Zombies by Quinton McCurine
It is not me but it is more myself than myself…His guts are the maze in which he has become lost himself, losing me with him, and where I rediscover myself being him, that is-monster.” –Bataillefrom the Labyrinth, the Pyramid, and the Labyrinth The zombie is a condition born during the advent of the death of history. Its unique horror has left an indelible impression on our psyches. The composition of the zombie is complex and volatile. It is a cultural cocktail that is more of a “perfect storm” than a clinical assemblage of disparate elements. After consulting with a bunch of texts and watching as many free zombie films online as I could, it is clear to me that the zombie is, among other things, a victim of language. Through its development within cinema, the zombie has evolved into quite a sophisticated creature with a global identity. This essay attempts to circumnavigate the essence of the zombie in an effort to illicit meaning from its apparent relevance. Mythology Explained The zombie was born from the arcane minds of Central African bokors. The idea was then brought to the Caribbean via the slave trade where it subsequently mingled with the tenets of Christianity. It was the writing of William Seabrook, however, that brought the perverse myth to the attention of curious thrill-seeking Americans. Seabrook’s the Magic Island, published in 1929, is an account of the author’s firsthand experiences with so-called zombies in a postcolonial Haiti brewing with resentment toward the racist American soldiers who had been stationed there since 1915. The travel journal begins by building up the suspense around the ghoulish figure only to debunk the monster myth for what it was- a construct of a paranoid post-colonial culture. Upon witnessing “zombies” in person, Seabrook was convinced that there was a perfectly sensible scientific explanation for the strange phenomenon. His book details an account found in the Haitian historical record of a man by the name of Clairvius Narcisse. Narcisse had been drugged with tetrodotoxin (a poison found in the bladder of the blowfish whose effects include paralysis), presumed dead, and buried alive. Immediately after Narcisse’s burial, his body was dug back up and brought to a sugar plantation where the owner of the plantation put Narcisse to work using the psychotropic powers of the datura plant (known for its suggestive influence and durative capability). The plantation owner compelled Narcisse to work for years while under the suggestion of these intense drugs. Narcisse was fed a strict diet free of salt (according to Caribbean folklore salt had the power to awaken a zombie) and labored continuously following the spoken commands of his “master”. According to the government’s record, the plantation owner died in a bar fight and as a result could not administer the drugs to Narcisse and several other “zombies” on his property. Soon afterward, Narcisse awakened to find himself in a foreign part of the island not understanding who he was or how he had gotten there. Clairvius wandered around the island for months before someone finally recognized him. He was welcomed back into loving arms, but unfortunately these cases didn’t always end harmoniously. There are many informal accounts of “zombies”, all victims of the same manipulation as Narcisse, simply lingering around their own grave sites perfectly alive but not willing or understanding how to confront the living after having “crossed over”. The funerary rituals and customs for dealing with the dead had forever cleaved these poor Haitians from their rightful living communities. The shame of their affliction doubles as an affront to the living, by reminding them of their slavery under the French (before their independence in 1804), and as a titanic emotional anchor that weighed down the resuscitated zombie’s expectations for their new lease on life. The real world scenarios that created the mythology of the zombie show us how a society can be transformed by constructs of language. Language has the power to influence our unconscious selves binding our actions toward unknown ends. It is not clear if language has any ambitions of its own, but the same can be said of humanity. What is important is that language, unchecked, can create for us, extremely rigid immaterial structures that our bodies and minds must dwell within. To better understand the role language plays in the formation of the zombie I would like to offer an example that can be found in nature. On a recent foray into a scientific journal, there was an article concerning the gypsy moth that piqued my interest. Biologists have been studying a particular virus found within the larvae of the gypsy moth. This virus remains dormant inside a developing larva until it matures into a caterpillar. Upon maturation, the virus usurps the biological instinct of the nocturnal insect and drives it up the trunk of a tree in broad daylight. Steered by the virus, the caterpillar slinks its way toward a sunny leaf where it then lies, motionless. After a time, the gypsy moth caterpillar gets cooked by the heat of the sun and dies. Its body soon decomposes releasing viral spores into the air. The spores then sail on the prevailing winds infecting more gypsy moth larvae hiding in the trunks of faraway trees. Using the gypsy moth as an example, language virally occupies our minds extending its power far beyond our own lives and strengthening its grip upon the social order. It is obvious to say that the zombie is a reanimated dead person. It is much more difficult to explain the nature of its newfound life. In cinema, there are many causes for the undead to rise but there is something they all have in common, the invasion of a prone body by a dominant order. Whether that order is represented as arcane voodoo conjuring or a petro-chemical radioactive mutation, the effect is still the same, desecration. The dead do not rise from their graves as if they all had been given gift cards for Best Buy on the eve of Black Friday. No, the dead are disturbed by the capricious natures of the living. Their bodies are inflated by the immoral spirit of the social order that seeks to engage their physical vessels once again. In a culture where the appearance of a person matters so much, witnessing a loved one in the abject state of decomposition would be horrifying. The human burial ritual is one of the items on a short list of traits that separate human beings from other mammals. The intrusion into the earth to affect a corpse is a radical indicator of our culture’s tendency to dehumanize. This dehumanization appears to be an effect produced from the collision of two very powerful cultural forces, the mirror and the rainbow. Physical objects being reflected upon the surfaces of glass, bronze, or turtle shells is nothing new but during the advent of Modernity the notion of reflection took on added significance. With the writings of Freud, Nietzsche and others providing the landscape for introspection, the qualia of the modern subject became ever more disenfranchised from the physical world, the body, and history. These critical minds challenged our view of the world and our role within it. They unveiled an abyss hiding behind diaphanous assumptions, an abyss that would forever encapsulate the struggle for consciousness. In our current state typified by the lack of criticality and the preponderance of the image, it is not evident that we have the ability to discern between our own reflection and our true ‘selves’. The abyss opened for “our own benefit” has been covered yet again by an adhesive plasticity that borders on the organic. Language has become so prevalent that our own reflections have become the playgrounds for marketing gurus and social networking advertisers. Our minds, our voices are not our own. Just as the finances for education are borrowed, so are our thoughts that are introduced into our minds via multimedia and the regurgitation of appropriated ahistorical content. The zombie is an individual who no longer has access to their autonomy from the symbolic order nor do they have a distinct place within it. They can only mutter primal issuances of breath that mirror their emotional confusions. The critical capacity required for the effective coalescing of unique perspectives translated by the individual into an understood lingual format is in a state of perpetual death. The dominance of the social order has trapped the zombie within its own unconscious mind letting it stir in the abyss between the physical world and the word. For the zombie, there is no vision. Its movements, however intense, must be viewed as being biological remnants of imprinted neurological behavior and not intentional or focused exertions. When a zombie encounters a normal human being its’ attraction is a metaphor for social complicity. The corrupted human form that is the zombie, strives to escape back into the essence of humanity. In a society devoid of history, the living being can be the only vassal that can contain the idea of what it means to be “human”. The undead use their numb clawed hands filled with rigor mortis, having no mind in which to investigate with, to break open the bodies of the living. And when the warmth of human flesh has waned it moves on searching for the essence that it has lost once again. To be continued…
