52 Making Zombies in Haiti: Technologies and Types

Overview

There is much more to zombies than meets the eye, especially the eye that knows them only from popular horror films, video games, or any other product that has been part of the zombic and apocalyptic spawn of a five billion dollar per annum industry.¹ Although there are moments in zombie cinema and English-language fiction that remain more or less true to one type of zonbi in Haiti, the vast majority of these horrific creatures that so captivate Americans and others around the world deviate tremendously from even that form, the zonbi kò kadav, literally, the “cadaver body zombie,” upon which “their” zombies are based. In Hollywood, furthermore, by 1968 zombies had become contagious agents and had developed an appetite for human flesh, ideas that are entirely unknown in Haitian zombic culture. That was also the fateful year that the zombie got tied to the apocalypse. Although other types of zonbi appear more frequently in Haitian culture, the zonbi kò kadav was the only one smuggled out of Haiti by Americans. These Americans, adventure writers, U.S. Marines, and anthropologists, seemed totally oblivious to the other kinds of zonbi that were all around them during their time in Haiti. These Americans are the subject of the following chapter, “How the Zombie Came to America.” In this chapter, our task is twofold: to explain the various types of zonbi in Haitian religious culture, especially Vodou, and to describe the various techniques and technologies that made them zombies in the first place.

Personal Encounters with Zonbi in Haiti

Zombie in a Bottle

I suddenly moved to Haiti early in 1992, just two days after my beloved mother-in-law was murdered on the road between the capital of Port-au-Prince and a smaller coastal city named Petit Goâve, may her soul rest in peace. It was utterly tragic and heartbreaking, and I had not expected to be in Haiti that year, let alone live there for the following six years, but my Haitian wife and I did precisely that. The first place that I visited upon arrival in Port-au-Prince was the morgue, and the first things I did over the next nine days were to mourn, to meet many members of my new family, to attend a viewing, and to serve as a pallbearer at the Catholic requiem Mass and then again at Le Grand Cimetière, the nation’s largest graveyard. Thousands of tombs haphazardly congest the cemetery, so navigating the narrow walkways with three other pallbearers, carrying my mother-in-law to her tomb, was quite challenging. We stepped over the wreckage of other crypts, fallen statues of saints, and even on occasion human bones. I vividly recall the Catholic priest leading us in prayer prior to the interment, then Rosicrucians and Freemasons led prayers and rituals of their own that I did not understand. Finally, the coffin was passed into the large crypt, where two men inside received it, picked up trowels, and began sealing it with cinder blocks and cement. The living left before they had finished.

Figure 11-20 : Le Grand Cimetière, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2012. Photo by Stefan Krasowski. | Le Grand Cimetiere, Port-au-Prince by Stefan Krasowski is used under a CC BY 2.0 License.

At the time, I knew little about Haitian Vodou and did not realize that I had just spent a couple of hours, under the hot Caribbean sun, in one of the religion’s holiest places. Each year, this cemetery is the site of the most resplendent ceremonies in Haiti during Fèt Gede, the Feast of Gede, the lwa of all things related to death, dying, and the dead in Vodou. I described the Feast in some detail in the previous chapter, but now we are going to focus entirely on zombies, who, in Haiti, also have a lot to do with graveyards. As an American who grew up watching too much TV and went trick-or-treating every Halloween, I had, of course, heard about zombies. Fast forward to adulthood, and from time to time over my first year or two in Haiti, a friend or relative used the term, usually in reference to a person we passed who seemed catatonic, slowly and vacantly sauntering along a street. These people seemed entirely alone in a bustling city of two million people with two functioning traffic lights, which only worked when there was electricity. My friends and relatives suspected that such solitary saunterers might be zonbi, though in retrospect I believe they were likely bereft of means and suffering from some undiagnosed mental illness.

Because I had lived in Zaire for three years, I was fluent in French and an African language, Lingala, so it didn’t take me long to learn Haitian Creole. And because I had begun doing dissertation research on Catholicism in rural Central Africa, with a focus on religious syncretism or religious translation—focusing on the Africanization of Catholic symbols and ideas—I was well positioned to learn about Haitian Vodou. Over the first few years into this Haitian odyssey, though I got to know Vodou priestesses (manbo) and priests (oungan), went to many temples and communal rituals, and spent countless days on the pilgrimage trail,² I did not see a zonbi. And I did not understand that in Haiti there are countless zombies, and most of them are invisible.

Then one day, while visiting a Vodou priest at his temple in the hills of southern Haiti, I overheard him asking his assistant (ounsi) to do something for or with the zonbi. She went into the temple, and I was, of course, quite intrigued, so I asked him: “Wait. You have zombies in there, in your temple?” The nonchalance of the oungan’s reply was a bit unsettling to me: “Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of them. Wanna see?” Clearly sensing my discomfort with the idea, he added, “Don’t worry. I am with you and would never let any harm befall you, my brother.” We entered the temple and there was a small room in the back, almost like a closet. The ounsi was there, and on a ledge were about twelve bottles (wine and rum, apparently) surrounded by lithographs of Catholic saints. Many candles were burning, and plastic flowers filled a vase, on the floor, in a small zinc basin filled with herbs and water. “There they are, the zonbi.” I shook my head and offered to take him to a nearby town for dinner. Needless to say, it was not what I had expected, and over dinner we really didn’t speak of it. But as I learned more about the religion, especially from an amazing article by an anthropologist friend named Elizabeth McAlister, I came to realize that I had seen a collection of zonbi astral, “astral zombies.” It was a far cry from the zonbi kò kadav that made its way to Hollywood in the 1930s.3 We discuss these zombic forms in another section, but first a description of my second encounter with zonbi in Haiti.

