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For the Day of the Dead, and the festival of Santa Muerte, a meditation by Amy Wilentz on zombies:
… Most people think of them as the walking dead, a being without a soul or someone with no free will. This is true. But the zombie is not an alien enemy who’s been CGI-ed by Hollywood. He is a New World phenomenon that arose from the mixture of old African religious beliefs and the pain of slavery, especially the notoriously merciless and coldblooded slavery of French-run, pre-independence Haiti. In Africa, a dying person’s soul might be stolen and stoppered up in a ritual bottle for later use. But the full-blown zombie was a very logical offspring of New World slavery…
The only escape from the sugar plantations was death, which was seen as a return to Africa, or lan guinée (literally Guinea, or West Africa). This is the phrase in Haitian Creole that even now means heaven. The plantation meant a life in servitude; lan guinée meant freedom. Death was feared but also wished for. Not surprisingly, suicide was a frequent recourse of the slaves, who were handy with poisons and powders. The plantation masters thought of suicide as the worst kind of thievery, since it deprived the master not only of a slave’s service, but also of his or her person, which was, after all, the master’s property. Suicide was the slave’s only way to take control over his or her own body.
And yet, the fear of becoming a zombie might stop them from doing so. The zombie is a dead person who cannot get across to lan guinée. This final rest — in green, leafy, heavenly Africa, with no sugarcane to cut and no master to appease or serve — is unavailable to the zombie. To become a zombie was the slave’s worst nightmare: to be dead and still a slave, an eternal field hand. It is thought that slave drivers on the plantations, who were usually slaves themselves and sometimes Voodoo priests, used this fear of zombification to keep recalcitrant slaves in order and to warn those who were despondent not to go too far…
There are many reasons the zombie, sprung from the colonial slave economy, is returning now to haunt us. Of course, the zombie is scary in a primordial way, but in a modern way, too. He’s the living dead, but he’s also the inanimate animated, the robot of industrial dystopias. He’s great for fascism: one recent zombie movie (and there have been many) was called “The Fourth Reich.” The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North Korea; he’s the man, surely in the throes of psychosis and under the thrall of extreme poverty, who, years ago, during an interview, told me he believed he had once been a zombie himself…
Apart from remembering those who have gone before, what’s on the agenda today?
Raven
My ex is coming to town today, haven’t seen her in more than 10 years when she moved and we adopted the doggie that she and I had when we were together.
Mariefla
Coming from the land of zombies, may I say that zombies do not eat brains. Zombification is usually done as a punishment for some horrible crime that the person may have done. Not having a reliable or honest justice system, this is sometimes the only recourse that someone may have to justice.
Raven
Lookin like some gang bangin dudes in that video.
R-Jud
It’s my birthday. Celebrations delayed until the weekend owing to a 6-foot snowdrift of work. Perhaps I should say “celebrations”, as I will be participating in this nonsense. At least we have a good dinner lined up afterwards.
Phylllis
Day 2 of antibiotic + the really good cough syrup you can only score from the doc these days to treat my annual bout of bronchitis. Had hoped to go into the office for about a half-day, but it’s not looking too promising at this point.
Raven
“I think any dog could be trained in either discipline,” answered Justice Department lawyer Joseph Palmore.
“Can they be good at bombs, but not good at meth?” the chief justice persisted.
“I think once a dog kind of chooses a major, that’s what they stick with,” Palmore posited.
“You don’t want coon dogs chasing squirrels,” agreed Justice Antonin Scalia.
Frankensteinbeck
(I wish to begin with a disclaimer: I think knowing more about the slave culture of the Americas is both morally and historically wise, and I’m happy with the article – except for the generalization I’m about to dispute.)
The zombie is not a New World phenomenon. Only a couple of tiny details, particularly the name, is a New World phenomenon. All of the cultures of Europe and pretty much everywhere had their fear of the walking dead, a fear that came in two main varieties: Evil people whose hate would keep them functioning even after death, or a belief that a dead body is an empty vessel waiting only for an evil spirit to enter it to come back to life. These beliefs were not rigidly codified, and they overlap with our legends of witches, vampires, demons, and everything else that goes bump in the night. Most European burial customs have very little to do with preparing you for heaven and a great deal to do with ‘How far underground do you think we need to put the body to be sure it won’t get out?’
