The Zombie that Science Built: How Bodiless Souls Became Soulless Bodies and Invaded American Roadways
Rudy Eugene, the man that was shot by police on a Miami causeway last summer for attempting to eat the face of a homeless man, was quickly dubbed “The Miami Zombie” by news outlets. Although there was initial speculation that he was under the influence of bath salts, the “new LSD”, a subsequent toxicology report showed only the presence of marijuana.[1] The Miami Zombie’s girlfriend, however, provided her own explanation for his terrifying behavior –he was “under a Voodoo curse.”[2] Her ascription of his behavior to “Voodoo” was no doubt inspired by his Haitian origins, but it also reveals the traces of a peculiar history of zombies in America. That Rudy Eugene should have been called “the Miami Zombie” rather than simply “the Miami Cannibal” or “the Miami Madman” demonstrates the salience of this particular zombie variety in the popular American imagination. But, at the same time, his girlfriend’s remarks suggest that the memory of the zombie’s origins remains. Even so, the Miami Zombie is a strange hybrid of zombies old and new (zonbisand zombies), made up of elements drawn from different moments in America’s nearly century-long fascination with the zombie. Once limited to the winding footpaths of the Haitian countryside, the zombie has become a global figure, menacing our modern highways. Once emblematic of the persistent primitivism and superstition of Africans in the “New World,” the zombie has become a universal scientific possibility. Once referring primarily to the spirits of the recently dead (as we will see), the zombie has become a body overtaken by the ravenous desire for human flesh. The so-called “Miami Zombie” is then a mixture of the old and the new; he bore in himself specific cultural and geographic origins while also displaying the zombie’s newly acquired traits and universal potentiality. The once culturally-bounded zombie has gone global.
What is not immediately clear is how the figure of the “zombie” became so salient a monster as to displace those of a more refined and European pedigree (like Frankenstein’s monster or the vampire). Furthermore, how has this specific cultural-religious entity, the zonbi (in Haitian Kreyòl), acquired these new attributes (cannibalism, insanity)? What processes transformed it into the “zombie” (the popular Hollywood variety)? How has it become a genuine and widespread anxiety in the West? This paper will suggest that the answer to these questions is intimately tied to the intervention of so-called “Western science,” which began most explicitly near the end of the US Occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). Additionally, it will argue that the figure of the zonbi/zombie is an illuminating example of the interaction and confrontation between what are popularly conceived as radically opposed modes of thought – that of “science” on the one hand and primitive thinking (the magico-religious) on the other. The popular triumphalist view of Western science has long held that one of its primary functions is to serve as a force for disenchantment and the extirpation of superstition.[3] This is achieved through the scientist’s commitment to empiricism, rationality, and the proper ascription of causation. Whereas the Haitian peasant identifies a zonbias the creation of a bokò (a Vodou priest) who is “working with the left hand” (i.e. engaged in malevolent magic), the scientist is assumed to determine the actual causes that produce what is named as zonbi. While the peasant’s ascription is considered superstition, the scientist’s is explanation.
The interaction and confrontation of these two modes of thought is illuminating, however, precisely because it disrupts some of this deeply bifurcated description.[4] Far from rescuing enlightened Westerners from the creations of primitive religious belief or superstition, the recent history of scientific interest in the Haitian zonbireveals instead the power of science to produce its own monsters in its search for proper causation. In this history, as this paper will illustrate, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and ethnobotanists serve as real-life Dr. Frankensteins whose ascriptions of causation create the new monster -- a new source of fear -- even as they seek to offer explanation. Furthermore, this history suggests that rather than a difference between ascribing proper or improper causation, which is fundamentally a value claim and thus multiply contingent, the more important difference between the Vodouisant and the anthropologist or ethnobotanist is one of scale. We will see that the abstracting and typifying logic that motivates Harvard’s “Zombie Project” as carried out in Wade Davis will be consistently frustrated by the Haitian zonbi’s resistance to abstraction. We see this in the words of Davis’s informant who claims that, Haiti will offer Davis the chemical concoction that he seeks, but it will never yield “the magic” required to use it.