The Pentecostal Cow Zombie

It appears that Vodou is on the decline in Haiti, at least in terms of the percentage of the national population that practices the religion primarily. Generally, the post-WWII boom of Pentecostalism throughout the Caribbean and Latin America explains this. One reason is provided by Karen Richman, who finds that significant numbers of Haitian immigrants in South Florida sever their ties to Vodou spirits as part of their integration into U.S. society. Many of them convert to Pentecostal forms of Christianity: “Migrants are turning to conversion to resist their perceived domination by home kin and their spirits, and . . . have rejected the lwa . . . and joined Pentecostal churches.”⁴ Protestantism, whether in Haiti or its large diaspora, thus provides converts refuge from spirits who might strike back at their wayward sèvitè (servants) for their apostasy.⁵

Adopting a function that historically has been served by Haitian Protestantism, today Charismatic Catholicism offers a similar haven from Vodou’s sometimes taxing spiritual commitments. This represents a relatively new phenomenon in Haitian religion, a Pentecostal brand of Catholicism that began in the early 1970s. So abandoning the Vodou spirits no longer requires converting to Protestantism from Catholicism. Alfred Métraux noted this trend in Haiti over fifty years ago: “Protestantism beckons as though it were a shelter, or more precisely a magic circle, where people cannot be got at by loa or demons . . . . : ‘If you want the loa to leave you in peace, become a Protestant.’”⁶ Whereas throughout Haitian history remaining Catholic kept the lapsed or wavering Vodouist too close to the lwa to evade or ignore them, the Charismatic Renewal, because it is Pentecostal, offers the same “magic circle” to Haitians Protestantism always has. So today one may remain Catholic while turning one’s back on the ancestral spirits and safely keeping one’s distance without fear of retribution. And you can also keep your saints and rosary beads, things that are dear to most Haitian Catholics—and Vodouists.

In Haiti the faithful often witness or testify, in Charismatic Catholic healing services, to having been “liberated” from the lwa, the ancestors, and even from states of zombification. On February 19, 2002, for example, I saw one young man at a Catholic Charismatic revival, at the Marian grotto behind the Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption in Port-au-Prince, publicly witness to how conversion to Charismatic Catholicism had saved him from a zombified state. During the several weeks that he endured this condition, he lived on a farm, behaving like a cow. He fully believed himself to be a zombie cow, and that he had been rendered as such by as a Vodou priest (yon gangan) to whom he owed money. Unable to speak or otherwise govern himself as a person, he wandered about on all fours, grazed in a pasture, and drank from a trough, shoulder-to-shoulder “ak yon pakèt bèf” (“with a bunch of cows”). Then one day a sympathetic Catholic Pentecostal passerby took pity on the man, laid hands on him, prayed to Jesus, and set him free. The erstwhile zonbi quickly committed himself to the Church. His testimony that day at the grotto, to having been liberated not just from a state of zombification but from his taxing Vodouist devotions, was greeted enthusiastically by several hundred worshippers.

Figure 11-21 : Early-twentieth-century drawing of the majestic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, Port-au-Prince, Hait. Uncredited, in a book by Jacques Nicolas Léger. Sadly, the Cathedral collapsed during the tragic 2010 earthquake. | Port-au-Prince Catholic Cathedral from a book by Jacques Nicolas Léger, drawing uncredited is in the public domain.

Beyond Port-au-Prince it has become common for Catholic Charismatic “missionaries” in Haiti’s villages and mountains to exorcise spirits from people who, in their judgment, have been harmed by Vodou, a religion that they strongly demonize.⁷ Such exorcisms sometimes lead to equally dramatic conversion experiences, as in the case described above. Similarly, several Haitian Charismatics have described for me their “liberation” from the lwa upon their acceptance of the Holy Spirit in a Charismatic rite. This represents an attractive strategy for many deeply religious people in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora, as they may maintain the familiarity of Catholic practice and distance themselves from the mercurial and exigent lwa. Charismatic Catholicism thus places people beyond the reach of spirits and zombies.

Recall that Vodou is a living religion that is not centralized and has no scripture, no doctrine, and a wide array of manifestations, practices, and interpretations. The word zonbi thus means different things to different Haitians, whether mistaking an evidently mentally ill person wandering the streets of Port-au-Prince for a zonbi, immediately thinking of bottles and captured elements of human souls, or being transformed into a cow zombie by a vengeful Vodou priest. For one last example to further illustrate this point, let us consider the tragic case of Frency Vernet.

Organs and Zombies

On July 10, 1990, a seven-year-old boy named Frency Vernet and his family, all Haitian immigrants, were involved in a horrific automobile accident in Immokalee, Florida. Everyone in the car was seriously injured, but Frency’s condition was the gravest and was life-threatening. When paramedics pulled his broken body from the twisted metal, he was unresponsive and not breathing. The child was urgently helicoptered to Naples Community Hospital, where doctors sustained his life by hooking him up to a ventilator. Tragically, they soon discovered that their patient had suffered irreversible loss of brain function.

