengeance 10).40 Zombitude is equated here with pain and darkness in a way that evokes the narrator’s experience in “Chronicle of a False Love.” Yet where being zombified robbed Alexis’s zombie woman of her vitality and cognizance, here the impact of the night on Ogou is central to his ability to carry out his desire for vengeance. Before, Ogou was “sturdier, very muscular. A pure product of the Marine’s Special Forces!” (10).41 However, “He had brought something back from his trip to the afterlife. Something that terrified him sometimes, even if […] this … force was at his command” (10).42 This unknown force that comes from his zombification is augmented by Ogou’s training by his father Loray and sister Erlie: “His stay among the dead and his time spent discovering the art of bizango warriors had heightened his ability to conceal himself” (65).43 This training in bizango combat allows him to fight even farther out on the margins of Haitian society, undetected by his opponents—something that makes his marginality a superpower. The reference to bizango secret societies is also notable because they have been represented as the arbiters of zombification as a social sanction (Davis, Passage of Darkness 270–84).44 By possessing their skills, Ogou is 39 “[ne sont] pas maîtres de leur cerveau.” Ogou’s sister Erlie describes being served by “a man of great height, wearing only a loincloth, with a vacant gaze” (“[u]n homme de forte stature, vêtu seulement d’un cache-sexe, le regard éteint” (Vengeance 129)). She attempts to assuage her discomfort with her father’s zombies by telling herself that “the zombies were people who were paying for a crime they had committed” (“les zombis étaient des gens qui payaient pour un crime qu’ils avaient commis” (130)). However, she wonders: “in this country where all morals had been trampled on, who knew how many innocents had undergone this terrible punishment?” (“dans ce pays où toutes les valeurs étaient maintenant foulées aux pieds, qui savait combien d’innocents avaient subi ce terrible châtiment?” (130)). 40 “Je plains ceux qui vont savoir ce que peut un innocent quand la nuit et la souffrance ont insufflé en lui la soif de la vengeance.” 41 “plus costaud, tout en muscles. Un pur produit des Forces Spéciales des Marines!” 42 “De son voyage dans la mort, il avait ramené quelque chose. Quelque chose qui le terrifiait parfois, même si […] cette … force était à ses ordres.” 43 “Son séjour parmi les morts et son temps passé à découvrir l’art du combat des guerriers bizango avaient décuplé son adresse à se dissimuler.” 44 Much as the pierre de Damballah is associated with an ambivalent range of political power in Victor’s novel, bizango societies have been tied both to the

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both a victim of their power and able to wield it. But in contrast with the victimized and victimizing zombie hordes of Gérard Chenet’s Crucified in Haiti (see Chapter 2), Ogou uses the duality of his zombified state to protect his fellow Haitians. In the second season of Le Revenant, all of this makes Ogou a powerful opponent to those wishing to possess the Damballah stone and the unfettered power it grants. As the president tells Ogou, “Only you can stop this stone from falling into the hands of a madman” (35).45 Indeed, ultimately Ogou must stop both the president himself and an international Order—reminiscent of the one found in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code—from taking possession of the stone. The novel La Pierre de Damballah lists numerous figures in Haitian history who possessed the Damballah stone. Its trajectory offers a doublesided vision of political power, representing liberation from imperial forces but also dictatorial authority in Haiti. Initially, the stone promises to let indigenous and enslaved figures resist colonial rule: “The stone is said to have been in the possession of Cacique Henri, then Boukman, and Dessalines” (32).46 The Taíno leader Cacique Henri resisted the Spanish enslavers in the early sixteenth century; Boukman was famous for leading the Bois Caïman ceremony inaugurating the revolution; and Dessalines proclaimed the independence of Haiti. However, these figures of resistance give way to more problematic agents of the revolution such as Louverture (129), also said to have possessed the stone, and to internecine struggles for power: “The last man in possession of this stone was said to have been

nefarious use of dark magic and to the struggle against colonial rule. Métraux includes the bizango on a list of “criminals of a special kind” (“criminels d’un genre particulier”) and “sorcerers” (293) (“sorciers” (259)), including zobop and vlanbindingue. However, Beauvoir-Dominique writes that “It seems increasingly reasonable to suggest that the Bizango secret societies constitute the initial offspring of [the] early highly charged environment [of colonial Saint-Domingue]. […] According to Bizango legend, the secret societies emerged out of the determination of the indigenous people to pursue clandestine struggle against the colonists” (155). 45 “Il n’y a que vous qui puissiez empêcher que cette pierre ne tombe aux mains d’un fou.” 46 “La pierre […] aurait été en possession du Cacique Henri, puis de Boukman, ensuite de Dessalines.” The stone itself is described as having originated from an unidentified point in the Caribbean (40), although it is deactivated by an ancient Peruvian dialect (197). The stone is also African through its connection with Vodou: it is named for the lwa or spirit Damballah and protected by creatures called bossou, the same name given to a lwa said to be the spirit of a Dahomean king. This suggests that cultural hybridity is central to Haiti’s cultural patrimony.

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President Boyer” (32).47 These figures are linked through their ambivalent legacy: the revolutionary heroes Louverture and Dessalines also tried to reinstate the plantation system using forced labor, while Boyer, who united Hispaniola and abolished slavery in the eastern part of the island in 1822, was responsible for signing the indemnity to France—which Haiti paid its former colonizer after winning independence—and created the Code Rural in another attempt to preserve the plantations.48 More recently, the novel describes “the attempts by Papa Doc and the priest to find the stone again” (76).49 This reference to François Duvalier and Aristide shows how dictatorship and populism in late twentieth-century Haitian politics reflect an even greater desire for power. The stone links these recent presidents to earlier political leaders in Haiti and even in Saint-Domingue in a way that is reminiscent of the connections between revolutionary moments in the fight for democratic representation of the people in La Piste des sortilèges. In La Pierre de Damballah, the stone’s evolution from a tool for resisting colonial powers to a means of maintaining power over the Haitian people is ultimately interrupted by European imperialism. The stone was “doubtlessly in Hitler’s possession” (33), since it was recovered from the corpse of an SS officer in 1944.50 It is said to have fallen into the hands of the Nazi dictator through the intermediary of a Breton priest who took it from an oungan or Vodou priest during the rejete period— the so-called “anti-superstition” campaign of the Catholic Church. This reference speaks both to the imperialist drive to repress Haitian culture, and specifically Vodou, and the broader drive to strip Haitians of their resources and sovereignty.51 The Catholic Church is portrayed 47 “Le dernier à avoir été en possession de cette pierre aurait été le président Boyer.” 48 An allusion in the book suggests that the kind of power held by Boyer—over the entirety of Hispaniola—might resurface due to the power of the stone: “In the secret society he frequented, there were murmurs that something very serious was brewing, something that was going to redraw the political landscape not only in Haiti, but in the Dominican Republic” (“Dans la sosyete qu’il fréquentait, on murmurait que quelque chose de très grave se préparait, quelque chose qui allait redessiner le paysage politique non seulement en Haïti, mais en République dominicaine” (129)). 49 “les tentatives de Papa Doc et du prêtre pour la retrouver [la pierre].” 50 “sans doute […] en possession de Hitler.” 51 The theft of the stone evokes, among other things, the Vodou drums confiscated first by the marines during the US occupation and later during the

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as, hypocritically, only too happy to use Vodou for its own ends when power is at stake. The theft of the Haitian patrimony is also evoked by the stone’s next owner: at the beginning of the novel, it is stolen from the “Museum of Black Art” in London, which has housed the stone since World War II.52 It thus represents the theft of art objects from formerly colonized lands and the push to return them: “the Haitian government was attempting, in the utmost secrecy, to repatriate the stone, because it is after all a national treasure” (33).53 This call for repatriation echoes contemporary demands by the African diaspora for the return of stolen artifacts and art objects, and it brings to mind Aristide’s 2003 demands that France repay the crushing indemnity it imposed on Haiti.54 Thus, the Damballah stone symbolizes the longstanding dispossession of the Haitian people of political power and also of cultural and economic production by international forces—cultural appropriation emblematized at times by the zombie figure itself.55 And yet the MINUSTAH anti-superstition campaign. As Kate Ramsey notes, these drums were presumed to be “a means of insurgent communication as well as popular control,” and thus were “fetishized by marines as an instrument of both ritual and revolution” (162). Mary Renda writes that the confiscation of the drums during the US occupation is evidence of how “military power facilitated the production of Haitian cultural objects as exotic commodities for circulation and exchange in the United States” (213). 52 “Musée des arts nègres.” This evokes the similar treatment of vibranium artifacts in Marvel’s Black Panther, as well as the closing of the Musée Dapper in Paris. 53 “le gouvernement haïtien tentait, dans le plus grand secret, de faire rapatrier cette pierre, car c’est quand même un trésor national.” 54 A 2022 series in the New York Times, “The Ransom,” has generated debate for multiple reasons (in particular its failure to cite Haitian and US women scholars who have studied extensively the subject of France’s impoverishment of its former colony). However, it has also garnered criticism for its portrayal of Aristide in an article entitled “Demanding Reparations, and Ending Up in Exile” (Méheut et al.), which portrays the former president as having been ousted due to his demands that France repay the indemnity. A group of journalists who covered Haiti during Aristide’s presidency penned an op-ed published on Alterpresse.org that contests this vision of events, citing Aristide’s human rights abuses before his exile and questioning the sources quoted in the original piece by the New York Times (see Adams et al.). 55 This patrimony is also evoked through its ecology: “Ogou had noted how people continued to cut down the trees in Grand’Anse, one of the rare regions that still had a bit of tree cover. There was no state, no government, to offer people an alternative. And yet the numbers were clear. In twenty years, at this pace, nothing

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presence in La Vengeance du Revenant also suggests the ineffectual intervention of international forces. This theft by external powers is regularly used by Haitians in La Pierre de Damballah as a justification for searching for the stone. The Haitian president describes the stone as something that cannot be stolen from Haitians: “This stone belongs to our country. We can’t let strangers claim it for themselves” (142), giving a nationalistic bent to his claim on the stone.56 However, the president’s claim that he merely wants to prevent a neo-Nazi organization from possessing the stone (143) is eventually belied by his attempt to take the object, suggesting that both international and domestic groups are capable of exploiting its powers for evil. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that the president is working with Césimal, a powerful bòkò and sosyete (secret society) leader. Césimal describes the quest to recover the stone in terms that might be described as racialized or nationalist: “We need to defeat these white men come from afar to steal what rightfully belongs to we Haitians [notre race]” (196).57 (The term race in French can mean both “race” in the sense it holds in English as well as referring more broadly to lineage in a familial or societal sense; in Haiti, where all citizens are deemed “Black” by the constitution and the term blan refers to foreigners, regardless of race, the question is even more complex.) However, Césimal also claims that evil is “a word invented by white philosophers” and states, “we’re beyond evil” (196)—a claim that perverts decolonial thought to legitimize absolute power (in a way would be left of Haiti. That was a real problem for national security. But nobody really cared” (“Ogou avait constaté comment les gens continuaient à couper les arbres dans la Grand’Anse, l’une des rares régions du pays à conserver une certaine couverture forestière. Il n’y avait pas d’État, pas de gouvernement, pour offrir une alternative aux gens. Et pourtant les chiffres étaient là. Dans une vingtaine d’années, à ce rythme, il ne resterait plus rien d’Haïti. C’était là un vrai problème de sécurité nationale. Mais personne ne s’en souciait vraiment” (32)). Here, the idea that there is no government to protect the existing forest cover suggests in part why Ogou himself is the only one who can protect the Haitian people: in the absence of government, the lone wolf will take responsibility for the fate of Haitians. However, deforestation in Haiti is also tied to centuries of colonial and imperial exploitation of natural resources. 56 “Cette pierre est à notre pays. Ne permettons pas à des étrangers de se l’approprier.” 57 “Il fallait avoir raison de ces Blancs venus de loin pour nous ravir ce bien qui est de notre race.”