This apparent failure of science to reduce the zonbi to its psychoactive chemical components, however, does not mean that Americans will never have their own zombies. For, in fact, the abstracting and typifying logics of the anthropologist, psychologist and ethnobotanist succeed in making a new, distinctly American zonbi – the zombie. Having dismantled the zonbi so as to make it available to a scientific taxonomy, the zombie is reconstituted as a universal human possibility, a decidedly translocal phenomenon, capable of altering human life on an apocalyptic scale.
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The etymological origins of the word zonbi have been debated for more than a century. Some have suggested that the word comes from the French ombres meaning “shadows”, others linked it to West Indian terms like jumbie, meaning “ghost” orzemis which referred to souls of the dead. Most recent scholarship has sought the word’s origins in the African languages of either Bonda (in which zumbi= cadavre) or Kongo (in which nzambi = spirits of the dead). Given the Dahomean, and thus Kongo, origins of much of Haiti’s population, theses final suggestions seem perhaps most convincing. However, as with so many parts of Haitian culture and language, it wouldn’t be inadvisable to imagine the word as an amalgam or several, or at least bearing multiple resonances.
The difficulty in determining the proper derivation of the word was mirrored early on by confusion in description. Much of this confusion came from the existence of what now appears to be two kinds of zonbi in the speech and thought worlds of Vodou. One zonbi, thezonbi astral, is a bodiless soul. These are spirits of the recently dead that can be captured or purchased and put to spiritual or mundane work. The resemblance between zonbi astral and the Kongonzambi has led some to consider this the most original or at least the primary sense of zonbi in Haiti.[5] The second is the zonbikadav (Fr. zombicadavre), which is a soulless body. This is the zonbi with material form, and as we will see, it is the only possible zonbi for scientific inquiry. Consequently, this zonbi, while perhaps a more recent version, is by far the most well-known and popularized zonbi. It is the zonbikadavthat will pass through U.S. immigration and find its way onto Miami’s causeways, though not without first acquiring some new monstrous qualities.
Early folklorists have provided what appear to be the earliest accounts of Haiti’s zonbi. One of the earliest examples comes from Mary F.A. Tench, who claimed that the zombi “has a trace of the vampire about it, and probably its nearest parallel is the Irish Love Spectre.”[6] Still, in the second half of her description appears a semblance of the zonbi astral. She writes, “Fortunately, it [the zonbi] sometimes appears as a small creature which can be trapped [in bottles], not killed, but henceforth in service of its captor.”[7] This version of the zonbi -- the one that could be bought and sold in bottles, used for protection, healing, or for evil – was quickly overshadowed by William B. Seabrook’s more grotesque and horrifying account of his encounter with zonbikadav.