The supervisor for organ procurement at Naples Community Hospital asked to approach Frency’s father about the possibility of harvesting his son’s organs, but the man was semiconscious from his injuries, so the trauma surgeon on call would not permit her to do so. After learning that Frency’s mother had been airlifted to Lee Memorial Hospital in Fort Myers, the supervisor called the nurses there and asked them to approach her. One of the ER nurses received the call and, after realizing Frency’s mother couldn’t speak English, she sought help from a coworker who was fluent in French. “Yes, you can donate the organs,” the latter quoted the mother as saying. “I have no problem with that.”

The Fort Myers nurse relayed the dubious consent to Naples Community Hospital, where nurses and the organ procurement supervisor misspelled Frency’s mother’s name on the consent form, which they signed for her as witnesses, noting that permission had been granted telephonically. One serious problem was that Immaculata, Frency’s mother, did not speak French but Haitian Creole. Although these two languages share much vocabulary and, to the untrained ear, sound similar, they are not mutually intelligible.

The Vernet family was horrified when they learned what had occurred, and they will never be able to live in peace. As Frency’s father put it, “Frency lives in other people. In Haiti, we call that a zombie. My son can never rest in peace because he doesn’t have eyes or a heart. In Haiti, we bury the whole body – just as we came into the world.”⁸ In Vodou, respectful burial of the entire body is of paramount importance, so organ harvesting is generally considered to be an abomination, even if it is almost unheard of in Haiti.

Frency’s father believes that people who receive organs are zombies, as are people who have organs harvested from their bodies. He and his wife sued the University of Miami, the largest organ harvester in the state of Florida, and in 1998 settled out of court to the tune of $300,000. At the time, I was a professor of African and Caribbean religions at Florida International University in Miami, and when news of the settlement hit, a journalist with ABC’s Nightline asked me to appear on camera for an interview about the case. I agreed. His and his cameraman’s deadline was pressing, so I accepted their invitation to tape an interview on a Saturday, and to have them film me walking across campus pretending that I did not know I was being filmed. As I sat in a university office for the interview, and the cameraman complained that I was wearing a white shirt, I spoke freely. I said something to the effect that had Frency been white, Cuban, or Jewish, this probably never would have happened, but Haitians are expendable, their bodies long exploited, whether as slaves on sugar plantations, zombies in modern factories, or cheap sources of plasma for exportation.⁹ I was trying to lend some historical context, but evidently my comments were a bit too radical for their audience. As my family and I gathered around the TV the next night, we watched the segment, which did not have a single clip from my wasted Saturday with Nightline.

I had never heard of any interpretation in Haitian culture of the zonbi being related to organs, nor had I ever heard of zombies being cows. All of this speaks to the diversity and perhaps ever-shifting types of zonbi, the varied interpretations of zonbi in Haiti, the term’s myriad valences, and the utter power of the word itself. The cases just considered would not fit neatly into any of the categories of zonbi discussed later in this chapter, but postmodern and postcolonial theory have, for the last few decades, been challenging scholars to reconsider the categories of analysis they almost automatically employ in their research. Just as we saw in the previous chapter, with the concept of nanm, which is usually translated as “soul,” key ideas and gripping features in Haitian Vodou, like the zonbi, elude neat classification. Take, for instance, the following observation by Métraux:

Near cemeteries and in lonely places, there is risk of meeting zombi (which must not be confused with the flesh-and-blood zombie): these are the wandering souls of people who perished as the result of an accident and who are condemned to haunt the earth for as long as God had meant them to live. The same fate is reserved for nubile women who died as virgins. . . . from fear of the terrible ordeal which awaits virgins in the after life – the woman who washes a virgin’s corpse is asked to deflower the body before burying it.¹⁰

With those important, disturbing points in mind, let us sketch the chief types of zonbi in Haiti. Because the form of the zombie that made it to the silver screen, the zonbi kò kadav, though rare in Haiti, is usually zombified by way of poison, we begin with a brief discussion of the history of poison in Haiti, with some consideration of its African antecedents.

A Brief History of Poison in Haiti

In 1686, the Reverend Father Jean Mongin, a Jesuit missionary, made the following observation about Africans in the French colonial Caribbean, where he was trying to establish Catholicism in Saint Christophe (today’s St. Kitts): “Some of them are sorcerers, others employ sorcery, while still others are jugglers of these things and employ natural remedies.”¹¹ There were then relatively few African slaves in the French Caribbean colonies, but that would change dramatically over the next hundred years. When the Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791, there were more than a half-million enslaved people in Saint-Domingue. The Jesuits knew a lot about slavery, as throughout the Americas, from Maryland to Brazil, by 1760 they owned “at least 20,877” slaves, with over 1000 more in the French Caribbean colonies, including Saint-Domingue (colonial Haiti).¹² Mongin took such great interest in African sorcery and herbalism that he actually “conducted a survey of twenty-six enslaved healers.” Andrew Dial explains that Father Mongin “drew a line between those who ‘only applied certain herbs and natural remedies’ and those who ‘made it their business to cure with actual magic spells.’”¹³ Furthermore, “Mongin claimed to know several enslaved healers who were guilty of poison.” Although Jesuits recognized African herbal knowledge as having healing potency, they also greatly feared magic, sorcery, and poison, and Mongin asserted that “what really needs to be done, to provide an example, is to execute one of them.”¹⁴ Father Jean-Baptiste Labat, a Dominican friar in Saint-Domingue, would go further a few decades later in stating that “almost all blacks who leave their homeland as adults are sorcerers, or at least they have some tainting of magic, sorcery, and poison.”¹⁵ By the middle of the eighteenth century, sorcery had become so feared in the French Caribbean that additional measures were taken among French settlers and administrators to combat it. As one rather macabre example, “methods” to reveal the identity of poisoners “included digging up the heart of a poisoned slave and damaging it with quicklime or a firebrand to make the ‘author of poison fall into convulsions’.”¹⁶

