It used to be that one could only be zombified if one were to die and was unfortunate enough to have one's recently interred corpse re-animated by the invocation of spells and magic. It used to be that only shamans, sorcerers and witch doctors possessed the disturbing powers to create zombies. Those days are long gone.
Zombie-lore is unbelievably popular these days due, in large part, to its appearance in books in the horror genre of fiction, graphic novels, Japanese anime, comics and its adoption (and adaptation) by producers of horror films in Hollywood. You'd be hard pressed these days to find a Namibian who hasn't heard of zombies. A couple of years ago, the term became so popular in Namibian political discourse and was bandied about so indiscriminately and with such license, most people are confused to this day a few years later, about whether or not all, or just some Namibians are zombies, and what's the precise definition of a zombie in politics.
Zombies are featured widely in Haitian rural folklore as dead persons physically revived by the actions of a sorcerer or witch. A zombie remains under the control of the sorcerer as a personal slave, having no will of its own. It is believed that God eventually will reclaim the zombie's soul, thereby making the zombie a temporary spiritual entity.
The zombie belief has its roots in traditions brought to Haiti by enslaved Africans, and their subsequent experiences in the New World. It was thought that the voodoo deity, Baron Samedi, would gather the slaves from their graves in exile to return them to a heavenly afterlife in Africa, unless they had offended him in some way, in which case they would forever be enslaved after death, as a zombie. In Haitian zombie-lore, one could save a zombie by feeding it salt. A number of scholars have pointed out the significance of the zombie figure as a metaphor for the history of slavery in Haiti.
That's the old story - the history, as it were. Skip forward to 2017 where modern zombies, as they are now presented in literature and films, can't be 'saved' or stopped by anything, forget the salt idea, save by fire or some complete obliteration caused by something similar in strength to Saddam Hussein's fictitious WMDs. Zombies now, are the carriers of deadly zombifying viruses which, horror upon horror, are contagious and they don't sneeze either so you can't tuck the bands of an antiviral mask behind your ears to prevent infection and you can't dab at a scratch with Dettol, either; they have a penchant for biting now and are constantly hungry for fresh human flesh. It's the ultimate top-of-the-food-chain nightmare - cannibalism.
To crown its miraculous image makeover, zombies these days are made to look absolutely revolting. Not far behind in the queue for the hideously grotesque, after the shiny, hyper-salivating, double-jawed alien with its elongated skull and insect-like exoskeleton, stands the human zombie; its manners and appearance not in the least calculating to please, which, I suppose, is the point. I mean, who would be repulsed and afraid at the same time of a clean, rosy-cheeked, well-dressed, smooth-skinned, coiffed and perfumed zombie snarling through expensive dental work? You'd feel curiously obliged to give it a compliment, instead, for espousing such good taste. One may even feel compelled to hold forth a limb for it to be bitten and masticated by one such specimen.
In 1929, William Seabrook published an English-language novel called The Magic Island. As inspiration for this exceptional book on the subject, he cited Article 246 of the Haitian criminal code which was passed in 1864, and asserted that the article was actually an official recognition of zombies: 'Also shall be qualified as attempted murder the employment which may be made by any person of substances which, without causing actual death, produce a lethargic coma more or less prolonged. If, after the administering of such substances, the person has been buried, the act shall be considered murder no matter what result follows.'
Seabrook's questionable interpretation of Haitian laws aside, the first film featuring a zombie appeared in America in 1932, directed by Victor Halperin, with a distinctly racist title namely White Zombie. This was its first transformation, you see, when the zombie became white. From that pertinent point onward, the zombie's career as a ghoulish entertainer took off with admirable alacrity. The zombie even made it into a James Bond film, Live and Let Die, in 1973. But, wait, give it credit also, for while the literary zombie rarely made an appearance for readers of horror short stories and novels in the early part of the previous century, spirits, daemons and other supernatural phenomena outshining it so to speak, the zombie in the interim, managed to successfully transform itself into a disease-carrying, flesh-eating abomination. In 1968, George Romero's film, Night of the Living Dead, pushed the new zombie prototype into the murky depths of the human subconscious; yes, into those primitive places and pockets of the brain where all sorts of superstitious thoughts still dwell, that threaten, at any time during the night and early hours of the morning, to reduce sane and coherent persons to whimpering, mad lumps of plasma, frightened of their own shadows.
But, I digress. Modern zombie-lore got rid of the tragic and pitiful states zombies found themselves in as slaves of evil sorcerers in Haiti, clinging to an underlying hope of someday being freed from that evil spell by a good witch with powerful juju or Baron Samedi, and returning to their homes and families in Africa. Modern zombie-lore, although the concept and name remain true to their origins in the folklore of Caribbean slaves ('zombi'), trades today in the horror of humanity at something far more disturbing and credible than the Haitian zombie's undead and involuntary slavery, namely a deadly and contagious virus. It is truly a remarkable transition, one must admit, for the humble zombie, were it not for one bitter sliver of irony in the saga - zombies supposedly spread death, condemning the infected to a state of being perpetually undead, vicious and destructive and yet death, eventually, comes for us all.
Illustration by Following The Nerd, The Overlooked Benefits of a Zombie Apocalypse written by Jessica Stranger
Source: Wikipedia
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