Published in 1929, W.B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island attempts to demonstrate that “Voodoo in Haiti is a profound and vitally alivereligion”. Throughout his descriptions of Vodou, in what appears to be an effort to lend Vodou every available measure of legitimacy as a religion, Seabrook makes constant comparisons and appeals to West African religion. There was one figure in Haitian Vodou, however, that Seabrook could not comprehend because he could not link it to an African cultural past – the zonbi. Upon learning about the many creatures of Haiti including the zonbi, he remarked to his informant, “It seems to me that these werewolves and vampires are first cousins to those we have at home, but I have never, except in Haiti, heard of anything like zombies.”[8] This creature, for Seabrook, seemed “exclusively local.”[9] After listening to the remarkable stories of his informant, Polynice, about zonbis working at HASCO (Haitian-American Sugar Company), Seabrook himself was led to meet a group of zonbis working in the fields. There, though he normally had a stomach for almost anything (even for human flesh), he claims to have nearly panicked. He wrote:
“The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The whole face, for that matter was bad enough […] I had seen so much previously in Haiti that was outside ordinary normal experience that for the flash of a second I had a sickening, almost panicky lapse in which I thought, or rather felt, ‘Great God, maybe this stuff is really true, and if it is true, it is rather awful, for it upsets everything.’ By ‘everything’ I meant the natural fixed laws and processes on which all modern human thought and actions are based.”[10]
It is here, in the final years of the US Occupation, during a period of increasing industrialization and what many Haitians viewed as a re-enslavement, that Western science encounters face to face a new puzzle. Seabrook himself was certainly not a highly committed rationalist or an empiricist. Yet, this radical cultural relativist cannot help but appeal to “the natural fixed laws and processes” that the zonbithreatened to upend. Having been thoroughly shaken by his encounter with the zonbis in the field, Seabrook visits Dr. Antoine Villiers, a Haitian physician, in an effort to stabilize his thinking with a dose of Western science. Despite the fact that Dr. Villiers claimed to disbelieve the resurrection of any and all dead, including Jesus, he cannot refute the existence of the zonbi. Instead, he takes down a book from his shelf, the Code Pénal of Haiti, and points to Article 249, which categorizes as murder the use of any substance that induces a coma or lethargic state causing one to appear as dead.[11]
Dr. Villiers, while not refuting the existence of the zonbi, offers Seabrook a clue to establishing “proper” causation, and it is apparently enough to reassert the sovereignty of the “natural fixed laws” over this apparent anomaly, the sovereignty of the modern over the primitive. More importantly, Seabrook’s encounters with the zonbis in the field and the medical doctor in his office at once introduced American audiences to the zonbikadav and provided a clue that initiated Harvard University’s “Zombie Project” and the work of Wade Davis on its behalf. Science had found its zonbiand so too had Hollywood. In 1932, only shortly after the release of The Magic Island, The White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi hit cinemas. It depicted a Vodou sorcerer and factory owner who raised the dead to life to work in his factory – an obvious retelling of Seabrook’s account of HASCO. Several other similar films followed in the coming decades. The two projects sprang from the same source and would remain tightly bound – scientists would seek to explain away the (now only) corporeal zonbiand Hollywood would as quickly translate the zonbi into an ever-more monstrous source of fear. As scientific explanations of the zonbi shifted, so would Hollywood’s “zombie” acquire new attributes and come to represent new and increasingly universal threats to human existence.
The effort to materialize the zombie in America off-screenalso began with Seabrook, however. The clue given by Dr. Villiers of a “substance that induces coma or lethargic state” offered the assurance that the zonbi, like all things, could be broken down to its core constituents, its proper cause, and thereby reproduced. In his study of the Amazonian riverscape, Hugh Raffles describes the work of entomologist Henry Walter Bates as “[breaking] down the specimen into the definitive morphological elements through which it would reveal its secrets…only then, in the act of being successfully catalogued, did it become loosened from its relationship to local practice.”[12] A similar scientific logic is at work with the “zonbiologists” that follow Seabrook. For the zonbi to move from the Haitian footpaths to the causeways of Miami would require just such a breaking down and loosening.
One of the zonbi’s stop along its path is particularly important for understanding the American’s zombie’s madness and its other monstrous qualities – the psychiatric ward in Port-au-Prince. I only have time today to briefly attend to this important exchange between Zora Neale Hurston and one of Haiti’s scientific elite – Dr. Louis P. Mars – but I believe I have time to gesture to its significance. One of the most alluring chapters of Hurston’s 1938 Tell My Horse is the chapter on zombies. Here, she describes her encounter with a zombie at the Psychiatric Institute, and she even includes a black and white photograph of Felicia Felix-Mentor, with her dusty hair cropped short and her tattered clothes staring blankly at the camera. What made Felicia different from other mentally ill patients was that her death had been recorded in 1907, but she had reappeared in 1936 unable to speak or otherwise demonstrate mental clarity. For her part, Hurston defines the Haitian zombie as “bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were dead, and after that they were called back to life again.”
