Essay II: From “White Zombie” to “American Dream”
The image of the zombie today strays far from its origins in slavery. Originally, they were simply African slaves, considered to be mindless beings working about their master’s land solely for survival. Now, they are monsters that epitomize the sinful undead, reanimating a past life and essentially following the course of survival without remorse. It is interesting to see how zombies have changed over the years but to observe this remarkable and symbolic change, a look at its origin must be analyzed.
The historical center of the zombie originates from North America’s turbulent and controversial past with slavery. As early as the time of Christopher Columbus, discovering this new continent meant discovering a new society and creating a new livable area. As colonies form all over Europe began to cross the Atlantic Ocean, it became widely apparent that it wasn’t easily feasible to start their lives over. Therefore, in the mid-sixteenth century the Transatlantic Slave Trade began and lasted about 366 year until the abolition of slavery in the 1860’s. Through its course, roughly 12.5 million slaves were stolen from Africa and brought to the America’s for pure, no-strings-attached labor (“Transatlantic Slave Trade.”). Truly, it was the Caribbean colonies who mastered and succeed in slavery. In one of the most famous colonies of Saint-Dominique in Haiti; sugar and coffee thrived but they needed the labor to make it a worthwhile business. This is where the paradigm of slaves as plantation workers started and how the idea transcended across American colonies.
As African slaves were literally stolen from their tribes, a plethora of cultures and ideologies were forced into a religious coalition. This new African culture also had to adapt to their white slave master’s religion of Roman Catholicism (Batista). A strange hyper-religion formed and collectively spread across the new-found colonies. One in particular was the New Orleans colony, originally famous for the religion of Voodou which transcended the Haitian hyper-religion. As Voodou was popularized in the late 1700’s, the cultural spiritualities began to emerge. It is these spiritualities and cultural beliefs of Gods and Goddesses that cross over to present day that make legitimate Voodou partitionists a sign of the original zombie.
Analyzing a 2013 Vice short documentary of a Voodou priestess in Haiti, she practices and advocates the originally religion. In short, she celebrates the dead in a manner that brings them back to her own body, allows them to take over, and personifies their energy into a crowd. From the video she states, “I feel proud and happy because I’m going to see the most beautiful things tonight.” (Broadly). Although what she felt in that moment was pure euphoria, it is easy to see how “Voodoo” can be seen as devil worship.
“Voodoo” spelt in this form, is meant to represent the racists, ignorant version of the religion. Viewing the ceremony, an outsider would be fearful of the strange out of body experience these people were experiencing. It is also easy, then, to connect this to stereotypes of “voodoo dolls” and controlling of another person. Victor Halperin’s 1932 film White Zombie is a perfect example of this (Halperin). As the film was the first American Zombie film, it capitalized on the slave history and compares them directly to zombies. In the film Bela Lugosi’s character, Murder Legendre, charms the character of Madeline Short by using a “voodoo doll” vaguely into her shape. The charm over powers her when he simply puts his hands together as seen on the cover of the film. Doing so adds some action and visible effect to an otherwise unseen power that “voodoo dolls” stereotypically have today. Also, with movies becoming a new thing, a simple action was most likely necessary as viewers could’ve been confused by the intent of the director to simply infer that the “voodoo” effects were taking place. This stereotype creates fears among the Voodou religion which cause people to stray away from it. It is a fear of experiencing a lack of control in a society where that shouldn’t happen.
Analyzing this out of body experience further, we have to take a look at the term “zombie”. The word “zombie” can be traced back to several cultures with their own definitions. In West African culture for example, it was derived from the original term “fetish” (zumbi) which meant “spirit” or “god”. From the Louisiana Creole culture, the term “jumbie” meant ghostly shade. Similarly, with the area being largely French as well, their term they used was “les ombres” meaning shadows (Moreman). What all these terms have in common is that they are not tangible which is interesting because according to Benjamin Radford of livescience.com, he identifies zombies in today’s culture to be “the vital human force leaving the shell of a body, and ultimately a creature human in form but lacking self-awareness, intelligence and a soul.” (Radford). With original terminology stating that “zombies” were the soul, it is interesting to see that the current image of the zombie is the lack of the soul and what makes us “human”.
Therefore, having an out of body experience and experiencing a state in which the person lacks a mind soul is their lack of control. The term zombie is not only a mindless, brain-craving monster nowadays but could be generalized to the public. A plethora of states of being put us in a lack of control when we think we have it. For example, we think we control our lives as it is our decision to go to work but is it really? There are six possible motivation theories in our lives that cause us to act in a certain way. Evolutionary focus focuses on our instincts, drive reduction focuses on our needs creating drives that makes us act in order to fulfil that drive, optimum arousal, cognitive approach which focuses on rationality, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and incentive theory (Benjamin). In the contemporary society that we live in, we can eliminate evolutionary theory, drive reduction, and Maslow’s hierarchy because they focus on the basic needs when referring to work. It is possible that we go to work to experience optimum arousal but speaking from personal experience, nine out of ten times that is not the case. The cognitive approach and incentive theory are the two that I believe make us want to go to work. We understand that we must make rational decisions to allow us to find a career and become monetarily successful. The incentive for going to a job, at it’s least, being financial reward. In this way, I believe that Americans are a new form of zombies that reincarnate the Haitian slave zombies but society has made it seemingly okay for us to have to work tirelessly to form the idea of success in our mind. Today, zombies are the working-class Americans which have no race, no color, and no master but their own minds and society itself.
Batista, Christine. “Zombies.” ILS 4180 Things That Go Bump in the Night. ILS 4180, 8 Apr. 2019, Denver, CO, Johnson & Wales University.
Benjamin, Zamzow. “Motivation Lecture Notes.” ILS 2325 Economics of Sin. ILS 2325, 13 March. 2019, Denver, CO Johnson & Wales University.
Broadly. Meet the Vodou Priestess Summoning Healing Spirits in Post-Earthquake Haiti, Broadly, 26 Apr. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqSrTRu53Jc.
Halperin, Victor, director. White Zombie. White Zombie, Amazon Prime Video, 1933, www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B074V22GSM/ref=atv_dl_rdr.
Moreman, Christopher M, and Corry Jasmes Rushton. “Introduction.” Race, Colonialism, and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations and Traditions, Christopher M Moreman and Cory James Rushton, 2011, pp. 1–12.
Radford, Benjamin. “Voodoo: Facts About Misunderstood Religion.” LiveScience, Purch, 30 Oct. 2013, www.livescience.com/40803-voodoo-facts.html.
“Transatlantic Slave Trade.” Slavery and Remembrance, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2019, slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0002.