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that echoes, perhaps, Duvalier’s distortion of noirisme to legitimize his own authoritarian regime).58 Ogou rejects the president and bòkò’s invitation to join them in wielding absolute power, lamenting “our leaders have always been mentally ill” (197)59 before his former lover Sophia deactivates the stone using a phrase in “an ancient dialect of the high plateaus of Peru” (197).60 In this way, Haiti’s indigenous roots decode and defuse the problematic source of power. The presidential figure here seems to reflect less a specific president than a trend toward presidential corruption in Haiti, and specifically toward the misappropriation and abuse of political power. While Victor condemns the appropriation by international forces of Haitian culture—whether material or not—he also criticizes those who would use Haitianness and authenticity as an excuse to wield that same cultural patrimony as a tool for gaining absolute political power. Whereas La Piste des sortilèges uses the zombie’s path to establish parallels between discrete moments in the fight for true liberation of the masses or moun andeyò in Haiti, in the second Revenant novel, the Damballah stone represents the double-sided form political power has taken throughout Haitian history, as liberation from colonial and imperialist control but also as a way of maintaining authoritarian presidencies. In turn, the zombie in the Revenant series represents a last, extrajudicial hope for justice in a Haiti controlled by ineffectual, imperialist international forces and corrupt domestic leaders. In Le Revenant, Ogou’s liminal state replaces the zombie’s dearth of willpower with superhuman abilities that allow him to fight both natural and supernatural forces (whether Vodou or Catholic) in an attempt to preserve the patrimony of the Haitian people. Both Ogou and Persée Persifal serve as vehicles for reimagining the traditional relationship between the zombie and will, transforming the zombie’s marginal ontological status into a source of power (be it social, spiritual, or physical). As we will see in the next section of this chapter, Les Amours d’un zombi makes the zombie the potential inheritor of the locus of political power: the presidency. Yet the film suggests that as president, the zombie would be merely a puppet for the elites rather than a popular champion of the people.

58 “un mot inventé par les philosophes blancs”; “nous sommes au-delà du mal.” 59 “Nous avons toujours été gouvernés par des malades mentaux.” 60 “un ancien dialecte des hauts plateaux du Pérou.”

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Les Amours d’un zombi (2009) In the 2009 film Zombi candidat à la présidence … ou Les Amours d’un zombi (“Zombie for President … or the Loves of a Zombie”), written by Gary Victor and directed by Arnold Antonin, the titular zombie runs for president of Haiti, symbolizing the idea of the puppet president. Like the Revenant series, Les Amours d’un zombi seems to be set against the backdrop of the socio-political context of the post-Aristide period, and specifically in the wake of the priest-president’s second ousting from presidential power in 2004, with the subsequent longstanding presence of international (UN) forces in Haiti. On the one hand, the zombie in the film moves from the social margins to the center, becoming a political emblem for the Haitian people. On the other, although the zombie character regains some agency, he evokes the president who, underneath his avowed populism, is colluding with the local elite and the external powers intervening in Haiti. Ultimately, the zombie becomes a cautionary figure critiquing both the national and international forces behind Haiti’s ostensibly democratic elections as well as the complicity of the people in adopting the populist candidate. Les Amours d’un zombi presents the zombie as eminently popular, both by invoking the zombie as political icon and by drawing on the Haitian imaginary, on which Victor once again puts his ludic and irreverent spin. (Antonin, for his part, has established himself as an important documentarian of Haitian art and culture.61) This use of the Vodou mythos is central to the film from the very beginning, and it involves among other things a reimagining of zombie tropes. A disclaimer before the opening credits states: “The color of the zombie who is regaining his faculties and the rapidity of his reflexes changes according to the amount of salt he absorbs, the time between takes, his state of mind, his libido, and the atmospheric pressure,” and the zombie consumes salt throughout the film.62 In addition to playing on the 61 Among other notable accomplishments, Antonin has won the Paul Robeson prize for best film of the diaspora at the FESPACO in Ouagadougou three times: for Does the President Have AIDS (Le Président a-t-il le SIDA?) in 2007, for Jacques Roumain: The Passion of a Nation (Jacques Roumain: La Passion d’un pays) in 2009, and for Les Amours d’un zombi in 2011. 62 “La couleur du zombi qui reprend ses esprits et la rapidité de ses réflexes change selon la quantité de sel qu’il absorbe, la durée entre les prises, son état d’âme, sa libido et la pression atmosphérique.”

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trope of tongue-in-cheek forewords or avertissements au lecteur, this disclaimer thus reimagines the idea that salt revives zombies, prevalent in works from The Magic Island to Les Affres d’un défi. In contrast to the irreversible and wholly transformative effect salt has in Seabrook and Frankétienne’s works, in Les Amours d’un zombi the zombie figure Pierre Zéphirin constantly needs to consume salt, apparently in order to maintain his consciousness and living dead state. He therefore remains ever on the ontological margins, aware of his state and yet still undead. In another way, Zéphirin clearly conforms to existing beliefs about the living dead in Haiti. After an opening shot of Port-au-Prince from above, the camera cuts to images of the bustling Port-au-Prince streets, where radios announce that a zombie who escaped from a fire by turning into a winged goat will be holding a press conference. During the media event, Zéphirin recounts to skeptical journalists that he was zombified because he slept with a married woman, Swamen, a fact that is in keeping with the idea of zombification as a form of social sanction.63 Following this press conference, which offers an irreverent satire of Haitian realities, Zéphirin enlists the help of the journalist Nicole to try to win back his lost love Swamen. His televised appeal to his beloved unintentionally wins over the Haitian public and inadvertently leads to his presidential candidacy. With the public captivated by the story of the zombie and the woman he loves, a group of politicos in search of a presidential candidate decide he is the only man with the widespread approval to receive enough votes in a general election. Indeed, Zéphirin’s campaign seems destined for success until lwa Baron Samedi appears at an event to challenge his claim over Swamen. One of his advisors laments that it is not possible to have power without the support of the gods, and it seems Zéphirin will abandon his campaign when Swamen is suddenly kidnapped and held for ransom. Zéphirin and Baron Samedi are about to escape with her when she is shot; Zéphirin suddenly awakens, and it becomes clear it was all a dream—or was it? Spotting a woman who resembles Swamen, he drops his briefcase, spilling its contents— including the saltshaker Zéphirin constantly kept by his side. The soap opera-like plot elements combine to create a satire that is equally critical of the Haitian political sphere and the superstitions of the people. 63 The film nuances this idea, though. Although Zéphirin is not a morally righteous zombie like Persée Persifal, his love for Swamen is legitimized when she tells the journalist Nicole that her father couldn’t care for her, so she went to live with her now-deceased husband as soon as she entered puberty.

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The struggle to find a presidential candidate who will please the Haitian 1 percent, the populace, and the intervening external forces reflects the political realities in Haiti during the mid-2000s. As for the Revenant series, Les Amours d’un zombi was produced in the years after the second Aristide presidency ended in a coup d’état, during the fifteenyear military occupation of Haiti by the MINUSTAH.64 In 2006, two years after Aristide’s departure, René Préval was declared the winner of the presidential election, although he initially failed to reach the requisite 50 percent of the vote to clear the first round. During Préval’s presidency, Haiti notably joined the PetroCaribe oil alliance despite pressure from the United States in the opposite direction—a fact that speaks to the challenges faced by the Haitian president in responding to internal and external pressures. Les Amours d’un zombi critiques the recent role of both coups d’état and international intervention in Haitian politics. Before the zombie becomes a presidential candidate himself, he stokes a coup attempt by the presidential hopeful Roger Julmé, who visits the bòkò who is Zéphirin’s master, hoping to gain an advantage in the election. Zéphirin poses as the bellicose lwa Ogou per his master’s orders. The trickster zombie urinates on the power-hungry political candidate and tells him he is destined for the presidency and should take it for himself, a message he eagerly attempts to make reality. (When he eventually fails, he tries to take out his anger on Zéphirin.) It is thus evident that Zéphirin takes the presidency lightly—as his protector Nicole accuses him of doing when he accepts the proposal to run for president with little forethought and no preparation. The sequence also critiques the role of religion in politics through the would-be president’s attempts to use Vodou to sway the results of the election. In addition to this coup attempt, another sequence portraying the evening news notes that the UN has invoked the “devoir de gérance” and demanded a meeting of the Security Council. Immediately afterward, the camera cuts to a group of politicians who meet to discuss potential political candidates, suggesting that the delay in electing a president has led to international intervention in the political process. Les Amours d’un zombi also deploys the zombie to comment on puppet presidents, reinterpreting the figure’s traditional lack of individual will 64 Only in June 2019 was the intention to dissolve the mission announced, albeit to be replaced by a permanent office, BINUH (Le Bureau intégré des Nations unies en Haïti, or the Integrated Office of the United Nations in Haiti).