Schlemizel
@Raven:
Jay-zus! I thought people trained in the legal profession had a better vocabulary than that. This court shatters a lot of illusions about things like competence and erudition.
As for remembering those that have gone before – I’m still trying to remember why I am going right now!
My 2 FB posts from last night:
OMG! THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE HAS BEGUN!! WE ARE DOING OK SO FAR – I HAVE KILLED 3 SMALLER ZOMBIES SO FAR! ODD THOUGH, THEY ALL WERE CARRYING CANDY – DO YOU THINK THAT IS SIGNIFICANT?
NEARLY OVERRUN – TOO BUSY TO KEEP UPDATING – AT LEAST 2 DOZEN DEAD ZOMBIES IN YARD, ALL SMALL ONES. THEY SEEM TO BE SLOWING DOWN NOW – UPSIDE IS EACH SEEMED TO HAVE A BAG OF CANDY SO OUR SUPPLIES ARE ACTUALLY INCREASING!!
Elizabelle
@R-Jud:
Happy Birthday.
JPL
@Raven: The cockapoo theory was spot on. Who doesn’t love little dogs? Since I didn’t know coon dogs aren’t suppose to chase squirrels, I found the article informative. Because I live in a state where if I feel threatened, I suppose I could just shoot the dog. How much is this war on drugs costing us?
hep kitty
Chris Christie Just Posted Dozens Of Pictures Of His Trip With Barack Obama
kay
Republicans here are absolutely convinced they are going to win. Now, they have been sure they were going to win for a while, but the Mittmentum narrative has really driven them past the point of no return.
There was nothing, nothing to indicate a Romney lock in Ohio, but they listen to pundits on Mittmentum and they ALL believe it.
Tuesday night is going to be interesting. If they lose, I wonder if there will be any kind of reckoning, any anger towards the folks who led them to believe this.
Ecks
The only problem I have with thie metaphor to slavery is that zombies, at least in the modern western sense, aren’t at all useful as labour. Sure they don’t complain, but they don’t file or operate drills or direct traffic well either. They just shuffle slowly about looking for brains to eat, and posting articles from Reason on the office bulletin board.
jwb
@kay: Won’t the response be: “the Kenyan usurper stole it”?
kay
@jwb:
These aren’t Kenyan usurper types. They’re usually rational.
I think 2 things happened. They thought Obama was really, really unpopular going in, never as true as it was presented to be, and then they believed the Mittmentum mania.
Those two things fit together, Obama hate (exaggerated) leads to Mittmentum (also exaggerated) so I could see how they got there, but this is ridiculous, the level of faith.
gnomedad
@kay:
My guess: no. They will be all about vote fraud and impeachment. They have been soaking in “unskewed polls” and are counting down the minutes until they are rid of the Commie Mooslim Usurper. I fear a freak-out of dangerous dimensions; I hope I’m wrong.
danielx
Zombie Republicans are threatening to eat my brain.
Raven
Halperin was pretty funny repeating several times “Republicans are going to FREAK OUT if Obama wins”!
Hell yes!
JPL
Voters still remember how the Republican in office responded to Katrina and now they have the opportunity to see how a well managed FEMA responds. This is not good news for McCain.
danielx
@kay:
Shorter: no.
Seriously – when did wingnuts ever exhibit any anger towards those Dear Leaders actually responsible for a Grade A fuckup?
Schlemizel
@kay:
Towards the liars that have been fooling them for years? Not hardly. I worry about the rest of us though. They will sure as hell blame us
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
I have nightmares of very angry, heavily armed white guys who think the Negroes stole their country.
El Cid
This is a very biased and partisan view of slavery, which fails to mention all the good things about slavery. More liberals trying to justify the evil War of Northern Aggression.
Geoduck
@R-Jud: Is it intentional that the website offers almost no clue as to what you’ll actually be doing?
Gin & Tonic
Off the wall, but when did the periods between words for emphasis become de rigeur? I mean where “really.strong.assertion” is stronger than “really strong assertion.” I see it all the time now, and don’t think I did a year or two ago.
