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The issue is an issue that too few folks are speaking intelligently about. Hello, how are you? I really liked the article on your website I will even share it with my group. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Nathan S. Please read the Duke Wordpress Policies. Contact the Duke WordPress team. A bokor with dried specimens of Diodon hystrix puffer fish One of the most fascinating and intricate processes in Haitian Vodou is zombification, which revives the recently dead into mindless, soulless zombies.
While making the first film, Romero understood zombies instead to be the undead Haitian slaves depicted in the Bela Lugosi horror film White Zombie. By the time Dawn of the Dead was released in , the cultural tide had shifted completely, and Romero had essentially reinvented the zombie for American audiences. But the zombie myth is far older and more rooted in history than the blinkered arc of American pop culture suggests.
It first appeared in Haiti in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the country was known as Saint-Domingue and ruled by France, which hauled in African slaves to work on sugar plantations. Slavery in Saint-Domingue under the French was extremely brutal: Half of the slaves brought in from Africa were worked to death within a few years, which led only to the capture and import of more. 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.
The original brains-eating fiend was a slave not to the flesh of others but to his own. The myth evolved slightly and was folded into the Voodoo religion, with Haitians believing zombies were corpses reanimated by shamans and voodoo priests. Sorcerers, known as bokor , used their bewitched undead as free labor or to carry out nefarious tasks. However, French law required slaves to convert to Catholicism. What emerged was a series of elaborate synthetic religions, creatively mixing elements of different traditions: Vodou or Voodoo in Haiti, Obeah in Jamaica, Santeria in Cuba.
What is a zombie? In Martinique and Haiti it could be a general term for spirit or ghost, any disturbing presence at night that could take myriad forms. But it has gradually coalesced around the belief that a bokor or witch-doctor can render their victim apparently dead — either through magic, powerful hypnotic suggestion, or perhaps a secret potion — and then revive them as their personal slaves, since their soul or will has been captured.
The zombie, in effect, is the logical outcome of being a slave: without will, without name, and trapped in a living death of unending labour. The imperial nations of the North became obsessed with Voodoo in Haiti for one very good reason. Conditions in the French colony were so dreadful, the death rate amongst slaves so high, that a slave rebellion eventually overthrew their masters in Re-named Haiti from the French Saint-Domingue, the nation became the first independent black republic following a long revolutionary war in From then on it was consistently demonised as a place of violence, superstition and death because its very existence was an offence to European empires.
Throughout the 19th Century, reports of cannibalism, human sacrifice and dangerous mystical rites in Haiti were constant. The concept of the zombie in Voodoo folklore could be seen as a metaphor for slavery — but it was co-opted by American filmmakers for horror movies Credit: United Artists.
American forces attempted a systematic destruction of the native religion of Voodoo, which of course only reinforced its power. It is significant that White Zombie appeared in , right at the end of the American occupation of Haiti the troops left in These had once been immaterial spectres: now they were the very physical form of rotting corpses said to be lurching out of Haitian cemeteries.
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