Haiti: Capitalism, colonialism, and zombies

Reading notes:

Zombies: A Cultural History by Roger Luckhurst (Reaktion Books, 2015)

Introduction

....The zombies do not do the cultural work of monstrous others, slimy tentacular aliens or ancient cephalopodic gods raised from the deep. Instead, they are simply us reflected back, depersonalized, flat-lined by the alienating tedium of modern existence. They are the pressing problem of the modern world's sheer number of people, the population explosion, bodies crammed into super-cities and suburban sprawls, demanding satiation beyond any plan for sustainable living. Survival horror is the crisis of the last representatives of rugged Western individualism trying to wrest themselves from the unregarded life of the anonymized mass.

     It is then a short step to reading the zombie as the symbolic figure for contemporary capitalism. The zombie is 'the official monster of the recession', a relatively new addition to 'the capitalist grotesque', one shouty Marxist tome declares. 'What is striking about capitalist monstrosity', David McNally continues, 'is its elusive everydayness.'4 Karl Marx didn't have the zombie metaphor to hand, but he did sometimes write of capital as vampiric, sucking dead labour from living bodies. Now that contemporary capitalism has become both massively more extensive (reaching around the globe) and intensive (penetrating and commodifying body and mind), this seems to make the zombie horde the privileged emblem of globalized hyper-capitalism, a runaway world always on the brink of apocalypse. Zombiedom as contagion, as sparking off exponential viral vectors through the communication networks of the global village, is only another figure for representing the risky interconnection of the world's economy. The zombie is the Gothic version of the catastrophe that haunts what sociologists call 'the risk society'. 'The deepest pleasure of the zombie story', another radical critic declares,

"lies always in its depiction of the break, that exhilarating moment of long hoped-for upheaval: the fulfilment of a sometimes avowed, sometimes disavowed, desire to see power at last unmade, laid finally to waste and torn limb from limb – and our structures of dominion and domination replaced finally and forever with Utopia, if only for the already dead."

....while there is a familiar history of the emergence of the zombie, this needs to be situated in a host of other cross-currents. The zombie is in fact one of the most unstable figures in the panoply of the undead, and has never stayed fixed for long. This is not surprising when you realize that 'zombie' is a word that emerges from the grim transports of populations between Africa, Europe and the plantations of the Caribbean and the American South. The word originates from a belief system that is a product of the slave trade plied between Africa, Europe and the Americas from the sixteenth century onwards. The zombie is rarely stable because it is a syncretic object, a product of interaction, of translation and mistranslation between cultures. Possible African linguistic candidates for the origin of the world includendzumbi ('corpse' in the Mitsogo language of Gabon), nzambi ('spirit of dead person' in the Kongo language of the Congo) and zumbi (a fetish or ghost in the Kikongo and Bonda languages). In the Caribbean, speculations on the origins of zombi include sources in Arawak (zemi means spirit) or even a Kreyòl derivation from the French les ombres. It also bears some relationship to the words 'jumbee' and 'duppy', more familiar from Jamaican folklore as umbrella terms for a wide array of ghosts, spirits and changelings. The passage of the French Caribbean zombi to the North American pulp fiction zombie in the 1920s and '30s is also a complicated but crucial story to tell.9 The American zombie is a mistranslation and weird creative elaboration of the Caribbean zombi, yet all the time it keeps an undertow of violent colonial history in plain sight.

     The zombie, in other words, is a product of what has been called 'the circum-Atlantic world': 'Bounded by Europe, Africa, and the Americas, North and South, this economic and cultural system entailed vast movements of people and commodities to experimental destinations.' This created what the theatre historian Joseph Roach terms 'an oceanic interculture' marked by the hybridization of peoples and beliefs.10 It also creates a poétique de la relation, a cross-cultural poetics.11 A crucial part of the story, then, is that the zombie is a result of the Black Atlantic, 'a webbed network, between the local and the global', a dynamic interaction of far-flung points on the map, brought into contact through centuries of maritime trade and colonization that produces unpredictable forms of cultural mixing or métissage.12 The meaning of the zombie changes radically from point to point, time to time, twisting and turning, constantly subverting, reverting and inverting itself, sometimes a positive belief held in a magical or theological frame, just as often a negative projection of primitive superstition onto others.

     If the zombie emerges in the slippage between cultures, all the same this is not a preface to celebrating the zombie as some kind of sliding signifier that can mean anything we want it to mean. Wherever it comes to stop, the zombie is still branded by the murderous history of slavery and colonial dispossession that underpins its origins. It remains connected to the meaning of Haiti and the islands of the Antilles to the modern world, and the systematic violence, expropriated labour, rebellion and revolution in those areas, however far it travels. What is complex about the figure is often the way this atrocious undertow is at once avowed and disavowed as the zombie stumbles through very different cultures.