JPL
@R-Jud: Happy Birthday!
Dominick Argento was clued in the NyTimes crossword today and someone on the crossword blog linked to this piece.
kay
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
My sister thinks people are sick and tired of hysteria, and as the economy gets better, will start ignoring most ginned-up outrage and drama coming from media-conservatives, post-election.
I think I agree with her.
R-Jud
@Geoduck: @Geoduck: Yes. We know that there will be six different workouts; we know the moves that will be used and what the standards are; we know what time our teams are on deck for each one. But that’s it.
I am praying I don’t get stuck with a pull-up workout. I can barely manage one.
Narcissus
@Frankensteinbeck: My favorite are the traditions in some parts of Europe where dead bodies are dug up pre-set amounts of time later, just to be sure. I think it’s Romania, actually.
@Raven: Think about how freaked out Halperin is going to be.
Ben Cisco
Nate Silver just went all in. Bonus points for smacking Mourning Joe around too.
Chyron HR
@kay:
And yet every ad on the site this morning is warning me about RUSSIAN NUKES OMG.
merrinc
@Ecks in #13: “[Zombies} just shuffle slowly about looking for brains to eat, and posting articles from Reason on the office bulletin board.”
Thanks for the morning guffaw!
@Ivan Renko in #22 “I have nightmares of very angry, heavily armed white guys who think the Negroes stole their country.”
I have a friend from high school and college who I keep in touch mainly via FB. We were both poli sci majors and were legislative interns together way back when. He went through college on the ROTC program and retired from the Marines. He’s always been on the right, me always on the left but we usually find some area of agreement and have had many interesting discussions over the years.
I blocked him on FB last month after a steady stream of “BUY AMMO” posts, accompanied by private messages which insisted that the country would riot if Obama is re-elected. He’s one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known and while I’m sure he’s not racist (he voted for Obama in 2008 but mainly because he hated Palin), he’s also got one of the worst cases of ODS I have ever seen. And he probably owns enough guns to start his own militia.
Cmm
@kay:
Nope. My bet is that they will assume their pundits were right and the other side won by cheating.
Santiago
@Ben Cisco: Popcorn!
Elizabelle
Anne: Enjoyed Amy Wilentz’s essay about New World zombies.
Had forgotten about Baron Samedi, and how interesting that Papa Doc adopted his costume in public.
RE Republican zombies: they’ve been feeding on our flesh long enough.
Looking for some Tea Partiers to get trounced, and for the wailing to begin.
Suffern ACE
Not gonna whine, but I would like my cable back and reliable wireless service restored. I went from wifi, to 4g, to 3G to E to O. What the heck is O.
jibeaux
Kay, my guess is they blame it on the storm. Because the Mittmentum was totally taking off / about to take off / etc., when the storm hit. Also too Christie’s a sellout.
Elizabelle
@kay:
Interesting comment. Too much emphasis on their faith: religious, faith in the free market (hardly free, but they refuse to see the manipulations), faith that God smiles on them and they will never need government aid or protection, since they have faith they (alone) control their own destiny. Faith that they’re not in the 47% Romney was dissing, despite evidence to the contrary.
On our side: faith in Nate Silver, who trades in reason and rational analysis. (And may it not be misplaced!)
Faith in science, that’s warned of global climate changes and its potential threats to human environments.
Faith in good laws, justly derived and applied. Laws that can be retooled and strengthened (or lessened) as circumstances warrant. Regulation based on reason that protects our financial markets, consumers, ethically run businesses of all sizes.
Cmm
Re: zombies. I think their popularity in the last decade is more a response to the overall zeitgeist is the feeling that people in charge don’t know what they are doing and between things like 9/11 and economic craziness we are sliding into chaos. The zombie thing isn’t so much about the zombies as it is about the survivors, fighting them. The zombies put a face and a body on the anxieties about larger institutions failing, leaving us all on our own, and it becomes very simple. To survive you have to fight, and aim for the head. The survivors are the ones able to comprehend what is happening, the ones who don’t believe it and who are not prepared fall quickly. The survivors were prepared and ready. Although it is not a world anyone actually wants to live in, there is a sort of mad joy in mowing down clear enemies, particularly in video games where you don’t have to think long term. It also feeds into so many other things going on–affirming the survivalists who stockpile supplies and weapons and ammo; zombies as the faceless hordes of society’s dependents coming to get you, or alternately as the giant herd of stupid people blindlybelieving any misinformation and mobilized by the few with the power, but who don’t control them entirely and they can get loose and lurch around wrecking things (hmm sounds like the tea party and their candidates).