“The most significant of the prerevolutionary resistance movements [in Saint-Domingue] was that led by an African named François Makandal, who for nearly 20 years struck fear in the hearts of white Dominguans by employing poison and leading his maroon followers on raids of their plantations.”¹⁷ Makandal was captured and burned at the stake in 1758, but some believe that he morphed into a fly and escaped execution by buzzing off. To this day in Haitian Creole makandal is a cognate for pwazon, “poison,”¹⁸ though the term can also refer to “an evil charm” or “a secret society or members of a secret society” in Haitian Vodou.¹⁹ He is one of the few former human beings to have become a lwa, or a spirit, in Haitian Vodou, and was most likely Kongolese, though he may have been a West African Muslim. Whatever his origins, evidently Makandal aimed to establish an independent African nation in the Americas, though many details about this legendary Black radical are disputed among historians.²⁰

Figure 11-22 : Haitian coin, now out of circulation, commemorating François Makandal. | Makandal by Author unknown is in the public domain.

In addition to poison, some amulets in Haiti (usually called pakèt or pwen) are referred to as makandal, but the entire culture of using objects to do harm is referred to as wanga, as are the objects themselves.²¹ Some are employed to do good, but generally in Haiti they are associated with sorcery and thus greatly feared. One has to pay to have wanga made, and the more you pay, the more likely they are to work.²²

Recall from Chapter Five that in 1793, M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry published his tome on Saint-Domingue (colonial Haiti), in Philadelphia. It was the second instance of the term zombi appearing in print, and the first pertaining to what is today Haiti. This appears in his discussion of African sexuality—not that the zombie is sexy or sexually active, but, per Moreau, that it is one of the few things that would scare Africans from seeking out their lovers late at night. He compares the zombie to the French revenant (one who returns to life from the grave), but offers little more in the way of description. There is no indication in the historical documents that zombies became zombies in the colonial era by way of poisoning, but they do in Haiti today. In the French colony of Saint-Domingue (1697–1804), African slaves greatly outnumbered white people, and they were feared for their knowledge and use of poisons, as already noted. A form of resistance, poisons were used against both humans and livestock. Some of this knowledge had been brought from Africa and adapted to the local flora and wildlife, as reflected in earlier observations by Fathers Mongin and Labat. So prolific was poisoning in Saint-Domingue that in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s eighteenth-century papers in the National Archives of France, I found an entire folder of primary source documents—reports, court cases, letters, and such—titled “poison,” documenting the dangers of Africans’ use thereof.

“The fear that Makandal and his fellow slaves created led to a violent backlash against slaves suspected of poisoning,” Karol Weaver explains. “In 1758, the same year that Makandal was executed, three other slaves named Samba, Colas, and Lafleur were imprisoned and awaited execution on charges of poisoning.”²³ In the following decades, the backlash proved ineffective, however, as poisonings continued, not only of white people and their livestock, but of slaves who labored on their plantations. This continued through the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), when “enslaved men and women created a revolutionary identity from Makandal’s life and legend.”²⁴

The independent Republic of Haiti resulted from world history’s only successful national slave revolt, and the new nation’s early leaders sought recognition of its sovereignty from other nations, but it was shunned. The independence won by the United States some twenty years earlier did not lead to the abolition of slavery there, unlike in Haiti. America was loath to affirm the new Caribbean republic’s legitimacy when its national economy depended so heavily on slave labor in the U.S. South. Reflective of efforts to gain recognition on the global stage, Haiti’s early constitutions declare it to be a Christian nation and, to appear as such, its leaders policed Vodou, including promulgating proscriptions against poisoning in its national penal codes. For example, in 1820, a presidential decree called on authorities to “suppress superstitious gatherings known by the names of gangan and vaudoux,” while the penal code of 1826 outlined punishments for “those who work with macandals,” which was echoed in the 1835 national penal code.²⁵

By 1864, though, the relationship between poison and zombification was clearly implied in the penal code:

The use of substances that, without leading to death, produce a more or less prolonged lethargic state is also qualified as an attempt on the life of a person through poisoning. . . . If, as a result of this lethargic state, the person was buried, the attempt will be defined as an assassination.²⁶

