The Zombie Hero of our time

 

On July 11, 1980, there was a traffic accident, a collision,  on the road in the hills above a Club Med in Haiti. One of the involved persons, Emerson Douyon, was a criminologist and anthropologist from Canada. He wrote an article that begins with the details of the accident, and its cause, which was as follows: in the backseat with Douyon was a man who, as the taxi driver in front understood from the conversation they were having, was dead. The name of the man was Clerveus Narcisse. The taxi driver, learning that he had a dead man behind him, panicked and ran into the car in front of him.

Douyon’s introduction to the crossroads of beliefs, practices and crimes is a clever way of showing how the questions asked by policemen and judges derive from classifications that may not completely hold in a population that believes, for instance, in zombies.

Narcisse claimed that he died in the Schweizer Hospital in Deschapelles in Haiti in 1962. There is a folder in the Hospital that shows that a man with that name did die in the Hospital in 1962. This became an issue when Narcisse went to the Hospital in 1980, for a hernia issue. The American doctor there refused to process him, since he was dead, officially. His case, however, was taken over by a Haitian doctor, who performed the necessary operation on the hernia. In the opinion of the Haitian doctor, being dead on a piece of paper and even being buried didn’t necessarily mean that you were dead dead.

Narcissse was one of a “chain of subjects” who researchers were interested in, victims of a ritual that made them ‘morte apparente’ in vaudou. Douyon’s brother was a doctor in Haiti. He himself was interested in the zombie as a victim. This is not a viewpoint that we often encounter: zombie-ism as a crime, perpetrated against someone.

It is an interesting transmutation, on several levels, that led from the zombie as victim of a ritual in Haiti – a crime victim, which has been judged in Haitian courts - and the movie and tv zombie.

The latter has become, for better or worse, one of the great symbols of our age. My off the cuff theory about the plague of zombies is that it is the mirror of the age of Porn. Probably at no time ever have adolescents had such total access to the imagry of fucking as they have today. It is a piece of our social construct that we have no real theoretical framework for. Of course, we know the male bourgeois European in the 19^th century went to brothels as a matter of course, and we know that a great deal of the urban population, fed by a continuous migration from the country, drifted now and then into prostitution and out. But there is a living difference between the nineteenth century experience and our sensu-surround porncast experience since the 1980s, just as we have no total grasp of the effect of the phthalates, phenols, organochlorines, perfluoroalkyls and polyfluoroalkyls, metals, air pollutants and polybrominated diphenyl ethers that are in the things we eat, the wrappings of the things we eat, our deodorants and sprays and plastics and the thousands of minutia that have coated us, infested us, travelled through us and out as consumers.    

The media zombie is, in almost all respects, different from the porn actor or actress. The latter are at least made up to be sexually attractive, with a fetishistic emphasis on dick, pussy, ass, tits, etc., etc. The zombie, on the other hand, is all decay. The high concept of a beautiful zombie has not emerged from the media soup because it violates the sexually depressed or negated being of the zombie. I exempt here Daybreak, but the show is clearly cheating, a raid on vampire motifs that has been grafted onto the zombie. There are definite family likenesses between the zombie and the vampire, but the former is, by the narrative logic in which it figures, essentially non-sexual. Unlike other animals, the zombie does not reproduce sexually. It simply decays and eats.

The slave, of course, did reproduce sexually, and his or her children were sold – were slaves themselves. Under the sign of this inhuman terror, one created by the colonizer, the White Mythology (in which the colonizer is always implicated) created its fetishes and its elaborate erotic mythologies. But the zombie, by its death, is transported into a new and horrible chapter of slavery, a sort of Eros degree zero, where even the emancipation of death is denied. Narcisse claims that after his death he was “resurrected” and forced to work for 18 years. He eventually escaped, and his case was heard in court.

The close tie between slavery and the zombie has been shuttled off by the media zombie, of course. Wokeness – by which I mean consciousness of history – has not touched this theme.

Thus, the zombie. The zombie decays – although it is an F/X mystery how far and to what degree that process of degree proceeds - and eats. Its eating is its reproductive act – it is by biting that the zombie makes other zombies. The undead inversion of sex is, of course, sexually coded. Otherwise, the zombie would not haunt the media. However, it is an odd sexual power.

As Mario Praz noticed, the Byronic hero in early nineteenth century literature had strong links to the vampire and the sexual automats in Sade. It is a bit of an exaggeration to say that the zombie plays a role in our present circs not unlike the Byronic hero of yore – but where is the fun in not exaggerating? Certainly I’d link the odd moral panic about AI to the omnipresence of zombies. AI, of course, supposedly doesn’t decay, and simply eats and eats information – which it then spits out. Brainless, sexless intelligence – for this eating and spitting thing is labelled intelligence by peeps who think that intelligence is a high score on a test. Those aren’t my peeps. Mass produced – exactly as zombies are mass produced in apocalypse movies.

I am waiting for a zombie Hero of our Time, a zombie that goes beyond death to ultradeath, and comes out beautiful. Because though the networks, Silicon Valley and a gaggle of billionaires are all determined to make us believe that chains are forever, I’m betting on emancipation. Clerveus Narcisse escaped. And that does make him a Hero of Our Time.