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as a symbol for impotent political figureheads. Dismissing the potential of the nation’s leading intellectual to meet these criteria, the council members decide that only the newly famous zombie meets these criteria.65 In fact, although Zéphirin is able to reassert his will enough to escape the bòkò’s hold over him, the film suggests that his zombified state indicates a malleability that makes him an appealing candidate for the elite. When the politicians approach Zéphirin about running for president, he specifically asks if he would be a puppet president. The question is met with vehement denial that is belied, for the viewer, by their previous discussion indicating that he would be precisely that. Indeed, seeing a zombie—an entity typically viewed in the Haitian context as a fleshand-blood automaton—ask this question reveals the role of the president as an empty figurehead. It is clear that Zéphirin has been chosen to attract public favor, but will possess no real political clout of his own and will serve only to mobilize popular consensus behind political power for the elite ruling class. His apparently recovered agency is thus shown to have no political outlet; it is merely an individual will. If the film satirizes the president for being beholden to local and international elites, it also suggests that the masses are complicit in electing such empty icons. After Zéphirin’s candidacy is announced, a TV news vox pop illustrates his widespread support: a manbo proclaims that the zombie’s presidency would place traditional Haitian culture at the center of the national narrative again; one Protestant minister declares that the zombie is a demonic force, while another states that God brought Zéphirin back to the land of the living to save Haiti (in language reminiscent of Aristide’s Messianic discourse), just as Jesus resurrected Lazarus; and a group of students chants “down with the living.” The slogan “à bas tout vivant” echoes, as Toni Pressley-Sanon notes, the slogan promoted by the men who recruit Zéphirin—suggesting that the people have bought the elite’s populist ruse, by which Zéphirin’s ontological liminality is viewed as emblematic of the socio-economic marginality of the populace at large (“The Fight for the Nation” 287). Indeed, when they are convincing Zéphirin to run for president, the 65 The dangers of the intellectual as president are evoked by Laënnec Hurbon when he writes: “In each intellectual as in each political leader, all one can see anymore is the ghost of Duvalier rising up” (“En chaque intellectuel comme en chaque leader politique, on ne voit plus se dresser que le fantôme de Duvalier.” Comprendre Haiti 61, qtd. in Munro, “Master of the New” 188 and Dash, The Other America 113).

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council members proclaim “vox populi, vox Dei,” before extrapolating the expression to “vox zombii, vox populi.” The voice of the zombie is, it would seem, the voice of the people, implying that the people are themselves zombies of sorts in the eyes of political influencers. The ultimate expression of democratic ideals is thus perverted as it transforms the voice of the zombie—not the people—into the voice of God. Whereas the slogan “vox zombii, vox populi” conflates the voice of the zombie with that of the people, the film parodies the conflation of Haitian identity with the zombie figure, as an interview with a leading intellectual demonstrates. (It is unclear whether he is the same one being considered as a presidential candidate.) During the interview, the intellectual espouses the concept of “HGM,” short for “Haïtien génétiquement modifié” or Genetically Modified Haitian—specifically, he claims that any Haitian who does not believe in zombies is an imposter.66 This humorous assertion mocks the conflation of belief in the zombie (representative of a belief in the Haitian popular imaginary, in Vodou, or in the supernatural) with the idea of authenticity that is so often used to marginalize certain identities as less “Haitian” (such as those that are diasporic or intellectual).67 It also calls to mind USAID initiatives that led to the extermination of kochon kreyòl and their replacement with less hearty Iowa pigs, the replacement of local rice crops with imported US rice—a condition of Aristide’s return to power in 1994 (Braziel 127–28)—and the purported rejection of Monsanto seeds by Haitian farmers following the 2010 earthquake. In Les Amours d’un zombi, Haitianness is even more directly associated with a zombified ontology by the elite political influencers. When they discuss Zéphirin as a potential political hopeful, one man justifies the zombie’s candidacy by stating that Haiti is a country of the dead—all Haitians are dead, so a zombie president will not bother anyone. This truism echoes a refrain in Dany Laferrière’s Down Among the Dead Men that is repeated in The Cry of Mad Birds (Le Cri des oiseaux fous, 1997): that all Haitians are zombies.68 66 This seems to echo the discussion of Zéphirin’s candidacy. When they wonder whether he will accept their proposal, one man states that of course Zéphirin will agree to run for president, because, what Haitian could refuse? 67 For example, Nadève Ménard speaks to this in her discussion of linguistic knowledge (“The Myth of the Monolingual Haitian Reader”). 68 When the narrator of Laferrière’s Autobiographie américaine visits his long-exiled father in Brooklyn, “he claimed that he didn’t have any children

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However, while Laferrière uses the zombie to reflect the enduring legacy of Duvalier or the mythologized visions of Haiti on the international scene, Victor is concerned specifically with post-Duvalier struggles over democratic governance. Moreover, whereas the undead armies of Down Among the Dead Men are shrouded in secrecy and relegated to the nocturnal hours even as rumors about them proliferate, in Les Amours d’un zombi the zombie is recognized on the national stage and set to become a political icon. Yet the vision of the living dead in Antonin’s film problematizes the zombie’s popularity, revealing its basis in popular appeal rather than political aptitude. By extension, the film criticizes both the attempts of the local and global elites to maintain socio-political power and the willingness of the populace to buy into populist propaganda. Ultimately, then, Les Amours d’un zombi takes the idea of the popular zombie—that is to say, of the zombie as central to the national narrative and representative of “the people”—to its logical conclusion, making it a symbol of the subaltern Haitian populace, subjugated to a socially and economically powerful elite in the guise of a populist president. If Les Amours d’un zombi does not exhibit the same kind of delicate and wary hope that one might find in La Piste des sortilèges and Le Revenant, the film’s zombified protagonist nevertheless echoes the (anti-)heroes of those novels, who are singular in their valuing of love, justice, and their country over greed and power. Gary Victor’s reinterpretation of the zombie emphasizes its ambiguous status, leaning into its living dead marginality and imbuing the figure with a new agency—in a way, restoring an essential part of its humanity. His representations of the living dead also move the figure from the margins of the popular consciousness to the center (La Piste), make the revenant a savior of the Haitian cultural patrimony despite its marginality (Le Revenant II), or give the zombie a central position in the political sphere while problematizing the living dead’s association with Haitian identity and authenticity (Les Amours d’un zombi). In this way, Victor transforms the zombie from a figure of social, ontological, and political marginality—representing slave rebellion, mental difference, and internecine conflict—into a figure that is central to the popular political consciousness. He thus comments on the enduring political marginalization of the Haitian majority, implicating the elite and since Duvalier had made all Haitians into zombies” (“il affirmait qu’il n’avait pas d’enfant puisque Duvalier a fait de tous les Haïtiens des zombies,” Le cri des oiseaux fous 319). Translation my own.

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imperialist international powers, even as he uses the zombie to push back against superstition and populism, critiquing the role they play in contemporary Haitian politics and society. Victor thereby renews the symbolic relationship between the zombie and the Haitian political sphere following the Aristide regime. Whereas Down Among the Dead Men points towards the zombie horde’s overdetermination and ultimate collapse as symbol of internecine conflicts in Haiti in the post-Duvalier period, Victor’s works suggest the zombie’s renewed relevancy as a vehicle for representing and interpreting the relationship between the political and the popular imaginary in Haiti in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.69 It is only when the populace becomes a kind of zombie to populism, and believing in the zombie as a representative of the nation becomes a requisite for Haitianness, that narratives of the living dead pose a problem. This connection between the zombie and the populace is evident in films about anthropophagic zombies as well—one example being Dawn of the Dead’s critique of middle America’s mindless consumer culture in US shopping malls. Yet more evidence of the global impact of the popular zombie avatar is found in representations of the living dead in pop culture not yet alluded to in this book. Even as, following Night of the Living Dead (1968), films and other forms of mass media (pulp paperbacks and eventually video games) increasingly popularized the representation of resurrected corpses with a taste for human flesh, the zombie avatars found in Haitian popular or “folk” culture underwent a revival in blaxploitation-inspired zombie stories in US pop culture of the 1970s. To be specific, between 1973 and 1975, Marvel Comics published a series called Tales of the Zombie about Simon Garth, the owner of a coffee company in New Orleans with plantations in Haiti, who is turned into a zombie after his gardener sells him to “the Hoodoo people” (vol. 1) in an act of revenge. The series featured articles on Romero’s recent Night of the Living Dead as well as earlier Haitian-inspired films such as White 69 N’Zengou-Tayo writes that while “Gary Victor might be reproached for the political pessimism that surrounds his novels,” his use of humor in representing Vodou and Haitian politics situate his works in a comic register, even as “behind this laughter, we feel the suffering and the anger of a novelist bearing witness, powerlessly, to the destruction of his country” (“Gary Victor pourrait se voir reprocher le pessimisme politique qui entoure ses romans […] derrière ce rire, il nous arrive de sentir la souffrance et la colère d’un romancier assistant, impuissant, à la destruction de son pays” (“Le Vodou” 271)). Translation my own.

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Zombie. (Interestingly, although the comics often distort Vodou ritual to exotic and sensational effect, they also cite Alfred Métraux’s respected Voodoo in Haiti.70) Tales of the Zombie also reflects the Vodou zeitgeist of the early 1970s, which followed in the wake of “Papa Doc” François Duvalier’s death in 1971. The James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973), although it does not precisely feature the living dead, takes Roger Moore to the fictional island of San Monique, where a dictator named Kananga “employs a mysterious henchman called Baron Samedi” (Cussans 180)— the name of the lwa of the cemetery who is frequently represented as a zombie master. Live and Let Die draws on the blaxploitation subgenre, with its emphasis on drugs, oppression by white characters and social structures, and Black resistance. Blaxploitation tropes are also central to the zombie film Sugar Hill (1974), which portrays a woman who uses a band of zombies to exact revenge on the gang that killed her lover. Both films refer to “voodoo” or Hoodoo in the context of Haiti and/ or New Orleans, linking Black Power with black magic in a way that both underscores the power of the Haitian Revolution and renders it frightening and exotic.71 In Tales of the Zombie, Simon Garth’s story draws on blaxploitation tropes, but it makes the white, United States citizen anti-hero both a victim of “hoodoo” and uniquely resistant to it. Whereas zombies typically lack the will to disobey their masters, Garth is occasionally able to use his superhuman strength and lack of pain to avenge himself and others—his whiteness perhaps rendering him immune to the full power of zombitude.72 He wears around his neck the Amulet of Damballah, a stone emblazoned with a snake that represents the serpent lwa’s power, and is controlled by the person who possesses the amulet’s twin. With its emphasis on the international drug trade, its setting in a gritty Port-au-Prince cityscape, and its living dead anti-hero, Gary Victor’s Le Revenant echoes Marvel’s Tales of the Zombie in numerous ways. Particularly striking is the parallel between the Amulet of Damballah that controls Simon Garth and the Damballah Stone that the zombie Ogou must deactivate in La Pierre de Damballah. Marvel’s Amulet of Damballah controls the living dead and specifically Simon Garth—in a 70 See Claremont, “Voodoo: What’s it All About, Alfred?” 71 See Cussans’s fascinating chapter on Baron Samedi and his association with François Duvalier in Undead Uprising. 72 In this way, Simon Garth seems to anticipates Dennis Alan’s escape from living death in Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow.