Here, zombification is clearly associated with poisoning and, by extension, with sorcery and spells, as sortilège (French for spell) is a word that appears frequently in Haitian anti-Vodou legal documents and in denunciatory declarations by the Catholic Church. The Church hierarchy would return to Haiti in 1860, after the Vatican finally recognized the Caribbean nation’s independence. It would not take long for the Church and the Haitian state to embark on a series of campaigns (1896–1900, 1911–1912, and 1940–1942) to weed out things like zombification, poisoning, superstition, and Vodou itself. During the U.S. Occupation of Haiti, American marines actively engaged in the attack on Vodou. General Littleton Walker noted in Senate testimony in 1921 that the Haitian Penal Code’s articles prohibiting sortilège and macandal were rarely enforced, so the U.S. Marines took it into their own hands to do so: “We broke up all their meetings, seized all their drums, etc., and wherever a voodoo drum was heard we immediately got on the trail and captured it, and broke it up, as far as we could.”²⁷

Following the U.S. Occupation of Haiti, which mercifully ended in 1934, and the last formal Catholic antisuperstitious campaign, which concluded eight years later, the zombie came back to life, so to speak. During the last anti-Vodou campaign, some “zonbi were released by their keepers, who feared they would be targeted by the mobilization.”²⁸ When the dance ethnographer Maya Deren conducted her fieldwork on Vodou in the 1950s, she found widespread fear of “the dread zonbi, the major figure of terror, who is precisely this: the body without a soul, matter without morality.”²⁹ As discussed in the next section, such zonbi, the zonbi kò kadav, are usually victims of poisoning, even though Deren doesn’t mention poison in this context. By the 1980s, writes Sarah Lauro, in Haiti “zombification becomes a means of punishing those who transgress social mores.”³⁰ In Africana contexts, many victims of poison are indeed guilty of some transgression, whether it be greed or sexual assault, but it seems to me that people who are poisoned into a “prolonged lethargic state” in Haiti are victims, their bodies dug up from the grave for labor. Meanwhile, adds McAlister, reflecting diverse forms of zonbi in Vodou:

20th century reports describe not a returned soul but a returned body – a person bodily raised from the grave and turned into a slave worker. As a spirit or a slave, complex spiritual formulae separate body and soul, and compel one or the other to work. These entities – especially the invisible zonbi astral (astral zombies) – continue to be fairly common inhabitants of the unseen mystical world of Haitian Vodouists.³¹

How does zombification in Haiti work? What are the poisons, rituals, and technologies that are involved? We turn now to these questions, but it is important to recall first that in Haitian Vodou, zombies are neither contagious, cannibalistic, nor apocalyptic. People generally do not fear them, but they do fear the possibility of their recently departed loved ones, or they themselves, being transformed into zombies in some way, shape, or form.

Zombie Technologies in Haiti

As reflected in the 1864 Penal Code, zombification in Haiti, at least in one form, is associated with poisons “that, without leading to death, produce a more or less prolonged lethargic state,” a state in which a human being might actually be “buried” only to later be clandestinely exhumed and put to work as a zonbi. This pertains only to the zonbi kò kadav, the one kind of the zombie that was brought, in literary form, from Haiti in the 1930s, which made its debut in Hollywood in the 1932 film White Zombie. In Haiti, some people are poisoned so they are near death and their burials are conducted. Then the bòkò and/or his (they are almost always male in Haiti) minions return, revive the inhumed, and either sell them as slaves or employ them themselves. Or, as we saw earlier in this chapter, one might be poisoned into a zombic cow-like state. Again, there is more to the zombie than meets the eye, and scholars of zombification in Haiti are increasingly appreciating the range of meanings of the word zonbi in Haitian Vodou.

It takes knowledge, skill, and extensive training to make zonbi in Haitian Vodou, so let us revisit the stations of religious leadership and ritual specialization in the religion. All of them, incidentally, are open to women and LGBTQ+ people with requisite vocations. The makers or takers of zonbi work closely with the Vodou spirit who rules over cemeteries, Bawon Samdi. There is really no hierarchy to the list below, as Vodou is a quite egalitarian religion, though elders and spiritual leaders do command a great deal of respect:

• Manbo – Priestess
• Oungan – Priest
• Pret Savann – Leader/reciter of Catholic liturgies, some in French, others in Latin
• Medsin Fey – Herbalist/Healer
• Bòkò – A healer and a sorcerer; purveyor of spirits, poisons, and charms
• Ounsi – A novice who assists a priest or priestess as part of her/his/their training to one day be a priest or a priestess
• Laplas – A “master of ceremonies” in communal Vodou rituals, often carrying a flag or a sword to help in their orchestration³²

Which ones make zonbi and what kinds of poisons or potions are employed for the cause in Haiti? Usually it is the bòkò (most often male) who makes zonbi, someone described by Hebblethwaite as “a Vodou priest who deals with both fret (cold) and cho (hot) lwa.”³³ As for the poisons, there are several, actually, and the science behind all this is rather astounding. According to Boston-based Haitian Vodou priest and scholar Patrick Sylvain: We “should think of zombies in terms of science . . . . poor Haitians, uneducated, without a lab, have extracted those toxins . . . to put you in a state like death.”³⁴

Surely some of these zombie poisons are entirely secretive and unknown to scholars like the controversial Wade Davis, who wrote his Harvard dissertation on this topic, which was transformed into two books. One of them was a sensationalist anthropological thriller, The Serpent and the Rainbow, and the other a more seemingly scholarly book with the somewhat spooky title Passage of Darkness. The former book was later turned into a horror film by famed Hollywood producer Wes Craven.³⁵ In the latter book we read the following description of the creation of poison used to zombify: “animal constituents,” especially “the puffer fish and the sea toads were sundried, carefully heated, and placed in a mortar.” To these were added dried lizards, spiders, and frogs, as well as human body parts, all of which were “sifted to yield a fine powder.”³⁶ So dangerous is the process of encountering zombies or of making such poisons that following their production the sorcerers (bòkò) Davis was observing “rubbed all surfaces of their bodies with oil emulsion, placed cotton plugs in their nostrils, and wrapped hemp sacks around their entire bodies.” They also wore “protective hats.”³⁷