Unsurprisingly, the authenticity of the case did not go uncontested. Dr. Louis P. Mars, who trained in medicine and psychiatry at Columbia University and later became dean of the Medical School at the University of Haiti (and was also the son of Protestant Haitian Aristocrats!) offered the most public critique of Hurston’s account in a short article he published called “The Story of the Haitian zombie.” Mars brings back into view the dual nature of the zombie, describing it as (1) referring first to the spirit of a dead person who died without having a Vodou spirit attached to his/her head and (2) referring to an entity which a wealthy farmer may have working for him. Regarding Hurston’s account, he wrote: “Evidently she got her information from the simple village folk and did not go beyond the mass hysteria to verify her information, nor in any way attempt to make a scientific explanation of the case.” He offers his own double-psychological explanation in which belief in the zombie is the result of mass-hysteria on the part of the people and mental illness on the part of the so-called zonbi.
There are two things to notice here: Firstly, the appearance of the word “explanation” and its attachment only to certain kinds of discourse, that is the current “scientific discourse”. Secondly, we should notice the ascription of mental illness to the zonbi. From Dr. Mars’ perspective, it is little surprise that Hurston found her zonbi in the psychiatric ward, and Hurston herself is implicated in the mass hysteria that propagates the myth of the zonbi. There are also reasons why we shouldn’t be surprised, however – reasons that point towards the entangled fields of power that characterize zonbi science in the mid-century. Michel Foucault might have argued that, whatever the zonbiis, from the perspective of the state the zonbi is fundamentally a monster. “The monster,” Foucault writes, “combines the impossible and the forbidden.” It is, in both the “juridical and scientific tradition,” fundamentally a mixture – a mixture of two realms, two species, or even “a mixture of life and death.” The monster is born out of transgression. In the modern age, zonbis and other monsters like masturbators, pederasts, cannibals, and witches are precisely the kinds of deviants that come under the care of medical science as the “mentally ill.”
Hurston’s psychiatric ward zonbi is a crucial moment in this history. It indicates a move from the fields to the clinic, from anthropology’s fieldwork to psychiatry’s clinical work. It is also here that the zombie may pick up some of its other deviant qualities. The soulless bodies who labored quietly in the fields and stared blankly back at the anthropologist were becoming cannibals and madmen, ravenous brain-eating killers. In this way, the Hurston-Mars debate also reveals the zonbi’s resistance to abstraction and its future lines of flight.[13]
There is, however, another stop on the zonbi’s journey to the Miami causeway – Harvard’s Zombie Project. "The Zombie Project began in the spring of 1982,” Wade Davis recounts in the opening pages of The Passage of Darkness, “when the Botanical Museum at Harvard was contacted by the late Nathan S. Kline.”[14] Nathan Kline had helped to establish the Centre de PsychiatrieetNeurologie Mars-Kline, named for himself and none other than the late Louis P. Mars. With the help of McGill-trained Haitian psychiatrist LamarqueDouyon, Kline had spent years researching every popular report of the appearance of zonbis. Now, one particular story caught their attention (and even the attention of the BBC) – the story of ClarviusNarcisse. ClairviusNarcisse had died in 1962 at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital. Then, in 1980, a man who claimed to be the very same Narcisse returned to his home village and presented himself to his family members, claiming to have been made a zonbi eighteen years earlier by his brother due to a land dispute.[15] What made this case of particular interest, of course, was the nature of the institution that recorded his death. The Albert Schweitzer Hospital was “an American-directed philanthropic institution that maintains precise and accurate records."[16] In other words, his death had been verified by an approved arm of Western science, rather than by the unreliable expertise of local Haitian officials. Still, Kline and Douyon subjected the case to further scrutiny by developing a detailed and thorough questionnaire concerning “intimate aspects of the family past.”[17]Narcisse answered all of these questions correctly. They even enlisted the forensic expertise of Scotland Yard to match his fingerprints with those of the once dead Narcisse. His story, therefore, was a special one. Both his death and his reappearance had survived the initial scrutiny of science.