El Cid
@Cmm: These are people who would include “getting more votes” as cheating, even without respect to their made-up ‘voter fraud’.
By definition, Democrats getting votes is cheating. Democrats using their elected office to do things Republicans don’t want is cheating. Democrats (god forbid actual liberals or heaven-forfend leftists) saying things they don’t want said is cheating.
Any effort or outcome against their most fervid desire is cheating.
El Cid
@Cmm: And we seem to go through these cycles, and partly I think zombie fascination is the result of vampires (and werewolves to a lesser extent) being waaaayyyyyy overdone the last couple of decades, and also because zombies are the perfectly acceptable targets in first-person shooter games.
Original Lee
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko: Given what I’m seeing on FB from the wingnuts on my newsfeed, I am 100% with you. Yesterday one of them started posting links to a story about voting machines that were programmed to turn Romney votes into Obama votes. So they are preparing the ground for massive voter fraud court battles, at a minimum.
Schlemizel
@Cmm:
Having been to a couple of “zombie shooting” events in the last few years and seen the crowd that shows up for them I think for 75-80% of the people at these things zombies are just a substitute for the folks they fear are going to rise up and take away their gawd-given power and belongings. You know, dazzling urbanites. For the rest of us they are just socially acceptable targets because they are not human (not that the other75% don’t see dazzling urbanites as not human but you get my point).
Being a lefty with a brain going to these events is always very painful & I don’t go as often as I would want to. The competitions can be fun & the scenarios challenging but you have to put up with a lot of “black helicopters & black power is comin to git yo mama” BS that spoils it sometimes
bago
@El Cid: Zombies and nazies. The bread and butter of id.
jibeaux
I know voting is primarily a state law thing, but for the life of me I don’t know why everyone doesn’t have little scantron fill-in-the-bubble ballots. I have fond memories of voting with my parents behind the curtain, and them telling me which little circuit breakers to flip, and then them yanking that huge parking brake that cast their vote and then the curtain opening up — for teaching kids about voting, it’s unbeatable, but: hanging chads. I love wasting time on my touch-screen tablet, but: no paper trail. Everybody who made it to about the fourth grade is going to have no difficulty filling in an oval and there’s an automatic paper record. I also understand the efficiencies of mail-in voting only, although I like the civic duty part of showing up, I can’t fault it.
I mean this as a sincere question, if your state does something else or is playing around with something else, why? Are there advantages that I’m missing?
jwb
@jibeaux: So they are going to say that God hates them and sent the storm to help Obama?
Cmm
@El Cid: I agree about first person shooter games. Ones featuring zombies and assorted monsters are the only ones I can play. I am especially partial to House of the Dead games.
barath
@jibeaux:
The brilliant and awesome Debra Bowen, secretary of state of California gave a talk on why and how she concluded that fill-in-the-bubble paper ballots are the best option over all others:
https://www.usenix.org/conference/17th-usenix-security-symposium/keynote-address-dr-strangevote-or-how-i-learned-stop
jibeaux
@jwb: I’m sure that will be a variation. You know that all storms other than Katrina benefit sitting presidents, right? I’m sure it’s one of those things: No challenger has ever been elected when there’s been a huge storm within the last two weeks that has been competently managed, or something like that.
bemused
@kay:
We all hang out with people of like mind but I do think many loyal Republicans like you describe are more self-isolating than the general population. Even when they are with less conservative family, friends, co-workers who do express different views they are still convinced that the majority of Americans share their beliefs.
Paul in KY
@kay: They are probably banking on the Republican state establishment to reprise 2004.
Paul in KY
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko: I’m a white Democrat & I am heavily armed too.