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distortion of the power of lwa Damballah, who is associated with life, water, and serpents and not with zombies. Gary Victor’s Damballah Stone offers a much more encompassing form of power, but also a much more ambivalent one, tied both to indigenous fights against colonial forces and the exploitation of Black identity under Duvalier. Victor thus restores the Damballah Stone to the Haitian historical mythos, underscoring Vodou’s broad cultural significance (as opposed to its ability to control a few unlucky white individuals). This juxtaposition also highlights the way Le Revenant’s Ogou serves as counterpoint and arguably a corrective to Simon Garth—a white US victim of zombification with neocolonial ties to Haiti—by restoring the zombie’s ambivalent power to a Black Haitian. In this respect, Gary Victor’s popular zombie fictions offer a new understanding of the figure’s symbolic and imaginary potential in the twenty-first century. This reclaiming of the popular zombie draws on and at times responds to the zombie’s global pop culture migrations,73 while allowing for stories of the living dead that reflect the desires, fears, and history of Haitians.

73 See Cévaër, “Contemporary Globalized Popular Cultures.”

Conclusion Conclusion

In the pages that have preceded this conclusion, I have shown how recent and contemporary writers have transformed the zombie as it appears in the popular imaginaries of Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, using the figure to consider the enduring legacy of slavery and colonization in the French Caribbean, to underscore its polyvalent significance in the region, to envision the conditions for social uprisings and the limits of the zombie itself as metaphor, and finally to reflect the marginalized populace in Haiti. I have also suggested how the corporeal zombie or kò kadav in Haiti has influenced representations of the figure in the literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe—a trend continued beyond the corpus studied in this book by works such as Henri Hazaël-Massieux’s Zombi à Chabine (2009), which recasts the act of zombification as a form of knowledge possessed by specialists of the “Caribbean pharmacopeia” (13).1 (The novel offers a political satire of the French overseas territories (“‘Outremer’ français”), as it states on the cover, thus reiterating the critique of the French Antilles’ neocolonial status but in a more contemporary context than Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows.) In the remaining pages of this book, I would like to reflect on the ways Haitian writers used the zombie to translate the affective and philanthropic aftermath of the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake before turning to even more recent representations of the zombie legend by filmmakers from beyond the Caribbean, in order to consider one final time the potential and pitfalls in the figure’s representation. In the late afternoon of January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Port-au-Prince with an epicenter 16 miles from the capital. The earthquake affected 3 million people and killed an estimated 160,000, not counting the many “humanitarian aftershocks” (Schuller) caused 1 “pharmacopée caribéenne.” All translations in the conclusion are my own.

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in the earthquake’s wake by NGO and United Nations intervention. As is often the case, writers served as the spokespeople for the Caribbean nation on the global stage, offering humane and nuanced narratives as alternatives to the often dehumanizing clichés emerging from the news media in the Global North. Because the Étonnants Voyageurs festival was set to begin two days later, numerous writers and artists, including many who live in the diaspora, were gathered at the Hotel Karibe in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Pétionville on January 12. Quickly, amid the aftermath, authors such as Lionel Trouillot and Dany Laferrière reached out through the internet in order to dispel myths and paint a picture of life after the quake, as well as to advocate for the fair distribution of aid to its victims. As a result, these writers experienced a renewed interest in their work around the globe, and in the following months after these early digital narratives appeared, longer printed texts concerning the earthquake by Haitian authors were published, including Corps mêlés, Marvin Victor’s award-winning first novel. However, early literary production concerning the earthquake was dominated by non-fiction first-person accounts. Although Haitian writers did not turn to the zombie in a major way following the 2010 earthquake, some of their works deploy the figure as a motif to translate the writers’ sense of shock after the seismic event. In The World is Moving Around Me (Tout bouge autour de moi, 2011), Dany Laferrière’s “chronicle” of the earthquake, the short passages composing the work offer brief impressions that seem to correspond with the intense, disjointed nature of the author’s memories following the traumatic experience. Laferrière uses the zombie specifically to translate the immediate aftermath of the earthquake: “When the two strongest tremors have passed, we get up slowly, like zombies in a B movie” (23).2 The reference to the zombie’s slow movements reflect a kind of mindless automatism, suggesting a state of shock and uncertainty. However, it is unclear what type of zombie, precisely, Laferrière is describing: the Haitian zombie reimagined as a kind of sleepwalker in early films like White Zombie or I Walked with a Zombie? Or the corporeal Haitian zombie’s flesh-eating counterpart as seen in Night of the Living Dead? These “cannibal,” “modern,” or “Romero” zombies, which often seem to arise suddenly, do not contain the weight of historical memory that defines the zombie in the French Caribbean; yet their catastrophic, portentous 2 “Les deux plus fortes secousses passées, on se relève lentement, comme des zombis dans un film de série B.”

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nature makes them apt to describe the immediate aftereffects of the Port-au-Prince earthquake, which for many seemed like “an apocalyptic moment, a cataclysmic end” (Munro, Tropical Apocalypse 1). In contrast with the ambiguity of Laferrière’s reference to the living dead, Yanick Lahens presents the zombie within the context of Haitian Vodou in her work Failles (Fault lines, 2013). This “récit” or narrative melds the author’s personal story of the earthquake with the novel—a love story—she was writing when the geological disaster struck. Early in the work, Lahens describes the moments following the earthquake as akin to experiencing the liminal or dissociative state of consciousness experienced by the living dead. She writes: “We are DESOUNEN, in a kind of stupor. Zombies. According to popular belief, once a zombie tastes salt, its cognitive faculties return. On January 13, I don’t really want to wake up and taste the salt” (36).3 The Creole term desounen refers to the ritual by which the Vodou initiate is detached from its life force to find a peaceful death. Strangely, this would normally seem to be quite the opposite of zombification, in which the body endures without the part of the soul containing personality and volition. As Joan Dayan writes, the ceremony of desounen makes it “so that the individual’s spirit can move beyond death” (168). Here though, the zombie becomes synonymous with a kind of stupor. If salt awakens the zombie, Lahens states, she would prefer not to fully regain her faculties. Zombitude therefore becomes desirable, as a way to forget traumatic memories (in contrast with the cautionary tale of “Chronicle of a False Love,” in which the narrator seeks to bury her trauma and is subsequently stuck in its unending loop). Whereas both Lahens and Laferrière use the zombie myth as a rhetorical device, Gary Victor’s 2011 detective novel Soro uses the idea of a “real,” physical zombie at the level of plot. The 2011 work features the alcoholic detective Dieuswalwe Azémar, and the title Soro refers to Azémar’s beverage of choice—a strong alcohol made from sugarcane. (This connection to sugarcane, the crop so strongly associated with colonial plantation enslavement, is particularly striking given that the alcohol works as a zombifying agent of sorts on Azémar.) The novel revolves around Azémar’s attempts to reconstruct his memories of the events of January 12, which are clouded by the liquor-induced haze in 3 “Nous sommes DESOUNEN, dans une sorte d’hébétude. Des zombies. Selon la croyance populaire, une fois que le zombie goûte au sel, ses facultés cognitives reviennent. Le 13 janvier au réveil, je n’ai pas trop envie d’en goûter.”

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which he experienced the earthquake. It is in a subplot of this central intrigue that the zombie legend appears. Azémar encounters a woman who claims she was visited by her lover, a well-known painter, the evening immediately following the quake. The next day, however, she is told he died during the disaster. The detective senses that something is amiss in the case of the zombified lover, and he eventually discovers that the purported zombie’s death was staged, his murderers making the seismic event look like its cause. The motive for the murder is purely financial: the artist’s wife and his brother orchestrated his demise to capitalize on the higher price of his paintings following his death. Soro thus critiques those who seek to profit from disaster. The legend of the living dead, which reenacts the commodification of human life that was intrinsic to the slave trade, functions here as a screen for a different kind of objectification—one that can be tied to the necropolitics of NGOs feeding (on) Haitian catastrophes and the commodification of Haitian culture. Strikingly, then, Victor’s allusion to a flesh-and-blood zombie— even if a hoax—speaks to the physical realities of Haitians after the quake, when hundreds of millions of dollars in aid were squandered in failed reconstruction efforts, the “aftershocks” of which continue to be felt today. These contemporary moments are enmeshed with previous instances of economic exploitation and historical amnesia—instances such as colonial plantation enslavement and US occupation that, even if unmentioned, the zombie figure inevitably evokes. Indeed, as this book has shown, the zombie serves as a shorthand for the weight of colonial and neocolonial history in the Caribbean. As such, referring to the living dead figure within the context of the earthquake is a way of gesturing to the very manmade nature of the natural disaster (something Victor’s use of the zombie in Soro evokes). Yet the zombie is not merely a “palimpsest” (Recker) for historical narratives. Rather, particularly within the works of writers from the Caribbean, as much as it symbolizes certain histories, the zombie also represents the painful experience (both individual and collective) of these events. Indeed, Laferrière’s use of the zombie evokes the feeling of living through a cataclysmic event seemingly outside of history or at the end of historical time. In contrast, the zonbi kò kadav lacks memory even as it emblematizes enslavement, colonization, and disaster; thus, for Lahens, becoming a zombie represents a way of (temporarily) ignoring the accumulated trauma of these histories. After all, the zombie is not only a historical symbol but also an ontological category—a category that contests and mobilizes the ways Africans were conceived