    

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1 From Zombi to Zombie: Lafcadio Hearn and William Seabrook

....Seabrook was immersed in that strand of Modernism that expressed its disgust of bourgeois civilization after the Great War by embracing what it perceived as the 'savage' vitality of the 'primitive' black world as an answer to Western decadence and decay. This 'negrophilia' stretched from Picasso's famous use of African masks in his seminal painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) after visiting the ethnographic display in the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, to the craze around La Revue nègre in Paris in 1925, which made a star of the near-naked black dancer Josephine Baker. Paris in the 1920s was a city 'in the grip of a virus noir'.16 Michel Leiris delighted in another African American revue, Black Birds, declaring that it shattered the polite tedium of bourgeois art by reconnecting with 'our primitive ancestry', and exclaimed that the show was the perfect exemplum of 'why we have so little esteem left for anything that doesn't wipe out the succession of centuries in one stroke and put us, stripped of everything, naked, in a more immediate and newer world'.17 Seabrook was the same: he wished to 'escape modernity through initiation into blackness'.18

    

....Seabrook travelled the world in search of the wild savagery that would shake the prison of his white identity. Most often, though, he found this in the bottom of a bottle, and he wrote a remarkable memoir of his treatment for alcoholism, Asylum.

....It is only in later chapters [of The Magic Island, 1924] that Seabrook provides any proper context for his visit, when he travels to the island of La Gonave to meet its famous 'White King'. Faustin Wirkus was the American Marine Corps sergeant promoted to effective governor of this island in the Gulf of Gonave, 30 miles from Port-au-Prince. Wirkus 'ruled' this territory as the lone white American representative on the island. After Seabrook's visit, Wirkus became something of a celebrity in America, published his own memoirs and went on the lecture circuit with his 'exotic' films of Haitian life. Seabrook praises the Marine for weaving himself into peasant structures of belief and justice, rather than trying to impose foreign values: this is how Wirkus is crowned 'King', symbolic companion to the native Queen.

    The key point is that in visiting Wirkus, Seabrook's travelogue finally acknowledges that his whole trip is made possible by the occupation of Haiti by American forces in the period between 1915 and 1934. His impressions of Haiti are entirely dictated by this act of colonization, and this context is central to understanding how the Caribbean zombi made the leap to become the American zombie.

    The occupation of Haiti was part of a larger series of American interventions in the Pacific and Caribbean in the early stages of America's imperial expansion into its sphere of influence from the 1890s: the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898, the occupation of Cuba and Honduras, the creation of Panama, the troops sent into Mexico in 1914. Haiti occupied a unique position in the Caribbean in that it had been an independent republic since 1804, changing its name from Saint-Domingue to the indigenous Arawak name Haiti. It was the only state to be built from a successful slave rebellion at that time. This revolt began in 1791, started by a group of 'Black Jacobins' inspired by the rhetoric of universal liberty promised by the French Revolution; it had to defeat French, Spanish and English troops and a last Napoleonic attempt at reinvading the island before winning final independence.

    Saint-Domingue had been the most profitable colony in the French empire, pouring vast wealth into French port cities like Brittany and Marseilles from rich harvests of sugar and coffee. The wealth of a substantial portion of the French bourgeoisie depended on the output of this single colony. Its profits were so vast because the plantations exercised a brutal system of slavery that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of African slaves throughout the eighteenth century in the relentless pursuit of maximum return. The infamous newly independent black republic wrote a constitution outlawing foreign ownership of land. For this and other outrages, Haiti was demonized in white Europe and America for a century as an affront to benign accounts of the civilizing virtues of imperialism. The fledgling post-colonial state was virtually crippled from birth by the huge reparations of 150 million francs it was forced to pay in 1825 to foreign plantation owners for loss of income in return for limited trading deals. Haiti has been in debt dependency ever since.

    In July 1915, the U.S. intervened in Haiti, ostensibly to restore political stability and avoid civil war following the murder of the president Guillaume Sam, who had been torn apart by his own citizens. The Americans depicted themselves in paternalist terms, and Haiti as its savage, childish 'ward' requiring benevolent guidance. American capitalists had actually been steadily securing control of Haiti's Banque Nationale over the previous decade, and the finances of the country had effectively been taken over by the New York City Bank before the U.S. Navy arrived. Haiti was again a pioneer, this time in experiencing the neo-imperialism of global finance at the start of the twentieth century.

