Review:
Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History, (London, 2015).
It is believed in the American South that the Devil can be met at a desolate cross-roads.
“It was very dark and eerie,” wrote the young anthropology student documenting Catholic occult belief in a system of practices known by the short-hand Hoodoo. “I was genuinely frightened.”
She concludes: “It was a very long hour. I hope never to to meet its brother.”
The Victorian academic anthropologist rarely found himself out of an arm-chair. Social Darwinism dominated and it was commonly believed (as it still is today despite pretences to the contrary) that humans outside Western Europe are intellectually undeveloped, backward and superstitious. Those that roused themselves out of the comforts of their universities would assist King and country, enthusiastically participating in colonial military adventures and massacres. Yet, by the 1920s, the discipline was changing; especially in the United States of America. The man responsible was a professor at Colombia University: Franz Boas. In stark distinction to his contemporaries in the United Kingdom and elsewhere at the time, Boas advocated relativism and keeping an open-mind in matters of culture. He encouraged his students to embed themselves deep into the culture of their study and lose their perspective as observers from another culture. This was how Zora Neale Hurston, the young black writer, associated with the Harlem renaissance of the 1930s, found herself waiting for the Devil in the middle of nowhere.
To appreciate the immensity of the task Roger Luckhurst has set himself, deciding to author a short academic introduction to the cultural history of zombies, a comparison may be made to a similar work, Les Zombies: Ou Le Secret Des Morts-Vivants by C.H. Dewisme (written in French and untranslated) published in 1957. Dewisme was well-qualified to author a book on zombies: his career credits include speculative fantasy and science fiction novels, and comics. His work, like Luckhurst’s, serves as a succinct and authoritative introduction to the subject. It begins with analysing the mood of a painting depicting a moonlit scene in a grave-yard: a witch-doctor in a straw hat, carrying a tamtam drum and a whip, making his way to an open grave. It shifts to a discussion of initial accounts of the phenomena of zombies reported by William Seabrook’s Magic Island (1942). Seabrook, an eccentric ‘modern primitivist’, would boast, among many things, dabbling in BDSM photography and turning into a Japanese native, that he was the first writer to introduce the word ‘zombie’ into the English language. Moving on to discussing the role voodoo plays in a society like Haiti (a former French colony in the Caribbean; the first and only republic to win independence militarily by defeating the pre-imminent naval powers of Europe in the late eighteenth century), Dewisme’s account shifts to the zombie films of the time— eight in total. Dewisme’s book concludes with a photograph that Zora Neale Hurston returned from in Haiti (where she went to study on a two-year Guggenheim grant). It was the first physical image that claimed to document an actual zombie: a woman in a mental asylum named Felicia Felix-Mentor. |
| This photograph is the first public document of a "zombie" |
Luckhurst adroitly ploughs through it all. The book runs chronologically, beginning with the travel accounts of folklorist Lafcadio Hearn, summarising the political history of Haiti as an important periphery of European imperialism. Then, the book picks up some serious steam. Marshalling Weird Tales, an institution of speculative literature, as an important source of American voodoo lore is a notable outstanding feature of this book. The final chapter that discusses the films of various nations and the role medical science now plays in preserving humans in a state between living and dying makes insightful reading as well.
What happened in these years between Dewisme and Luckhurst? How did zombie-lore go from being a small, tightly defined area of expertise to a subject that involves everything from capitalism to infectious diseases; a subject so complex that it almost impossible to define a zombie precisely?
The answer, the experts would agree, is the 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead directed by George Romero.
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| The first of Romero's ghouls, who came for Barbara, to be mistaken for "zombies" |
Communication is a shifting quantity, a subject that involves repeated mistranslation and misrepresentation. Arguably, the comedy of linguistic and visual confusion, mixed up and vigorously shaken, finds perfect capture by the identical twins, Thomson and Thompson (from George Remi’s Tintin. As Tom McCarthy blathers on in Tintin and the Secret of Literature:
“What can this possibly mean? Tintin asks as he picks up Mitshuhirato’s cryptic wireless messages in The Blue Lotus. Here, too, is reticence; here, too, are snares and misleading signals. Here, too, is corrective unrest. ‘No, Madam, this is not Marlinspike 431. This 421, Madam.’ Correction: three, two, seven, six… Repeat…’ “Three, two, seven, six… Correction made’; ‘Correction: seven, eight, five, two. Correct it, this time!’ Another allegorical episode: these partial corrections, made to the radio-guidance system of Calculus’s trial rocket in Destination Moon, are doomed. They will never hold because the signal has been intercepted, the frequency hijacked.”
Alas! Despite his Herculean research effort, Luckhurst has been misled into dialling the wrong number. He’s got Thompson when he wanted Thomson.
Luckhurst confidently asserts:
“Japanese horror does derive some its power from the complex Shinto system of the debts and obligations between the living and the dead. Those vengeful ghosts in post-war Japanese film, from Ugetsu (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953) to Ring (dir. Hideo Nakata, 1998) are the wronged and dishonoured dead that seek recompense. But the zombie does not fit this supernatural ethos and there is no native ‘zombie’ tradition in Japan; it was imported only after Romero’s revision of the figure.”