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of philosophically in order to legitimize plantation slavery. (Zombitude is also, of course, a category of being that is tied to Vodou conceptions of the soul.) In other words, the zombie reflects on history as narrative and as lived reality in Haiti and the broader Caribbean. Whereas “cannibal” zombie narratives are most often concerned with what the living endure, Caribbean stories of the living dead regularly consider the experience of becoming a zombie—that is to say, of embodying a position of radical social and political otherness. In this study of how and why writers from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe use the legendary living dead figure in their fiction, I have relied on several important questions. How is the zombie used to interrogate and even contest dominant narratives about the region? Which historical moments are evoked through the living dead? Are narratives of enslavement and colonization occluded, and if so, why? What forms of power are critiqued by the figure? How is Haitian Vodou represented in relation to the zombie? These questions can be used to evaluate narratives of the Caribbean zombie that lie beyond the scope of this book. The questions can serve, for instance, to consider recent attempts by European artists to represent the Caribbean living dead in more nuanced ways. While the zombie did not play as significant a part in Haitian or French Antillean fiction or film in the late 2010s as it did in previous decades, filmmakers from France and Italy were inspired by the figure during this period. Their works often initially seem to reflect a less exoticized sensibility than earlier films on the Haitian zombie produced in the Global North, but they ultimately do so to mixed effect. For example, the 2017 documentary short Kale Zonbi or Whipping Zombie represents images of what are described in promotional materials as “a ritual dance, slaves and masters: it’s the zombie dance. Riding on a hypnotic and relentless music, inducing trance and evoking the rhythm of working muscles, men whip and fight one another, until they die and be born [sic] again in an infinite cycle.” These authentic images of Haitians do not invoke the sensationalized vision of Vodou and the zombie found in many films. The shots of the seemingly entranced ritual participants are interspersed with images of metal-workers transforming barrels into punched tin art objects, offering a reflection on death and rebirth. Yet the documentary is, notably, executive produced by the Ethical Fashion Initiative, a United Nations project that “creates and strengthens social enterprises in emerging economies to connect discerning international brands in fashion, interiors and fine foods with talented local designers,

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artisans and micro-producers,” according to its website. One might therefore ask if the film is a reflection on rebirth and renewal or, in fact, an artistically rendered infomercial for the kinds of goods produced in collaboration with the initiative? Viewed in this light, the film’s only voiceover—a description of how to capture spirit zonbi to make them work for you—might call to mind the cultural reappropriation of the living dead in occupation-era films like White Zombie. The framework established in the chapters of this book can also help to elucidate another feature-length film that holds promise for a more nuanced representation of the Haitian zombie. French director Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child (2019) intersperses the story of purported zombie Clairvius Narcisse in 1960s Haiti with that of a literary sorority at an elite all-girls high school in Paris founded by Napoleon. Bonello’s film is a puzzle: on the one hand it implicates Napoleon in his attempt to reinstate slavery in the French Caribbean colonies, and it represents Haiti as beautiful, avoiding the clichés of poverty that so often afflict representations of the nation. On the other, it says little about the dictatorship of Papa Doc, even though most of the Haitian sequences of the film are set during this period, and depicts Sans Souci palace in Northern Haiti (a highly evocative location discussed by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past) with barely an allusion to its history, making it a gothic backdrop rather than a weighty historical site. Finally, the film concludes with cross-cut shots of an apparently authentic Vodou ceremony in Haiti and images of Baron Samedi—lwa of death played by author Néhémy Pierre Dahomey—juxtaposed with shots of manbo Katy and of Fanny, the French student who enlisted her services. Fanny’s irises are fully black, her possession by Baron Samedi echoing scenes of demon possession from horror films, these images serving as a distortion of the Vodou practice of being “mounted” by a lwa; Katy’s apparent death at Fanny/Baron Samedi’s hands seems like a punishment for the Vodou practitioner. The film, with its early parallels to the thoughtful I Walked with a Zombie—its critique of transatlantic slavery—thus ultimately spins off the rails in a rush to the finish that delves more into the territory of Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, associating Vodou with black magic rather than religion. This means that the film’s references to history and more nuanced images of the zombie—many produced in conjunction with a Haitian crew—are eclipsed in the end by the idea of the dangers of Vodou. In contrast, French filmmaker Mati Diop’s Atlantics (Atlantique, 2019) echoes the zombie legend in ways that are subtly evocative of

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Senegal’s role in the triangular trade. The film’s revenants do not exactly reflect the traits of the living dead in Haiti or the French Antilles, and have been connected with the tradition of faru rab or “boyfriend spirits” who have fallen in love with women, possessing them at night.4 However, Diop’s living dead nevertheless serve to critique the enduring legacy of slavery and colonization in ways that more closely parallel how writers and artists from the Caribbean use the figure. Early in Atlantics, several construction workers at a high-rise building in Dakar who have gone unpaid for months die at sea while attempting to cross the Atlantic to Europe in search of economic opportunity. Their spirits subsequently return and take over the bodies of living individuals, in order to request their unpaid wages from their former employers. This representation of revenants demanding payment for their labor, within the region where so many ships sailed for the Caribbean carrying enslaved Africans, seems like a logical return of the zombie’s avatars to a place instrumental in the legendary figure’s creation. Moreover, much like the literary works studied in this book, the film reimagines the living dead in a way that represents the contemporary legacy of colonization—in the enduring economic disparities wrought by the exploitation of the Global South— and that evokes the unpaid labor and exploitation of enslavement, as well as the dangers of the Middle Passage. While the zombie will likely continue to endure as a sensational symbol of Haitian and Caribbean culture in media particularly of the Global North, writers and filmmakers from the region will also doubtless continue to use the figure to decolonize narratives of personhood, religion, identity, and nationhood in the French Caribbean and beyond. That is to say, although its avatars are ever-shifting, the zombie remains a vehicle for resisting colonial systems of thought. Far from a powerless drone, the zombie is a powerful tool for the region’s writers—endlessly fascinating and evocative, yet primed to critique reductive narratives of Haiti and the French Antilles and consider the lived realities of those in the region. Indeed, the zombie’s avatars reveal, precisely, this polyvalent function as an embodied memory in Haiti and as a constantly evolving tool across the French Caribbean and, now, globally. If the zombie is far from a “new narrative” of Haiti or of the French Antilles, the figure’s constant renewal makes it a tool through which writers can rethink old narratives—narratives like enslavement, colonialism, and manmade or “natural” disasters, which continue to haunt our present. 4 See Dry, Mueller, and Bâ et al.

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McAlister, Elizabeth A. Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora. U of California P, 2002. Méheut, Constance, et al. “Demanding Reparations, and Ending Up in Exile.” New York Times, 25 May 2022, p. A1. Ménard, Nadève. “The Myth of the Monolingual Haitian Reader: Linguistic Rights and Choices in the Haitian Literary Context.” Small Axe, vol. 18, no. 3, Nov. 2014, pp. 52–63. Métraux, Alfred. Le Vaudou haïtien. Gallimard, 1958. ——. Voodoo in Haiti. Translated by Hugo Charteris. Schocken Books, 1972. Michel, Claudine. “Epilogue: Kalfou Danje: Situating Haitian Studies and My Own Journey Within It.” The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicaments of Narrative, edited by Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, et al., Liverpool UP, 2016, pp. 193–207. Milne, Lorna. Patrick Chamoiseau: Espaces d’une Écriture Antillaise. Brill, 2006. Montero, Mayra. “Corinne, Amiable Girl.” Translated by Lizabeth ParavisiniGebert. Callalloo, vol. 17, no. 3, 1994, pp. 836–46. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Mérédic Louis Elie. Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, vol. 1. Philadelphia, 1796. Morrison, Anthea M. “New Voices.” A History of Literature in the Caribbean: Hispanic and Francophone Regions, edited by A. James Arnold, et al., John Benjamins, 1994, pp. 485–504. Mueller, Rachel. The Spirits are My Neighbors: Women and the Rab Cult in Dakar, Senegal. Macalester College, 2013. https://core.ac.uk/download/ pdf/46725076.pdf. Honors thesis. Munro, Martin. Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat. Liverpool UP, 2007. ——. “Master of the New: Tradition and Intertextuality in Dany Laferrière’s Pays sans chapeau.” Small Axe, vol. 9, no. 2, July 2005, pp. 176–88. ——. Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times. UP of Virginia, 2015. ——. “Whose and Which Haiti? Western Intellectuals and the Aristide Question.” Paragraph, vol. 36, no. 3, Nov. 2013, pp. 408–24. Murphy, Kieran. “White Zombie.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 47–55. Nau, Ignace. “Isalina, ou, une scène créole.” Revue des colonies, nos. 1–3, July, Aug., and Sept. 1836, pp. 37–40, 84–86, and 124–32. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José. “Le Vodou dans les romans et nouvelles de Gary Victor: Entre fantastique et réalisme merveilleux.” Francofonía, no. 7, 1998, pp. 255–73.

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Index Index

4 Hs 3 abjection 47, 69, 147 Afro- 61, 70 abolition 3–4, 18–19, 26–27, 37, 39, 45, 49, 51–56 see also Law of 4 February 1794 Abu Ghraib 58 Ackermann, Hans-W. 5n7, 86n66, 101n4, 116 Affres d’un défi, Les (Frankétienne) 21, 26, 28, 102, 104–15, 117, 121–23, 128–29, 146n35, 156 Africa 26n3, 31, 39, 55, 150n46 African diaspora 11, 152 African spirit beliefs 5, 8, 13, 25–26, 57, 99 Africans 142–43, 146 enslaved 35, 42, 52, 67n14, 70, 96, 137–37, 168–69, 171 Afro-abjection 61, 70 Agamben, Giorgio 36, 97 Age of Revolutions 104 AIDS see HIV/AIDS Ainsi parla l’oncle (So Spoke the Uncle) (Price-Mars) 11, 87 Alexis, Jacques Stephen 19–20, 91, 97 El Reino de este mundo 74n23 Romancero aux étoiles 11, 74–75, 87 see also “Chronicle of a False Love” (Alexis)

All of Us Are Dead (Netflix series) 58, 130 allegory 7, 85, 124, 128, 130 for anthropology 69n18 for Duvalier regime 11, 17, 21, 82, 100–5, 114–21 for Haitian national narratives 4, 21, 131 for Haitian Revolution 14, 58 for science 8 for US occupation 122 Amours d’un zombi, Les (Antonin) 22, 133–35, 154–61 animals/animality 10, 35–36, 40–41, 46, 65, 105, 108–11, 109n29, 140 anthropology 5–7, 10, 19, 40, 57, 59n1, 69n18, 101, 116, 127 antillanité 7 Antilles (French) 8–9, 14, 171 definition 5 enslavement in 18, 48, 57 neocolonialism in 7, 13, 28, 165 Antoine, Régis 74n24 Antonin, Arnold 22, 134, 155n61, 160 see also Amours d’un zombi, Les (Antonin) Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 4, 23, 131, 155, 158–59, 161 coup against 3, 21, 126, 129 in Down Among the Dead Men 12, 21, 103–5, 122, 125–26, 134

