“How Haitian ‘zombie’ folklore entered the American imagination” by Liam Hogan
Haitian culture was being sensationalised, distorted and commodified in order to sell theatre tickets.
In 1920 a U.S. Admiral admitted that the Haitians forced into this forced labour system had been treated abominably.
There was of course resistance to the corvée system and and to the U.S. occupation in general. One of the leaders of the guerrilla forces was Charlemagne Péralte. He was assassinated by U.S. marines who were disguised as Haitians (and probably in blackface) on Halloween night 1919.
The “Haitians” in the film were white actors in blackface and their enslavement was treated as something in the background. A banality. The horror of the film is that a white person could be reduced to that state. This is partly an echo of white supremacist views contemporary with the transatlantic slave trade but also a renewal of prejudices and belief in racial hierarchies necessary to support or tolerate colonialism, past or present.
Almost 100 years later we find Blackface voodoo doughnuts on sale in Oregon.
The Oregon Constitution of 1857 included a clause that ordered that “No free negro, or mulatto, not residing in this State at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this State, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein and the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such negroes, and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the State, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ, or harbor them.”
Raphael Hoermann: “US-American writers and directors invented the zombie of popular North Atlantic culture: a soulless slave without consciousness directed by a zombie master. This amounts to a neo-colonialist act of symbolic re-enslavement of the self-emancipated Haitians. This time they are deprived not merely of their freedom as under the slave regime, but even of their consciousness.”
For the rebel slaves are characterised as either superhuman and uncannily courageous or subhuman, blindly following orders. In a letter in the Archives nationales from Pierre Mossut to the Marquis de Gallifet (1791), a slaveholder describes the rebellion [and the rebels]. He claims that “There is a motor that powers them and that keeps powering them and that we cannot come to know. All experienced planters know that this class of men have neither the energy nor the combination of ideas necessary for the execution of this project. [this planters’] choice of a mechanistic metaphor contributes to the idea that the slaves are machines run amok, inhuman, incapable of agency, the intimation being that they are under the control of an unseen force.”