I'm not sure about other people, but for me, I was really confused about what was the "zombi" that we see show up multiple times in the novel. For one, the spelling threw me off as usually, "zombi" is spelled as "zombie". However, there also seems to be some cultural differences between the zombi that the novel refers to and the zombie that we think about today. To the islanders, a zombi is much more than a walking corpse that eats people as depicted with the image on the side. In a book The Glittering Coronet of Isles that Rochester was reading, it describes the zombi as a "spirit of a place, usually malignant but sometimes to be propitiated with sacrifices or offerings of flowers and fruit" (107). In this sense, a zombi seems more like deity and it makes sense why the islanders would be afraid of Christophine since she was rumored to be able to control these beings.
Reading about zombi gave me a sense of deja-vu. Some time ago, I read the book called The Serpent and the Rainbow, which some of you might have heard of. The author Wade Davis goes to Haiti to discover the secrets behind the zombies that the Haitians were talking about. At first, the book was rather shocking. Zombies were always just part of my imagination before, about as real as vampires and werewolves. Apparently however, the Haitians were able to create a death-like state by applying various medicinal powders onto the wound. The person would re-awaken into a psychotic state that would resemble a zombie. The person could also be more easily controlled because they "knew" they were dead. This all sounds kind of absurd to me, but it's interesting to find out that the zombi that the novel refers to has such an unique back story.
Like many aspects of the Voodoo (Vodun, Voudou) religion, figured here as "obeah" and elsewhere as "santeria," with variations, "zombies" represent one familiar way that a genuine concept (and even reality) gets watered down when popularized (and some would say belittled) in popular culture. As a syncretic religion, blending aspects of African traditions with New World Catholic imagery and concepts, voodoo hasn't always gotten a whole lot of respect. The fear and anxiety surrounding it dates back to slavery times, when it was outlawed: the idea that the people of African descent practicing traditional rites was "dangerous" and even murderous has its roots in the fears of slaveowners.
ReplyDelete"Zombies" like the one in your illustration are fine, as a pop-cultural concept or a movie monster, but they bear almost no connection at all to the religious practices they derive from.