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in Pierre de Damballah, La 151–52 in Piste des sortilèges, La 134–36, 138–41, 145–46 US removal of, 147, 157 Asibong, Andrew 77n31, 80n45 Auschwitz 38, 104n12 authenticity 11–13, 38n34, 50, 69, 154, 159–60, 169–70 authoritarianism 22, 102–3, 112, 115, 118–20, 133 of Aristide 138n15 of Duvalier Sr. 12, 75, 121, 130, 154 of Moïse 1 automatism 42, 68, 76, 78–79, 104, 158, 166 avatars see zombie avatars B movies 8, 22, 166 barbarity, 2, 4, 19, 68, 111, 117 Baron Samedi 11, 15n27, 96, 114, 140, 156, 162, 170 Battle of Matouba 48, 56 Beauvoir-Dominique, Rachel 149n44 Beizer, Janet 76 Benedicty-Kokken, Alessandra 29n6, 61–62, 83–84, 86, 90, 93n88, 95n92 Benjamin, Walter 144 Bernabé, Jean In Praise of Creoleness (Éloge de la créolité) 13, 50–51 Bishop, Kyle 15n28 bizango 124, 149–50 black magic 19, 64n12, 106, 116, 126, 162, 170 Black Panther (film) 152n52 Black Power 162 Black republic 38 blaxploitation genre 161–62 Blessebois, Pierre-Corneille Zombi du Grand-Pérou, Le; ou, la comtesse de Cocagne 9 Bobo, Rosalvo 2, 85n62

bodily zombie see zonbi kò kadav (bodily/ corporeal zombie) Bois Caïman 3, 84n52, 95, 145n34 bòkò 6, 25, 27, 31, 92 in Affres d’un défi, Les 102, 107–9, 112, 114–15, 122 in Amours d’un zombie, Les 157–58 in Crucified in Haiti 118 in Hadriana in All My Dreams 83, 86 in Revenant, Le 148, 153–54 in Tell My Horse 101 in White Zombie 65 Bonello, Bertrand Zombi Child 170 Bongie, Chris 134n3, 138n15 bossou 150n46 Boyer Bazelais, Jean-Pierre 143–45, 151n48 Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament (Browne) 97 Bridge of Beyond, The (Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle) (Simone Schwarz-Bart) 13, 38 Brodber, Erna Myal 5n9 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre 5n9 Brooks, David 2n2 Brooks, Max World War Z 130 Browne, S. G. Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament 97 Bush, George W. 58 Cacique Henri 150 Camp de Beudet 59–60, 94 cannibal zombie 4, 8, 16, 97, 101, 121, 161, 169 in Night of the Living Dead 15, 57, 99–100, 116, 166 in Revenant, Le 17 in White Zombie 60

Index Caperton, William 138n14 Caribbean pharmacopeia 165 Castro, Fidel 83 catatonia 6, 61, 63, 66, 71, 74n24, 96 mental illness and 77, 79, 81, 87–88 Catholic Church 11, 79n42, 94, 151, 154 Central African Republic 147 Césaire, Aimé 7, 9, 10, 12, 50–51 Cévaër, Françoise 22, 134, 148 Chamoiseau, Patrick 3, 108n21 In Praise of Creoleness (Éloge de la créolité) 13, 50–51 Slave Old Man (L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse) 13 see also Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows (Chronique des sept misères) (Chamoiseau) Charcot, Jean-Martin 65, 76 chattel slavery 2, 25, 28, 58 Chenet, Gérard 4, 19, 72, 91 see also Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie (Haitian Vodou Trances for Dearest Amélie) (Chenet) Christianity 13, 136, 138–39, 146–47 see also Catholic Church; Jesus Christ; Judas Christophe, Henri 142–43 “Chronicle of a False Love” (Alexis) 11, 62–63, 73–82, 87–90, 96, 102, 149 Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows (Chronique des sept misères) (Chamoiseau) 14, 18–19, 27, 49–57, 165 citizenship 35–36, 137 Civil Rights movement 58, 100 Clinton, Bill 122 Code noir 37, 56 Code Rural 144–45, 151 Cold War 17, 21, 101, 104, 121 see also Red Scare

185

colonialism/imperialism 12n21, 70, 104, 133, 152n55, 161, 168 Aristide and 21, 138n15 in “Chronicle of a False Love” 73 in Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows 49, 53–56 Damballah stone and 22 in Down Among the Dead Men 130 in Hadriana in All My Dreams 80 in I Walked with a Zombie 67 neocolonialism, 7–8, 13, 17–18, 23, 25, 48–49, 53, 55, 60, 91, 92n85, 163, 165, 168 in Piste des sortilèges, La 136, 144, 146 in Quiet Dawn 26–32, 37, 56 in Revenant, Le 22, 150–51, 154, 163 in Serpent and the Rainbow, The 87 in Soro 167 in Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie 91, 92n85, 95–96 US 1–5, 6n9, 91, 114, 130, 138n15 in Woman Named Solitude, A 27, 45–49 zombie critiquing 5–9, 17–19, 25, 58, 133, 171 see also decoloniality; postcolonialism; UN occupation of Haiti; US occupation of Haiti communism 21, 75, 101, 121, 130 see also Cold War; Red Scare Condé, Maryse 14, 50n76 Confiant, Raphael 108n21 In Praise of Creoleness (Éloge de la créolité) 13, 50–51 corporeal zombie see zonbi kò kadav (bodily/ corporeal zombie) Corps mêlés (Victor) 166 Couti, Jacqueline 52n89

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Craven, Wes 61n6 Serpent and the Rainbow, The 71–72, 87, 162n72, 170 créolité 7, 13, 50, 53 creolization 13, 50, 54–55 Creolophone literature 21 Crucified in Haiti (Le Nègre crucifié) (Etienne) 12, 21, 102, 105, 115–23 Cuba 6, 75, 83, 87n70 Cussans, John 15n27, 61, 104, 112, 162n71 Dahomey, Néhémy Pierre 170 Danticat, Edwidge 1n1 Dash, J. Michael 3, 70, 123 Davis, Wade 4, 61, 70–72, 114 see also Passage of Darkness (Davis); Serpent and the Rainbow, The (Davis) Dayan, Joan 167 dechoukaj 111 decoloniality 5, 16, 28, 50, 153, 171 dehumanization 16, 40–42, 56, 58, 64, 67–70, 104n12, 108–9, 166 Deleuze, Gilles 109n29 Delgrès, Louis 38, 47–48 Delsham, Tony 134n3 Dendle, Peter 15, 17 Depestre, René 4, 19, 72, 75, 97, 113n44 see also Festival of the Greasy Pole, The (Depestre); Hadriana in All My Dreams (Depestre) Deren, Maya Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti (Deren) 10 desounen 167 Desquiron, Lilas 88n75 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 48, 150–51 devenir-animal 109n29 Dézafi (Frankétienne) 12, 21, 37, 102, 108, 115, 146n35 dezombification 37, 72, 83–84, 89, 91, 93, 97, 110, 114

diaspora African 10–11, 13, 54, 152 Caribbean 5 Haitian 57, 64, 155n61, 159, 166 Díaz, Junot 6n9 Diop, Mati Atlantique 23, 170–71 disability 19, 42, 60–61, 68, 88 see also mental health/illness Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti (Deren) 10 Dominican Republic 5–6, 137, 145n34, 151n48 Douglas, Rachel 14, 108n21, 111n38, 124 Douyon, Lamarque 71 Down Among the Dead Men (Pays sans chapeau) (Laferrière) 12, 21, 23, 102–3, 105, 122–31, 134, 159–61 Dubois, Laurent 38 Dunham, Katherine 106 Island Possessed 10 Dupuy, Alex 138n15, 140 Duvalier, François “Papa Doc” 1, 20, 29, 107, 123, 128 in Affres d’un défi, Les 21, 111n38, 114–15, 117 allegories for 11, 17, 21, 82, 100–5, 114–21 authoritarianism and 12, 75, 121, 130, 154 in “Chronicle of a False Love” 11, 74–75 in Crucified in Haiti 12, 105, 115, 117, 120, 122 death of 162 in Down Among the Dead Men 124–25 in Hadriana in All My Dreams 82 in Revenant, Le 151, 154 Revue indigène inspiring 11 US support for 21, 101, 121 in Zombi Child 170

Index Duvalier, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” 21, 70, 111, 114, 124, 129, 138 Duvalier dictatorship (1957–86) 3–4, 7, 61, 100–7, 120–22, 124–25, 130, 137n8, 139n20, 140, 158n65, 163 aftermath of 23, 103n10, 111n38, 123, 129, 135, 141, 144, 160–61 Aristide and 138 in Piste des sortilèges, La 140–41 earthquake (Port-au-Prince, 2010) 2n2, 3, 23, 129, 147n36, 159, 165–68 Emery, Amy Fass 69n18 Enlightenment 39, 43–44, 56 Erzulie Fréda 84 ethnopsychiatry 94 Etienne, Gérard 102, 117, 125, 129–30 see also Crucified in Haiti (Le Nègre crucifié) (Etienne) Étonnants Voyageurs festival (Port-auPrince) 166 exceptionalism 4, 22, 123, 129 Failles (Fault Lines) (Lahens) 167–68 Fay, Jennifer 60n4, 129n75 Felix-Mentor, Felicia 61, 69–70, 72, 93, 97, 101 Festival of the Greasy Pole, The (Le Mât de cocagne) (Depestre) 82–83 Fignolé, Jean-Claude 3, 56, 58, 107 Les Possédés de la pleine lune 12n20 see also Quiet Dawn (Aube tranquille) (Fignolé) forced labor 2–3, 5–6, 18, 25, 46, 69, 73, 109, 146, 151 francophone studies 14 Frankenstein’s monster 8 Frankétienne 4, 29, 100–1, 107, 110 see also Affres d’un défi, Les (Frankétienne); Dézafi (Frankétienne)

187

free people of color 3, 35–36 French Atlantic 18, 52 French First Republic 52 French identity 27, 49 French National Convention 52 French Revolution 36–37, 44–45 Galatea (Pygmalion) 8 Garth, Simon 17, 161–63 Gauthier, Jeanine 5n7, 86n66, 101n4, 116 ghouls 58, 99, 119 Girl with All the Gifts, The (McCarthy) 98, 118n48 Glissant, Édouard 13, 50n76 Global North 4, 23, 64, 166, 169, 171 global zombie imaginary 7, 16, 163 Glover, Kaiama 64n12, 74n24, 81n46, 107n18 on the Haitian zombie 11, 14, 16, 26, 30n9, 36–37, 61, 100, 103 Golem 8 Gonâve, La (island) 60 Gordon, Rae Beth 65, 69, 76 Gottin, Katia 30nn9–10 Griots, Les (journal) 11–12, 114 Guadeloupe 15 neocolonialism in 7–8, 17, 48 slavery abolition in 37–39, 45, 52 slavery reinstatement in 18, 27, 39, 45–49, 56 in Woman Named Solitude, A 27–28, 37–49, 57 in Zombi à Chabine 23 zombie in 3–9, 12–14, 25–26, 165, 169 Guantánamo Bay 58 Guattari, Félix 109n29 gwo bon anj 6, 86, 93, 108, 116 Gyssels, Kathleen 48n72 Hadriana in All My Dreams (Depestre) 12, 20, 62–63, 80–91, 96, 99 Haiti, occupation of see US occupation of Haiti