Ghouls from antiquity involve moral debt. A ghoul is created, often by natural law, either as punishment for misdeeds, or returns from the dead to avenge a wrong. Instead of natural law, we now see the forces of science zombifying people. The monster in Romero’s film is no zombie: it’s the ghoul. And what’s more, the scientific notion of a ghoulish revived corpse is not a pioneering invention of cinema. It was done in the very first science fiction novel in English, via galvanisation, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Luckhurst is well-aware of the switcheroo. As he notes, Romero was merely freshening ghouls, inspired by a vampire film based on Richard Matheson’s novel, I am Legend. Romero’s ghouls are created by a satellite exploding in space. It was, however, the audience that confused the slow-moving ghouls for the zombies they had known from earlier story-telling traditions. This mistranslation that occurred, entirely in the minds of the public, was an erasure of Romero’s authorship. His monster had taken a name and life of its own.
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| Richard Matheson followed Mary Shelley in creating a scientific explanation for a monster phenomenon |
Different kinds of ghoulish creatures are difficult to tell apart. Telling a mummy and a werewolf may be straightforward, but a vampire from a zombie can be difficult. Hollywood routinely confuses the two, infuriating the purists who insist that there are important distinctions between these ghoulish creatures. There is no doubt that had Luckhurst got the Thomson-Thompson switch right-- if that is even possible-- there would have been an outstanding additional chapter in this book on the influences of oriental folklore (such as the Arabian Nights) on the Victorian Gothic imagination. Instead, Luckhurst left the zombie orphaned, offering a limp claim to explain the wide, popular currency it enjoys because it lacks high-culture literary progenitors. When it comes to pedigree, the zombie is a royal. There is evidence to suggest it was born in the opulence of the Mughal palaces, immortalised by the greatest story-tellers of the Dastangoi tradition.
Despite his capacity of rigorous thought and voluminous research, this error of identification by Luckhurst appears to be born by a bashful embrace of conservative sociology: Luckhurst is desperate to see Europe’s Others as noble. Yet, the Others can poison as barbarically as the way racist accounts describe. There is simply too much evidence for the role pufferfish tetrodotoxin plays in inducing waking comas for the phenomenon to be cursorily dismissed the way it is done in this book. In dismissing the findings of Hearst, Chagnon and Wade Davis, Luckhurst denies any agency of violence to victim communities of the European imperial project. Anything the sociologist on the Clapham omnibus cannot accept or explain is quickly skipped. To end, Luckhurst, talks of the South African setlotlwane: “The setlotlwane is a real being in the local cosmology with real social effects. They are not metaphors but ‘actual exercises in constructing, rather than merely representing, social realities’.’ If this is true in South Africa, why can’t it be true in Haiti?
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| Homer teaches Bart to shave because he ate pufferfish tetrodotoxin and was to die by sunrise |
It’s kind of cute how proud Luckhurst is of England’s contribution to the discussion: abolishing slavery, banning Italian films and the making of Shaun of the Dead. All grand achievements; except, slavery wasn’t abolished in British India because it was ‘part of the culture'; and, the UK’s criminalisation of comics in the 1950s, essentially criminalising the profession of children’s illustration, out of moral panic, was a crime against humanity which deserved mention.
Giggling at zombies and the mockery of voodoo is at the very core of the Christian civilising project. Yet, uncannily, it is in the home of Catholicism, where reliquaries exhibit human remains openly in church vaults, in Italy, where gladiator blood was prescribed and drunk straight from the source as medicine for epilepsy, that zombies are most popular. But Italy is not the only nation suffering from this mania.
It appears initially that the global village is obsessed with zombies. On closer examination, however, it emerges that we are like any society, since the the dawn of time, obsessed with ghouls and death. There is nothing special about the perceived mania for zombies and ghouls. It is not the monster but the technology for story-telling that has expanded and become pervasive. There was a time a human being needed to go to a gathering such as a community gathering, church or temple, to watch performances, see sculpture and frescoes to experience narrative. In our times, we are constantly bombarded with stories from all directions. Mostly, about combating bad breath with toothpaste.
Ultimately, as Luckhurst points out in the introduction, the Haitian zombie is not so much a monster but a feeling of inexplicable dread. The zombie-ghoul continues to be an uncanny manifestation of our collective fear.
The public conversation, especially in Europe, is about debt and indebtedness. Global financial institutions and markets watch the public debt of sovereign governments like vultures circling a wounded ungulate, enforcing a very puritan concept of neither a borrower, nor a lender be. Haiti, which originated the word “zombie”, where Colombus landed seeking a trade route to India paving the way for the establishment of the United States of America, was the first nation to be ruined by moral philosophy pretending to be economics (the outrageous sin being black rebellion). As David Graeber puts it in Debt:
“Haiti was a nation founded by former plantation slaves who had the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms, but to defeat Napoleon’s armies sent to return them to bondage. France immediately insisted that the new republic owed it 150 million francs in damages for the expropriated plantations, as well as the expenses of outfitting the failed military expeditions, and all other nations, including the United States, agreed to impose an embargo on the country until it was paid. The sum was intentionally impossible (equivalent to about 18 billion dollars), and the resultant embargo ensured that the name “Haiti” has been a synonym for debt, poverty, and human misery ever since.”
Haiti has since been occupied twice by the USA under the excuse of economic reform, so that it can service its public debt more efficiently. We live in a new kind of normal world. Readers may be surprised to know, as we do from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, when Ronald Reagan first introduced his idea of extreme low taxation as a way to encourage economic activity (in the Republic presidential primaries; the idea was dismissed by George Bush Snr of all people) as ‘voodoo’ economics.
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