Of the various animals used in the creation of zombie poisons, according to Davis the most important were two kinds of puffer fish (Diodon holicantus and Sphoeroides testudienus),³⁸ a toad, and a frog, though some bòkò indicated that pure magic without powders can zombify and that the most potent of all elements in zombie poisons are ground human body parts.³⁹

Figure 11-23 : The puffer fish, which is said to be the source of a toxin used to zombify humans in Haiti. Photographer unknown, 2012. | Puffer Fish from Uploader1977 is used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 License.

As for the toad and the frog? Bufo marinus is a sea toad that contains several toxins. It is more popularly known as the cane toad. The largest cane toad on record measured a whopping nine and a half inches. They were brought to Australia in 1935 to eat beetles that were destroying sugar cane, but that didn’t work out. They are known to steal pet food left outside for dogs, as well as vittles intended for the teeming herds of cattle and sheep Down Under. Interestingly, the cane toad has no natural predator in Australia and has spread across the continent. Other animals who seek to prey upon the amphibious Caribbean import sometimes die from the toxins that it carries within its body, the very toxins used in Haiti to make zombies.⁴⁰

The frog of truly zombic consequence is the Hispaniolan Laughing Tree Frog, as it is sometimes called, whose Latin species name is Osteopilus dominicensis. It spends most of its time in trees, its ribbit sounds like laughter, and it is indigenous to Hispaniola, hence the name. The tree frog secretes a toxic substance through its skin. Though it is not fatal to humans or its predators, it is, according to Davis’s research, used in zombie poisons in Haiti. It is also a symbol of the Dominican Republic today and appears in Dominican folk tales and folk songs.

In addition to substances derived from animals and insects, Davis claims that various plant species are used to zombify in Haiti. For one, Datura stramonium is a flowery weed originally from Central America that contains hallucinogenic and toxic alkaloids. It is an invasive plant species that can grow in bush form up to five feet high. Davis identified the presence of datura in the “zombie powder” that he acquired in Haiti. In his 1985 book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, he calls it the “zombie cucumber,” as part of the plant, when alive, does resemble a cucumber. Davis found elements from numerous other plant species in the various zombie powders or poisons that he acquired in Haiti,⁴¹ but datura seems to be the most significant. In terms of administration, such powders can be traced on the floor, in the shape of a cross, at the threshold of one’s house or put “inside the victim’s shoes, down his back, or inside a wound.”⁴² Once the zombie is exhumed, datura is a key element to revive it barely enough to be put to work, combined with a paste that includes “sweet potato” and “cane syrup. . . . A second dose of this hallucinogenic paste is given to the victim the morning after the resurrection, when it reaches its place of confinement.”⁴³

Although practitioners of zombification in Haiti believe that “human remains [are] critical to the preparation” of their poisons,⁴⁴ Davis takes a more scientific view and concludes that one substance, above all, is the ultimate tool for the craft, for in the process such items “are burned almost to charcoal and probably chemically inert.”⁴⁵ Tetrodotoxin is this ultimate zombifying substance, “capable of inducing a physical state that might actually allow an individual to be buried alive.”⁴⁶ Neurotoxins are found in over a thousand animals, as well as in alcohol, heroin, and cocaine, and once in the human bloodstream they alter the functioning of the nervous system. In Haiti it mainly derives from the puffer fish (fugu), which is a delicacy in Japan, where there are numerous reports of people ingesting the seafood when it is underprepared and appearing to have died, only to return to life. There, “a person declared dead from eating puffer fish must by local law and custom be allowed to lie alongside his or her coffin for three days before burial.”⁴⁷ In Vodou, meanwhile, this tetrodotoxin is “a possible material basis for the entire zombie phenomenon – a folk poison containing known poisons fully capable of pharmacologically inducing a state of apparent death.”⁴⁸

This is all interesting, of course, but it must be asked whether Davis’s findings are scientifically and anthropologically valid. One could, for instance, question his reliance on linguistic interpreters and the relatively brief time during which he traveled about Haiti in search of these “zombie powders.” To write about anything in Haiti, or anywhere else, a responsible anthropologist must, de rigueur, be fluent in the local language(s). David Ingliss has carefully considered these matters and reviewed the relevant literature, some of which decries Davis for “vulgar self-promotion, of outrageous sensationalism, of methodological naivety, of falsifying data, and of setting back the study of Haiti by fifty years.”⁴⁹ Another critic finds that Davis’s work on the zombie “falls into the fuzzy realm of literary anthropology,” while others conclude that in his work on zombies in Haiti the swashbuckling Canadian anthropologist “perpetuated a major scientific fraud.”⁵⁰ In a scathing critique of Davis’s interpretation of the case of Clairvius Narcisse, the most widely documented former zombie in literature and documentaries, C. Y. Kao and T. Yamuoto allude to its “central flaw”: Davis “is untrained in medical diagnosis” and “an objective reading of Narcisse’s health record . . . revealed that Narcisse had been ill for about a year before his terminal episode,” which seemingly resulted from “chronic congestive heart failure,” rather than from any kind of zombification.⁵¹ Kao and Yamuoto conclude their refutation of Davis’s work on zombies by raising an important moral question about the Harvard anthropologist’s having paid for and participated “in the illegal exhumation of a freshly buried child whose remains were incorporated into a sample of zombie powder. . . . The monstrosity of this moral transgression is in itself overwhelming.”⁵² Ingliss summarizes:

