Zombies: An Origin Story (Part I)

I've been thinking a lot about zombies lately, and about how I'd love to teach a class on the history of zombies and zombie fiction. Funnily enough, as soon as I started setting up a post about it, I came across an article in The Atlantic that addresses the original usage of the term zombie. The article, which you can find here, reminds us that zombies were first found in Haitian slave mythology and goes on to say,

In the hundreds of years since, the zombie myth has been widely appropriated by American pop culture in a way that whitewashes its origins—and turns the undead into a platform for escapist fantasy.  

I'm intrigued by this article for a few reasons, not the least of which because I don't agree with all it says about what zombies have become. I therefore want to lay out a quick overview of how zombies have progressed over the course of the last century and then tackle the question of whether or not they have simply become escapist fantasy or have evolved into something very different from their origins, but just as important in terms of popular culture. I'll use this post to lay out what the article says and say a bit about how popular culture presents zombies before WWII (which, for me, is really the turning point in how zombies are used symbolically). Then I'll add a second post to go into contemporary zombies and what they mean today.

I'm not as conversant with Haitian zombies and the folklore behind them as I want to be. The article I cited earlier spends some time outlining the zombie's roots in Haitian culture, noting that the idea of living death comes from the belief that those who die in slavery will not be able to escape it and must continuing living as slaves forever. This becomes a potent trope for the atrocities of slavery and a way for black Haitians to work through the complicated realities of slavery at the time. After the Haitian revolution the zombie myth becomes entwined with voodoo religious practices, which the article sees as a problematic move away from a more culturally pure symbolism. It states,

The zombies of the Haitian Voodoo religion were a more fractured representation of the anxieties of slavery, mixed as they were with occult trappings of sorcerers and necromancy. Even then, the zombie’s roots in the horrors of slavery were already facing dilution.

The article thus sees every step zombies take away from their original meaning as a step away from true cultural potency. It argues that the 1932 film White Zombie takes this further, introducing white colonials as "interlopers in the zombie legend," taking things to the point where

eventually the memory of Haiti’s colonialist history and the suffering it wrought—millions of Africans worked into the grave—would be excised from the zombie myth for good. 

For me, this raises the question of whether symbolism can evolve without becoming appropriated and therefore weakened, or whether this reassignment of meaning really implies that the trope has become diluted (trope, in this instances, means something figurative, like a metaphor or symbol, that is repeated enough to become universally recognized). Zombies, then, are a colonial issue within their narrative frameworks, but are a post-colonial issue when confronted as cultural products. They are also a transnational issue, as other nations and cultures, particularly the United States, have come to see the trope as their own.

The Atlantic article goes on to say that the zombies we see in popular culture today are devoid of meaning because they are so far removed from where they began. And their prevalence in society has taken away the potency of their use in earlier narratives. While I think there is some legitimacy to these claims, I wonder if the two things cannot live side by side - contemporary zombies and their original counterparts... especially if we acknowledge how far zombies have come.

This is especially interesting because the zombies portrayed in fiction and film before WWII appear so different from those we see today. When Hollywood gets ahold of the zombie trope in the 30s, it does not initially equate zombies with the dead who rise again. Instead, zombies are somnambulists, sleepwalkers or those who live in some kind of comatose state. They are controlled by a voodoo priest or some other nefarious villain, but can be woken from that state if the villain dies. Nor can the zombie spread it's fate like a disease. Zombies and whatever evil they do can be traced back to one man or woman, and though multiple deaths usually occur in zombies films, they are always attributed to either the main antagonist or are considered collateral damage. At this stage, then, zombies are symbols of both colonial oppression and fear of the exotic Other.  Interestingly, the Haitian zombies (who are almost always present in these films) are usually just background characters, like henchmen. Things only become dire when a white man or woman is taken and transformed.

These zombies, then, are not the zombies that inhabit The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later. Could we, perhaps, therefore see them as distinct tropes? (I don't think we can, but it's a worthwhile question.) And if they are not distinct, what does that mean for how we view zombies now? That's the question I'll address in my next post...