Sterling
Zombies are as played out now as vampires and the mrerits of unfettered capitalism. I look forward to the day when all three largely disappear into the margins of popular culture.
Arm The Homeless
So last night we were held hostage in our neighborhood for a few hours as the cops tried to find a black bear raiding garbage cans. This is a bit disconcerting considering I was +3 by this point.
Looks like Memeorandum is all a flutter this morning with fears of a black planet. I wonder if the final days of this election will be spent trying to convince scared white people that POC are commin’ for their wimmenz … again?
I personally love it when my conservative acquaintances get all quiet when I tell them about the armory that me and my liberal friends have. It’s even better to show up to the public range with my rifle-bag festooned with Obama pins and the two small patches my dad sent back from oversees, one an American flag, one a post Saddam Iraqi flag.
Uncle Cosmo
@Narcissus: Back in the Fifties, well before the Rooskies had finally released the dental data on the burned corpses outside the Reichskanzlerei, I recall seeing a postcard with a drawing of a transparent coffin within which could be seen the-dictator-formerly-known-as-Schicklgruber’s corpse in full Naughtzee regalia, laid on its stomach. The caption explained that he had been buried face down as a precaution–if he ever woke up & started digging he would dig his way straight down to Hell where he belonged.
Paul in KY
@Arm The Homeless: Good on ya!
Maude
@Suffern ACE:
A lot of internet companies are having storm related issues. My dial up internet is fine, but I can’t call an 800 number to arrange for para transit.
It also means that my internet is faster than yours, ha, ha.
redshirt
Vampires are just sexy zombies who know how to dress.
Arm The Homeless
@redshirt: ZOINK!
Stolen … possibly with attribution.
Luckily, the fiance knows to slink-off to see Breaking Dawn during the day, so no one will know.
redshirt
@Arm The Homeless: Feel free. Mummies are just zombies that lasted a long time. That’s why they’ve got all the bandages – to keep their rotted stuff all in place.
Arm The Homeless
@redshirt: After watching Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy as a child, I couldn’t ever really be scared by them again. Although the Mummy movies might have been the pinnacle of Brendan Fraser’s career.
Gin & Tonic
@Maude:
I follow this sort of thing professionally. A lot of disaster recovery and business continuity plans will be getting rewritten after this. It doesn’t much help to have a diesel generator on the 17th floor when your fuel tank(s) and fuel pump(s) are in a flooded and de-energized basement. There are several very significant data centers within blocks of the Hudson River in lower Manhattan that are suffering this problem. It doesn’t much help to have redundant fiber paths when both paths get breached.
There are plenty of lessons to be learned.
McJulie
Zombie miscellany: The 1932 Bela Lugosi movie White Zombie has traditional Haitian zombies as described above, working a sugar plantation. There’s a horrifying scene where one of them is crushed in a giant grinding wheel.
George Romero did not call the living dead in Night of the Living Dead (1968) zombies anywhere in the script. When I saw him interviewed by Max Brooks at a San Diego Comic Con some years ago, he thought the “zombies” thing might have come from a review, but he wasn’t sure.
Zombies having a particular fondness for brains was introduced in the 1985 movie Return of the Living Dead.
Misterpuff
@Gin & Tonic: worst.observation.ever.
Mnemosyne
Ahem. May I say that I brought this subject up on B-J a few days ago when I talked about the horror classic I Walked With A Zombie, where the true underlying horror of the film is the lingering aftereffects of slavery? It’s pretty amazingly enlightened for a film that was made in 1943.
@Frankensteinbeck:
There’s a terrific book I read years ago called Vampires, Burial, and Death that goes into great (and occasionally gruesome) detail about that phenomenon and the steps that cultures take to try and ensure that their dead do not return to injure the living. There are different details in each culture (oddly, New Hampshire has its own, very specific “vampire” legends) so the overall term he uses is “revenants.”
Wilentz is right, though, that the specific details of the zombie as it developed in Haiti are very much tied in with the horrors of slavery and the fear that the master will work you to death and the revive your corpse and make you work for the rest of eternity.