The anthropological critics were no less scathing. The most recurrent criticism was that despite his claims to the contrary, Davis had indeed caricatured Vodou, presenting a closed culture system which had not changed since its inception in the late eighteenth-century, and depicting it in a manner that disconnected it from social and political change, and all forms of empirical practice. . . . His field work was trounced in various ways. He had no grasp of Creole, the language of the peasantry, so his reliance on an interpreter opened up all sorts of hermeneutic pitfalls.⁵³

Be that as it may, Davis was convinced that the most famous zombie of all time, Clairvius Narcisse (1922–1994), had exhibited “the quite particular symptoms of tetrodotoxin poisoning,” adding, for good measure, one “haunting fact. Every indication pointed to the possibility that Narcisse had remained conscious the entire time. Totally paralyzed, he may have been an observer of his own funeral.”⁵⁴ Narcisse “reportedly died in 1962, in the context of a land dispute with his siblings and allegations of stinginess toward them and toward the mothers of his numerous children.”⁵⁵ Ah, jealousy, vindication, quests for some arbitrary notion of justice—the prime movers of sorcery in Africana cultures, Haiti included, and often of zombification. As. J. Lorand Matory points out, “A combination of poisoning by a bòkò in cahoots with Narcisse’s aggrieved family, Narcisse’s own belief in zombification, and ostracism by his community turned Narcisse into a socially dead, involuntary worker known as a zonbi.”⁵⁶ Narcisse was buried one day only to show up in his hometown eighteen years later after laboring for that long, supposedly as a zombie, on a sugar plantation.

Figure 11-24 : Sugar plantation in independent Haiti, circa 1820. | Planting the Sugar-Cane by Infant School Society Depository is in the public domain.

So what does it feel like after you ingest tetrodotoxin? Bòkò in Haiti described to Davis—through his presumably reliable interpreter, of course—that its “onset” was akin to “insects crawling beneath the skin.”⁵⁷ Put more scientifically by Paul May and Simon Cotton:

Within a few minutes of ingesting it, there is a tingling or numbness of the lips and tongue. This spreads to the rest of the face, then to other parts of the body, accompanied by a whole range of other distressing symptoms (vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions, etc.). As the paralysis spreads, the victim may become unable to move, but remains conscious and lucid, though speech is affected. Cardiac arrhythmias can occur and the victim eventually dies of asphyxiation. Death usually occurs within 6 h. If the victim is still alive after 24 h, they generally recover.⁵⁸

Bòkò note that “the belly of the victim swells after he or she has been poisoned” and that “even female zombies speak with deep, husky voices, and all zombies are glassy-eyed.”⁵⁹ Narcisse was taken to one of Haiti’s best hospitals when he fell ill with “digestive problems with vomiting, pronounced respiratory difficulties, pulmonary edema, uremia, hypothermia, and rapid loss of weight.” Furthermore, “at one point his blood pressure was an impossibly low 26/15,” which Davis believes was likely due to the patient’s having been poisoned with tetrodotoxin.⁶⁰ Narcisse would never leave the hospital “alive,” being pronounced dead there three days later, but he remained “fully conscious” during his burial, albeit “unable to speak or move,” Gino Del Guercio explains. “As the earth was thrown on his coffin, he felt as if he were floating over his grave.” It didn’t take long before Narcisse was exhumed and fully (supposedly) transformed into a zombie:

The night he was buried . . . a voodoo priest raised him from his grave. He was beaten with a sisal whip and carried off to a sugar plantation in northern Haiti where, with other zombies, he was forced to work as a slave. Only with the death of the zombie master were they able to escape, and Narcisse eventually returned home.⁶¹

That was eighteen years later, and his family and friends were understandably astonished by his return, having attended his funeral and assumed that he had been dead all those years. He carried a new scar on his cheek, one that he recalls resulting from a nail driven into his coffin.

Narcisse worked in the sugar fields while putatively being a zombie, and sugar is what drove the importation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans to the French plantation colony of Saint-Domingue. The cultivation of sugar is a very labor-intensive process, so many people are needed to work in the fields and the mills to serve humanity’s addiction to the foodstuff. As Sidney Mintz puts it, “Sugar seems to satisfy a particular desire (it also seems, in so doing, to awaken that desire anew).”⁶² Furthermore, and this is centrally relevant to Haiti, “France early developed ‘sugar colonies,’ exported sugar and its related products in enormous quantities in the eighteenth century, and developed a sweet tooth of its own.”⁶³ That sweet tooth was served through slavery, as was the entire French economy at the time, as well as some of the most celebrated French philosophers and the wondrous architecture that, in part, draws millions of tourists to France each year. Yet what happens when the slaves who are forced to cultivate sugar rise up and liberate themselves, as in the Haitian Revolution?