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Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO) 10, 60, 87, 106 Haitian Independence 3, 137, 143–45, 150–51 Haitian literary tradition 74n23, 123, 134, 137, 148 Haitian national narratives 4, 21, 103, 123, 129–31, 135, 158, 160 Haitian Revolution 112, 124, 151, 162 allegories for 14, 58 inauguration of 3, 84n52, 95, 150 in Piste des sortilèges, La 22, 141–46 in Quiet Dawn 28–37, 56 in Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie 95 in Woman Named Solitude, A 44–45, 46n62, 48 zombie and 18, 26–27 Haitian sovereignty 3, 23, 126, 151 Haitian studies 4, 14 Hallward, Peter 138n15 Halperin, Victor White Zombie 10, 58–68, 92, 101, 119, 126, 129n75, 166, 170 Hardt, Michael 112 Hazaël-Massieux, Henri Zombi à Chabine 23, 165 Hearn, Lafcadio 59n1 Two Years in the French West Indies (Hearn) 2n3, 9–10, 12 Herskovits, Melville 10 Hibbert, Fernand 137n10 “highbrow” literature 22, 107, 134n2 Hinduism 16 Hispaniola 85, 151 Hitler, Adolf 151 HIV/AIDS 3, 70–71, 155n61 Hoermann, Raphael 26 homo sacer 36, 97 Hoodoo 161–62 Hurbon, Laënnec 6, 60n4, 102, 106n15, 158n65

Hurston, Zora Neale 19 Tell My Horse (Hurston) 10, 61–62, 64, 68–70, 72–73, 93, 97, 101, 106 hypnotism 61, 65, 92, 169 hysteria 63, 65–66, 69, 74, 76–78, 88–89, 95–96 I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur) 61, 64, 66–68, 73, 96–97, 101, 166, 170 “ideal” slaves 3, 35, 43–44 In Praise of Creoleness (Éloge de la créolité) (Chamoiseau, Bernabé, and Confiant) 13, 50–51 India 8, 54 Indigenist movement 103, 114, 123, 137n10 Inglis, David 71n21 insulin shock treatment 65–67 intertextuality 16, 20, 57, 62, 82, 87, 106–7, 123, 144 Island Possessed (Dunham) 10 Israel 8 Italy 15, 23, 169 iZombie (TV series) 97–98 Jacmel 81, 85 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 5n9 Janvier, Louis Joseph “Le Vieux piquet” 144–45 Jérémie Vespers massacre 121 Jesus Christ 88, 115, 135–41, 145n34, 146–47, 158 Johnson, Jenell 67n16 Jonassaint, Emile 126 Judaism 8, 38 Judas 141, 146 Kale Zonbi (Whipping Zombie) (Ancarini) 169–70 Kee, Chera 15n27, 97n97, 135n4 Korea 15 South 8, 130 Korean War 121

Index Lacour, Auguste 38 Laferrière, Dany 4, 117 World Is Moving Around Me, The (Tout bouge autour de moi) 166–68 see also Down Among the Dead Men (Pays sans chapeau) (Laferrière) Laferrière, Windsor 117 Lahens, Yanick Failles (Fault Lines) 167–68 Land of the Dead (Romero) 17, 57–58 Lanzendörfer, Tim 15n28, 105n13 Laroche, Maximilien 5, 13n23 Last of the Just, The (Le Dernier des justes) (André Schwartz-Bart) 38 Last of Us, The (video game) 118n48 Lauro, Sarah Juliet 5n7, 9n16, 26, 35, 70n19 on the Haitian zombie 11, 12n19, 15, 28n4, 100, 103, 114, 126, 139n20 Law of 4 February 1794 38–39, 45, 52, 56 Leclerc, General 142 Legba 67 Lescot, Louis Élie 75, 82, 91 Lhérisson, Justin 137n10, 148 liberation theology 138–39 liberty/equality/fraternity slogan 36–37 Live and Let Die (Hamilton) 162 lobotomy 64–65, 67–68 lodyans genre 134, 137, 144–45, 148 Lowe, Lenny 31n17 Lucas, Rafaël 74n24 Luckhurst, Roger 15n27, 17, 104, 112 lwa 11, 67, 84, 140, 146, 150n46, 156–57, 162–63, 170 and mental illness 93, 95–96 M., Marie 62–63, 88 macandal 31n11 Magic Island, The (Seabrook) 10, 59–60, 64, 68, 87, 93, 101, 156

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magical realism 19–20 Magloire, Paul 117 Magloire-Saint-Aude, Clément 11, 101–2 Makandal, François 26, 31n11 manbo 84, 158, 170 Manheim, Ralph 40n38 marasa 108 maroons 3, 7, 12, 25, 39, 46–48, 57 Mars, Louis 94–95, 106 Martinique 3–10, 13–15, 16, 25–26, 28, 134, 165, 169 in Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows 18, 27, 49–57 departmentalization of 18, 54 English occupation of 56 in Two Years in the French West Indies 2, 59n1 Marvel 17, 152n52, 161–62 marvelous realism 74–75, 82, 84 Masters of the Dew (Roumain) 123–24, 127 Maximin, Colette 74, 79n42 McAlister, Elizabeth 6, 116–17, 139n19 McCusker, Maeve 55 Ménil, René 7, 9–10, 12, 50–51 mental health/illness 16–17, 19–20, 59–98 Mesmer, Franz 65 mesmerism 15, 65, 92 Messianism 138–39, 144 métisse 39n27 Métraux, Alfred 31n13, 101n4, 150 Voodoo in Haiti (Le Vaudou haïten) 10–11, 40, 57, 60n2, 61, 63, 106n14, 162 Michel, Claudine 4n6 Middle Passage 52, 171 MINUSTAH forces (Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti) 134–35, 147n36, 152–53, 157 Miragoâne uprising 145 Moïse, Jovenel 1–3, 7 Moniz, Egas 68

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The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction

Monsanto 159 Montero, Mayra 6n9 Moreau de Saint-Méry 9 Morne à Cabris 142 moun andeyò 22, 136–37, 143, 146, 154 mulatto elite 74, 88 Munro, Martin 82, 123, 127, 138n13, 138n15, 139 Myal (Brodber) 5n9 Napoleon Bonaparte 27, 37, 39, 45–46, 52, 56, 95, 142, 170 Nau, Ignace 62 Nazis 38, 104n12, 151 Neo-Nazis 153 necropolitics 3, 23, 168 Negri, Antonio 112 négritude 7, 13, 50 neocolonialism 18, 23, 25, 49, 53, 55, 60, 91, 92n85, 163, 165, 168 in Guadeloupe 7–8, 17, 48 New Orleans 161–62 Night of the Living Dead (Romero) 4, 57, 161, 166 zombie hordes in 15, 17, 20–21, 99–100, 111, 116, 119–21, 128–30 noiriste ideology 11, 154 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) 23, 168 Nouvelliste, Le 22, 134, 148 N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José 161n69 Operation Uphold Democracy 122 oungan 6, 63, 96, 151 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth 9n16, 62, 84n52 Parisot, Yolaine 137n12 Passage of Darkness (Davis) 6n10, 28n4, 61n6, 64, 71, 107, 139 Pessini, Elena 84 Pétion, Alexandre Sabès 142–43 PetroCaribe 2n1, 157

Philoctète, René 29, 107 Pierre, Romulus Les Zombis en furie 12 pierre de Damballah (stone) 22, 135, 147–54, 162–63 Pierre de Damballah, La (story) see Revenant, Le (Victor) Pineau, Gisèle Drifting of Spirits, The (La Grande drive des esprits) 14 Piste des sortilèges, La (The Trail of Curses) (Victor) 22, 133–47, 149n44, 151, 154, 160 plantations 25, 27, 29, 42, 46–47, 49, 52, 66, 110, 168–69 coffee 161 proposed reinstatement of 142, 146, 151 sugar 32–39, 167 Plat de porc aux bananes vertes, Un (Plate of Pork with Green Bananas, A) (Simone and André Schwarz-Bart) 38 Point-à-Pitre 45 policing 54–55, 127, 148 popular zombie 7, 16–17, 22, 131, 161 in Amours d’un zombie 133–35, 155–60 in Piste de des sortilèges, La 133–46, 160 in Revenant, Le 133–34, 146–54, 160, 162–63 in Tales of the Zombie 161–62 populism 4, 22, 136, 145–46, 151, 155, 158, 160–61 Port-au-Prince 71, 73, 77, 87n70, 91, 105, 115, 117–18, 156, 162 in Amours d’un zombie, Les 156 earthquake (2010) 2n2, 3, 23, 129, 147n36, 159, 165–68 newspapers in 22, 148 in Quiet Dawn 35–37 in Revenant, Le 162 possession (spiritual) 29n6, 84, 93–95, 170

Index postcolonialism 28, 30, 130, 134n3, 136, 146 Pressley-Sanon, Toni 15n27, 158 Préval, René 134–35, 147–48, 157 Price-Mars, Jean 11, 87, 94, 137n10 Ainsi parla l’oncle (So Spoke the Uncle) (Price-Mars) 11, 87 Prieur, Petit-Noël 141–43, 146 psychiatry 19–20, 59–98, 102, 128 psychopharmacology 71 psychosurgical treatments 67–68 puppet presidents 22, 135, 155, 157–58 Pygmalion 8 Quiet Dawn (Aube tranquille) (Fignolé) 18, 26, 28–37, 40, 49, 56, 102n5, 146n35 race 39, 58, 60n4, 68, 77n31, 80n45, 153 métisse 39n27 racism 80 Ramsey, Kate 60n3, 152n51 Rastafarians 54–55 Raynal, abbé de 43 Red Scare 104n12, 121 rejete period 151 Renda, Mary 151n51 restavèk 69, 107 Revenant, Le (Victor) 17, 22, 133–35, 146–55, 157, 160, 162–63 revenants 8–9, 51, 55, 160, 171 Revue indigène 11–12 Rhys, Jean Wide Sargasso Sea 5n9 Robertson, Pat 3 robots 30n8, 51, 104 Romain, Jean-Baptiste 127 Romero, George Land of the Dead 17, 57–58 see also Night of the Living Dead (Romero); Romero-style zombies Romero-style zombies 4, 15, 57, 99–100, 111, 116, 119–21, 128–30, 166 post- 98, 112, 127