Aet
“This Book Is Full of Spiders”, the sequel to “John Dies At The End”, was one of the best meta-zombie novels I’ve ever read. Just came out this month too, I think.
Zombies as monsters are that perfect combination of subtext-rich subject matter combined with a monster that can actually lose. They work as metaphors for everyone (progressives and liberals see them as unthinking mindless hordes who lack all empathy, conservatives see them as hostile inhuman invaders on their propertah that will cleanse the world of everyone not-them). They’re such a perfect Other that they serve as an Other to everyone.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of compassion
@Frankensteinbeck: Wrong. Zombie is not a general term for the walking dead. Yoruba diaspora traditions (such as Voudun) recognize all kinds of revenants that do not fall under the heading of “Zombie”. The Zombie is a very specific cultural construct that is very much a product of Afro-Caribbean cultures.
mainmati
@Frankensteinbeck: Europeans, specifically the Jews also developed the myth (from the Old Testament) of the golem, a creature created out of mud and animated by means of a Hebraical phrase written on its forehead The golem would essentially act as a dumb (literally) slave to its master. It is said to have been the inspiration for both the robot, which came from a Czech playwright in 1921 and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster.
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
So in other words, the typical Fox News watching GOP voter.
ruemara
I’ve said this before to people because it seems that as a detail, it slid past the masses. One of the goals of the Umbrella Corporation in the Resident Evil movies, is to craft a controllable undead workforce that never needs to be paid, needs health care or will make demands. Just don’t see why it’s missed when that discussion happens in movie 2.
Dallas Taylor
FWIW, I posted a response to Wilentz’ Op-Ed here.
Aet
More like a manifestation of the same concept that keeps popping up everywhere through human history. It’s a genuinely ancient concept, possibly the basis for all religious belief. We just seized on ‘Zombie’ because of cultural proximity and intermix. It’s a term that started in Africa, got imported to the south, and then got retranslated at least once, getting added to our own vocabulary around the Civil War.
Ancient humans learn that if you spend a lot of time near rotting bodies, you get sick and die yourself.
Ancients learn to dispose of bodies, usually by burial.
Scavengers dig up recently buried bodies, eat, and leave. Ancient humans come by, see partially unearthed dead body.
Superstition appears about dead coming back to life.
Ancient humans adopt complex and thorough burial practices out of that dread.
It’s ultimately the same thing, over and over, reimagined different ways. The whole ‘Voodoo’ concept is that some third party can control the dead who are not ‘properly’ buried. Since its a pagan tradition, that third party is a shaman, an evil spirit, a curse, or something else neolithic. Which in itself isn’t novel.
‘Zombie’ as a word starts appearing in English around the late 1800s. But it came to English by way of Creole from West Africa (probably: I’ve never seen primary source stuff on that). From that definition it had to do with a person who was slow-witted, mindless, or in a kind of brainless state.
This belief then gets perfectly co-opted by Hollywood and pop culture, which are always on the lookout for good ideas (and bad ones). They twist the third-party control plus mindless actions into a malevolent ‘modern’ boogeyman. Maybe that third party is a disease, a chemical, a corporation, a government, divine judgement, or whatever.
Mnemosyne
Here’s a Smithsonian story about New Hampshire’s revenants/vampires — far more than any other culture or subculture, they are strongly tied in with tuberculosis:
The Great New England Vampire Panic
Mnemosyne
@Aet:
It is pretty novel, actually — in European traditions, vampires and werewolves are self-motivated. Most of the “curse” aspect comes from films where they needed to make characters sympathetic to the audience. In Europe, the “curse” usually comes from God because the person was born left-handed, or with red hair and has nothing to do with a third party. I’m not quite as familiar with Asian legends, but IIRC they also are more about self-motivated revenants, not ones controlled by a third party.
The “third party control” does seem to be very specifically tied into African legends that were subsequently imported into the West Indies, and the Haitian zombie myth is very much a myth about slavery and a fear that a person can continue to be enslaved even after death.
I’m not sure why people are so invested in writing off the specific slavery-based details of the zombie legend as “oh, every culture has that.” Every culture has a revenant of some kind, but the Haitian/West Indian one is very clearly based in fears of slavery.