The real deal?

A real live documented Haitian zombie

But probably not. Heartbreaking, I know. All of us have a tiny person within us, and that person is wearing a tinfoil hat and crammed with doubtful beliefs. F'instance, several years ago it only took a hot ten minutes at an urban myths website to realize that many "truths" I cherished, were actually pretty nutty. And so, onward in this post, to the possible reality of zombies, which was one of those "facts" I would have mud-wrestled you over.

When it first came out, I spent many happy hours pouring over Wade Davis' book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, a respected anthropologist's account of actual Haitian zombies. Later, a train-wreck of a movie was based on his book and I spent some happy time watching that too, shivering over the scary undead and marveling that zombies were real after all. Thanks to zombie-blogging, I've had occasion to revisit Davis' research and to wonder why I bought into it in the first place.

There are several problems with the Wade Davis book. Problem #1 is that the zombie powder used by witch doctors (or bokors) in zombie-making ceremonies is, on analysis, is far too weak to make a respectable zombie. You'd need a more massive amount of puffer toad plus fuga fish in the zombie powder to put someone in the comatose condition that's required. Once it's ingested, the zombie-nominee supposedly falls into a coma state so deep, it appears to mimic death. Then, after the zombie is "dead", he's quickly buried, periodically force-fed datura paste (which makes the zombie candidate catatonic) and dug up after an unspecified length of time.

Anecdotal and scientific evidence both suggest that people have been buried alive in Haiti for all kinds of reasons and that it's not uncommon. Since it's a tropical climate, the dead are buried very quickly, which increases the odds of a sad mistake. An interesting side-note is that people can and do recover from the whole puffer-fish, buried-alive, datura horror-show. But, according to Haitian bokors, if it looks like a zombie is coming to, he's just fed more datura. What supposedly emerges is a will-less, unconscious being, easily led and directed. However, that leads to another problem with Wade Davis book.

He seems to have jumped right into the whole spooky grave-corpse-witch doctor paradigm without considering any other alternatives (aka, hypotheses as used in the scientific method) to zombieville. The photo above pictures one such supposed "zombie", who was, in fact, never touched by a witchdoctor and is severely brain-damaged but is still considered a zombie, entirely for cultural reasons.

A considerable problem with the Wade Davis book is that, despite having a boatload of zombie powder, he was never able to zombify anyone or duplicate any "results" he saw. And a replication of results is the only proof the scientific method recognizes.

A later study by the British in 1993, included interviews with supposed zombies, analyzed zombie powders and various datura pastes, and ultimately concluded that these people were more likely the products of mental illness and oxygen starvation, seen in the context of voodou.

However, putting these poor souls to one side, to me, the more innaresting questions are small ones. Why do we use terms like zombie banks? And zombie creditors? Somehow we're conflating the economy plus the undead: Zombie Bankers Who Ate My Brain!

I'm not sneering at anyone's belief or joy in zombies, whatever type they prefer. It's forgivable. A quality of our species as human beings, is that we are highly suggestible. Like Kahnweiler wrote in his Introduction to the First Cubist Exhibition, We not only look at, we look for.

Right now, I think what we're actually seeing and participating in, zombie-wise, is one of our cultural allegories. We sit before our news websites, mouths ajar, goggling at will-less, unconscious, and immoral beings who can neither be held responsible or fixed.

That is a far, far scarier sight than any raggedy-ass zombie.

HERE ENDETH THE ZOMBIE CHRONICLES.

Fat zombies and other problems...

The chunky undead

As you may have figured out, I'm something of a monomaniac. Once I get into, uh, anything, I tend to keep at it until the topic/activity/chore and I are ground right into the floorboards, and my husband has to tell me what day of the week it is. But unlike a lot of obsessives, there's a more than a pinch of curiosity involved in my labors. So I've been researching zombies of all types, realizing that I may actually be looking for The Zombie Who Does Not Exist. In the last post, I took on girl zombies since I had this idea that girls were, at the very least, unwilling participants zombie-wise, and thus statistically rare. As you saw, I got my comeuppance big-time,and discovered that girls are totally enthusiastic about being zombies and would like blood to drip down their gray decaying faces 24/7. So, onward through the fog to fat zombies. I was positive there were no chubboid zombies, but check out my pix today. More where that came from too.

As half a minute's worth of the Google will show, fat zombies are not only ubiquitous, but according to the game, Doom 3, they're the most dangerous because their heft gives them momentum. However, in HellGate, fat zombies are just fat zombies, no special powers given. I think we can overlook HellGate entirely, since Doom 3 appears to be the gold standard zombie-wise. In fact, there's a certain consternation among the zombie websites about how to combat fat zombies. At LostZombies, it's strenously suggested that you not heave a fat person at a pursuing fat zombie, because you'd only wind up with two fat zombies as a result. Why you might heave anyone at a zombie, rather than just getting the fuck out of town is a question for another day. On PlanetDoom, zombie obesity is pondered, with one poster suggesting that once a body is dead and decaying, gases tend to bloat a corpse. This poster goes on to say that maybe fat zombies have been mislabeled as porkers, when they're actually just more dead than other zombies.

Since we're becoming heavier as a nation, I've wondered if zombies are just eating a richer diet and a lot more of it. Personally, I find fat zombies more appealing, since they seem to have less decay, and thus don't have the grisly display of exposed stringy muscles, body-parts and glimpses of the ribcage that skinnier ones seem to.

For myself, I've been wondering, on and off, if fat zombies might not spell the welcome end of this series. And yet...I realize I haven't considered the most important zombies of all: real zombies. The kind they create in Haiti to do the shit work like harvesting sugar cane etc. In that context, they seem mild enough and not prone to wolfing down passers-by. Anyway, their raison d'etre is to save money, since they don't eat much of the precious little there is to eat in Haiti.

Then too, as far as zombies go, I haven't considered a far more depressing kind of zombie: the symbolic kind. It's so depressing, given these troubled times, I wonder if I'm even up for exploring the topic. The fact that financial whiz-boys are talking about zombie banks doesn't seem accidental to me.

It means something is dead and stinking in the culture.

Been dead for a while, too.