    American diplomats installed a new puppet president and forced the passage of a constitution which allowed for foreign ownership of land again. Much of the constitution was drafted by Assistant Secretary to the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. A $40 million loan secured from New York banks in 1919 further indebted Haiti. American capital then set about reconstituting large plantations. New business ventures, such as HASCO, were investment opportunities that promised large returns to their investors. Improvements in the infrastructure of the immiserated state of Haiti were funded by heavy taxes; most Haitians could not pay in cash and were forced to do so through the supply of their indentured labour. The return of the corvée gang within a year of American occupation, working on roads and railroads, was seen by many as the return of slavery.

    The Americans fought a long-term insurrection by guerrilla rebels (known as cacos) and also, alongside the Catholic Church and Protestant missionaries, a war against 'native superstition', which involved attempts to systematically dismantle any Vodou religious worship among the peasantry. This resulted only in a black-market trade in 'Voodoo drums' seized from honforts (ceremonial spaces) destroyed in police and army raids. In 1920, allegations about atrocities allegedly committed by Marines, reported by the black American journalist James Weldon Johnson in The Nation, resulted in an American Senate Committee inquiry that undermined the discourse of paternalism. Haiti became a political focus for black civil rights and Negritude movements across the interwar period. By 1922, HASCO was in financial collapse and had to be recapitalized. During this slump, tens of thousands of Haitians travelled to neighbouring Dominica; up to 25,000 of them were later slaughtered in the ethnic massacres of 1937 known as El Corte, 'the cutting', thousands of macheted bodies of Haitian workers flung into the Massacre River. There was also mass migration to find work in Cuba, some estimating that nearly a quarter of the male population moved in this period. A shift in American foreign policy after the election of 1933 ensured the end of the occupation in the context of non-intervention. The U.S. withdrew from Haiti on 15 August 1934.

    Seabrook's visit came towards the end of the occupation, at a time when the euphemistically named 'Hygiene Service' of the occupier was engaged in yet another major drive to disrupt an insurgency they closely associated with Vodou worship. They were being assisted by a very active Catholic Church campaign against peasant beliefs. The weirder and more sunk in superstition savage Haiti was, the more the language of Empire and Church as bringers of enlightenment justified intervention. Seabrook's Modernist primitivism clearly disliked any pious Christian interference with savage energies (his rejection of Christianity was wrapped up in his rejection of his father's evangelical ministry). This is why he approved of the king of Gonave's decision to merge with local customs rather than try to eradicate them, and why he embraced with typical colonial melancholy what he believed were the last traces of authentic rituals and customs before modernity swept them away.

    But Seabrook was also blind to the conditions that created his 'dead men working in the cane fields'. The cultural resistance to slave plantations, from a century of building nationalist myths commemorating the violent refusal of the white masters, meant that the large HASCO plant in Cul-de-Sac found it very difficult to find labour for its revival of large-scale harvesting. Gang bosses brought in outsiders under duress; they were referred to locally as zombis. If slavery is, as Orlando Patterson has evocatively put it, a form of social death, to be returned to slavery by the American occupiers was an uncanny return after a century of freedom: no wonder the 'undead' roamed the HASCO fields. 'The essence of slavery is that the slave, in his social death, lives on the margin between community and chaos, life and death, the sacred and the secular. Already dead, he lives outside the mana of the gods and can cross the boundaries with social and supernatural impunity.'33 So the imbecilic state Seabrook diagnosed could just as well have been the exhaustion of corvée work, and the shuffling gait might have come either from being in chains or from a distinctive way of moving that slaves developed to conserve energy. There is a reason why so many African American dances are based around ideas of 'the shuffle'. What Seabrook thinks he sees as a savage survival is actually a product of the very industrial modernity he believes he is leaving behind. 'Could there have been a more fitting image of and inclusive commentary on the proletarianization of the displaced Haitian peasant sharecropper than a crew of zombies toiling in the HASCO cane fields?' one historian asks.34

....The Haitian zombi has accrued a much more fixed set of cultural identifications and meanings. As my reading of William Seabrook's The Magic Island has begun to suggest, this is down to the very specific role that the black republic of Haiti has played in the colonial imagination of Europe and America since independence in 1804.

     Seabrook's sensational story of the zombie needs to be understood as the story of a creature emerging from a long history of demonization of Haiti, which was focused for decades on overheated fantasies of Voodoo, cannibalism and black magic. Once this sense of historical undertow is in place, we can begin to place Seabrook as merely one voice in the cacophony that unleashed the zombies that poured into American popular culture in the last years of the colonial occupation in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

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