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Rosello, Mireille 39n37 Roumain, Jacques 11, 155n61 Masters of the Dew 123–24, 127 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 43 Ruche, La (journal) 75, 82, 91 Saint-Domingue 6, 9, 26, 46n62, 56, 104, 149n44 abolition of slavery in 52 revolution in 28–29, 34, 36, 45, 151 Saint-Jean Bosco massacre 138 salt 21, 72, 74n24, 80, 116, 167 in Affres d’un défi, Les 26, 28, 104, 106, 109–15, 122, 156 in Amours d’un zombie, Les 155 in “Chronicle of a False Love” 78 in Dézafi 37, 108 in Hadriana in All My Dreams 83 in Magic Island, The 60, 101, 156 in Quiet Dawn 31 Sam, Vilbrun Guillaume 2 schizophrenia 30, 66, 88 Schwarz-Bart, André 3 Last of the Just, The (Le Dernier des justes) 38 Plat de porc aux bananes vertes, Un (Plate of Pork with Green Bananas, A) 38 see also Woman Named Solitude, A (La Mulâtresse Solitude) (Simone and André Schwarz-Bart) Schwarz-Bart, Simone 3 Bridge of Beyond, The (Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle) 13, 38 Plat de porc aux bananes vertes, Un (Plate of Pork with Green Bananas, A) 38 see also Woman Named Solitude, A (La Mulâtresse Solitude) (Simone and André Schwarz-Bart)

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Seabrook, William 19, 72, 106, 114 see also Magic Island, The (Seabrook) secret societies 71, 85, 124, 149, 149n44, 151n48, 153 Senegal 23, 171 Serpent and the Rainbow, The (Craven) 71–72, 87, 162n72, 170 Serpent and the Rainbow, The (Davis) 28n4, 61n6, 71–72, 87 sexual violence 10, 67, 84, 111, 118 in Affres d’un défi, Les 117 in “Chronicle of a False Love” 20, 73, 79–80 by MINUSTAH forces 147n36 in Quiet Dawn 26, 30, 32–33, 37 in Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie 91–92, 96 in Woman Named Solitude, A, 39, 44 Shaviro, Steven 15, 130 Sheller, Mimi 99n2 Slave Old Man (L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse) (Chamoiseau) 13 slave revolts 18, 26, 58 in Affres d’un défi 106, 109n30 in Quiet Dawn 28–29, 34–35, 37 unthinkability of 3, 18, 27, 29, 35, 37, 58 in Woman Named Solitude, A 48–49, 56 slave trade 5, 7–8, 17–18, 25, 67, 168, 171 in Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows 52, 55 in Quiet Dawn 28, 34 in Woman Named Solitude, A 27, 39, 41–44 slavery reinstatement 38, 170 in Guadeloupe 18, 27, 39, 45–49, 56 in Haiti 142, 146, 151 in Martinique 52 sleepwalking 30n8, 44, 65, 92, 99, 166 social death 93n86 Soir, Le (journal) 137, 148

Soro (Victor) 167–68 sovereignty 3, 23, 68, 126, 151 Spain 150 Spiralism 14, 29, 30n10, 107 spirit zombie (zonbi astral) 6, 25, 29–32, 115–16, 142 Stockholm syndrome 92 Sugar Hill (Ichaso) 162 sugar plantation industry 10, 33, 41–43, 60, 66, 87, 101, 106, 167 Suisses 36–37 surrealism 11, 84 Taíno People 150 Tales of the Zombie (Marvel) 161–62 Tell My Horse (Hurston) 10, 61–62, 64, 68–70, 72–73, 93, 97, 101, 106 Tenga, Angela 15n28 Thorazine 65, 72 ti bon anj 6, 64, 81, 83, 86, 95, 108, 116 Ticket Magazine 148 tonton makout 12, 21, 75, 103, 115, 117–18, 121, 140–41 totalitarianism 21, 82, 100, 103, 105, 112, 114–15, 119, 122–23, 129–30 Tourneur, Jacques 19 I Walked with a Zombie 61, 64, 66–68, 73, 96–97, 101, 166, 170 Toussaint Louverture, François 142 Trail of Curses 136–37, 139–40 Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie (Haitian Vodou Trances for Dearest Amélie) (Chenet) 20, 62–64, 91–97 trauma 7, 16, 57, 81 in Affres d’un défi, Les 117 in “Chronicle of a False Love” 20, 63, 73, 76, 79–80, 89–90 earthquake (2010) and 23, 166–68 in Hadirana in All My Dreams 90 in Quiet Dawn 30 in Tell My Horse 61, 69–70, 72

Index in Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie 64, 91–96 in Woman Named Solitude, A 41, 43, 56 travel writing 2, 9–10, 59–61, 64, 101, 106 Tropiques (journal) 7, 10, 12, 50 Trouillot, Lionel 12n20, 138n15, 166 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 3, 18, 29, 35, 56, 170 Two Years in the French West Indies (Hearn) 2n3, 9–10, 12 Ulysse, Gina 23, 137n8 UN occupation of Haiti 134–35, 147, 152, 157 United Nations 7, 23, 131, 122, 166 BINUH (Le Bureau intégré des Nations unies en Haïti) 157n64 Ethical Fashion Initiative 169–70 MINUSTAH forces (Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti) 134–35, 147n36, 152–53, 157 UNESCO 10, 83 unthinkability of revolt/revolution 3, 18, 27, 29, 35, 37, 58 US colonialism 1–5, 6n9, 91, 114, 130, 138n15 see also US occupation of Haiti US Constitution 13 Amendment 3 US military 121–22, 128–29 Army 126, 138 Marines 2, 143, 149, 151n51 Navy 138n14 see also US occupation of Haiti US occupation of Haiti 10–11, 60n4, 85n62, 141, 168, 170 in Down Among the Dead Men 102, 122, 126 first (1915–34) 2, 19, 59, 122, 129–30, 137n8, 138n13, 151n51 in Magic Island, The 10, 59–60

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second (1994–95) 7, 12, 23, 123, 126, 129 in Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie 91, 96 zombie and 3, 19, 70, 91, 114 USAID 159 Victor, Gary 4, 12, 23, 131, 155, 161 Soro 167–68 see also Piste des sortilèges, La (The Trail of Curses) (Victor); Revenant, Le (Victor) Victor, Marvin Corps mêlés 166 viruses 8, 58, 99 Vodou 23, 25, 139, 150n46, 161n69, 167, 169–70 in Affres d’un défi, Les 108 in Amours d’un zombie, Les 155, 157, 159 authenticity and 12 Catholicism and 11, 79n42 Duvalier regime and 11, 103, 114, 162 foreign intervention and 3–4 in Hadriana in All My Dreams 20, 81–90 in I Walked with a Zombie 66–67 in Magic Island, The 60, 68 mental illness and 59–72, 79, 81–97 pathologization of 62 in Piste des sortilèges, La 136, 145n34, 146 priests 6, 65, 151 proto- 31n11 in Revenant, Le 151–52, 154, 162–63 in Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie 20, 91–97 US/European studies of 10 in White Zombie 65 zombie as figure of 15, 19 Voltaire 43

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“voodoo” 2, 10, 19, 60, 90, 124, 126, 162 see also Vodou Voodoo in Haiti (Le Vaudou haïten) (Métraux) 10–11, 40, 57, 60n2, 61, 63, 106n14, 162 “vox zombii, vox populi” 159 Warm Bodies (Levine) 97 Warm Bodies (Marion) 97 White Zombie (Halperin) 10, 58, 101, 119, 126, 129n75, 166, 170 mental illness in 60–61, 64–66, 68, 92 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys) 5n9 Wilson, Woodrow 2 Woman Named Solitude, A (La Mulâtresse Solitude) (Simone and André Schwarz-Bart) 14, 18, 27, 37–49, 56–58, 69, 93 World Is Moving Around Me, The (Tout bouge autour de moi) (Laferrière) 166–68 World War II 7, 54, 104, 112, 152 World War Z (Brooks) 130 Zombi à Chabine (Hazaël-Massieux) 23, 165 Zombi Child (Bonello) 170 zombi-cornes 27, 37, 39–42, 44–49 Zombi du Grand-Pérou, Le; ou, la comtesse de Cocagne (Blessebois) 9 zombie armies in Crucified in Haiti 115, 117, 120, 122 in Down Among the Dead Men 102, 123–28, 160 in Quiet Dawn 26, 28, 32, 35, 37 zombie avatars 4–6, 8–9, 14, 29n6, 140, 171 definition 16–17 of mental illness 19, 65, 72, 97–98 of the popular 7, 16–17, 135, 160–61

zombi-cornes avatar 37 zombie horde avatar 20, 103, 116–23 zombie–slave avatar 15, 18, 57, 73 zombie hordes 7, 16, 101, 131 in Affres d’un défi, Les 21, 102, 104–15 in Crucified in Haiti 21, 102, 115–22, 150 in Down Among the Dead Men 21, 23, 102, 122–30, 161 in Night of the Living Dead 15, 17, 20–21, 99–100, 111, 116, 119–21, 128–30 in Quiet Dawn 36 zombie horde avatar 20, 103, 116–23 zombie ninjas 22, 148 zombie powder 6n10, 25n2, 61, 63, 71, 81, 87, 126 zombie–slave 14–16, 19 in “Chronicle of a False Love” 73 in Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows 49–57 in Quiet Dawn 18, 26, 28–37 in Woman Named Solitude, A 18, 37–48 zombie studies 4, 14–16 zombitude 6, 15n27, 167, 169 in “Chronicle of a False Love” 79 in Crossing the Mangrove 14 in Girl with All the Gifts, The 98, 118n48 in Hadriana in All My Dreams 80–81, 88, 90 in iZombie 97 in Piste des sortilèges, La 135 in Revenant, Le 149 in Tales of the Zombie 162 in Transes vaudou d’Haïti pour Amélie chérie 93, 96 in Woman Named Solitude, A 42, 44 zombi-vendors (marchandes-zombis) 27, 49, 53–56

Index zonbi astral (spirit zombie) see spirit zombie (zonbi astral) zonbi kò kadav (bodily/corporeal zombie), 10, 17, 21, 27, 52, 100, 105, 119, 135, 165–66, 168 in Affres d’un défi, Les 106

195

in Crucified in Haiti 115–17, 119 definition 6, 25 in Quiet Dawn 28–32, 37 in Voodoo in Haiti 57 in Woman Named Solitude, A 37, 39–41, 57