Shortly after the Haitian Revolution, slaves who had labored on sugar and other plantations became peasants, claiming and working the mountainous land and fertile plains to sustain themselves. By 1811, one of the most important leaders of the Revolution, Henry Christophe (1768–1820), had himself coronated as king in the north of the newly independent nation, as Henry I, and sought to restore sugar production out of the wreckage and aftermath of the war. In this, he largely succeeded. As Bob Corbett explains, the king “was able to make the fermage system work quite well, at least to re-establish production of the sugar plantations.”⁶⁴ Many resisted, however, as this seemed like slavery in a new form, and the Haitian peasantry grew out of this resistance. By the early twentieth century, foreign corporations, mostly American and German, moved in to take over the lucrative Haitian sugar industry, which was a pretext for the first U.S. Occupation of Haiti (1919–1934). With the serfs absconding and no more slaves, how was one to produce sugar, devoid of such a labor force? Perhaps zombies were the answer.

“The spring of 1918 was a big cane season,” writes William Seabrook in his sensationalist and controversial 1929 book The Magic Island. The Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO) was then booming, complete with rail lines and factories and rum distilleries, in Port-au-Prince and sugar plantations in the countryside. Peasants flocked to HASCO in search of work, and they found it, but, per Seabrook, “these were not living men and women, but poor unhappy zombies . . . dragged from their graves to slave . . . in the sun.”⁶⁵ In a much more scholarly fashion, Kate Ramsey offers that “the account of zonbi slaving at HASCO can likewise be read as relating a powerful social analysis and indictment of the encompassing of rural life in these plains by North American capitalist enterprise after 1915,”⁶⁶ the year that the United States sent marines to occupy Haiti.

With no slaves to work sugar plantations and with sugar in high demand globally, the American-owned HASCO was widely rumored in early- to mid-twentieth-century Haiti to employ a large labor force of zombies, a “band of ragged creatures who shuffled along . . . staring dumbly, like people in a daze.”⁶⁷ The HASCO rumors were likely untrue, but they, among other things, gave the American occupiers of Haiti a means to justify their assault on Haitian Vodou. Rumor also had it that this was all going swimmingly for the company and its zombie master until his wife “made the fatal error of giving them a candy that had salt in it, an ingredient that must be withheld from zonbi because it has the effect of awakening them.”⁶⁸ In any case, “this narrative of Hasco zombies becomes the prime example of a zombie myth’s transportation to the United States,” as Lauro observes, something that is “extremely important, as it implicates global capitalism from the very beginning of American interest in the zombie.” For the zombie, in this light, possesses a “dual capacity to represent both the dehumanized slave and the factory worker reduced to the repetition of a mechanized gesture . . . Haiti’s predominantly agricultural economy and its past as France’s cash crop colony.” ⁶⁹

Types of Zombies in Haiti

As is hopefully clear by now, the zonbi kò kadav is an intermittent reality in Haiti (no hordes of them anywhere) and vastly outnumbered by the zonbi astral and other forms of zombies that are either part of one’s soul or manufactured from human body parts in cemeteries to be put to supernatural work, perhaps to bring luck or justice. “Life, in the Vodou view of things,” writes Karen McCarthy Brown, “is . . . characterized by alternating cycles of suffering and the transient relief from suffering that is called ‘having luck’. . . . Raising luck is the general rubric under which all kinds of Vodou healing can be grouped, and healing is the main purpose of all types of Vodou ritualizing.”⁷⁰ So zonbi can heal, “bring luck” (chans, in Haitian Creole). But zonbi are more often employed to exploit or to harm.

Figure 11-25 : Zonbi Astral, as made by a sorcerer in Port-au-Prince circa 1988 for Elizabeth McAlister, the photographer. Courtesy of Elizabeth McAlister. | Zonbi astral, or a zombie in a bottle by Elizabeth McAlister is used with the permission of the author.

If his story is true, Clairvius Narcisse was a zonbi kò kadav, as were those who labored beside him on a sugar plantation in northern Haiti beginning in the 1960s, victims of poisoning and exhumation who were forced to work. We have explored some of the leading explanations, in terms of poisoning, that might explain such phenomena in Haiti. In reality, though, such forms of zombification are rare, especially compared to other kinds of zonbi, like the zonbi astral.

To be made, most zonbi require the work of a sorcerer, a bòkò. McAlister explains their role in Haitian Vodou:

A bòkò is a Haitian expert in supernatural matters. He is a bit of a man out for himself, a freelancer, unlike the oungan or manbo who establish religious family networks. A bòkò is an entrepreneur who will “work with both hands,” that is, for healing and revenge. Traditional anthropology would call him a sorcerer.⁷¹

Upon visiting a bòkò in Port-au-Prince, the anthropologist was impressed with an ornate bottle in his house. The bòkò kindly asked her, “Do you want me to make you one^?”72 McAlister accepted, and the bottle, infused with the sorcerer’s wanga, was given to her and it resides to this day on a shelf in her office at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut. The bottle contains a zonbi astral, and its appearance is as complex as it is intense, swaddled in cloth, mirrors, scissors, magnets, and pins and wafting an intense smell of perfume. “The lines of scissors and mirrors lead the eye around and around the bottle in a colorful spiral of red, white, and black.”⁷³ Recall from the previous chapter that these very colors infuse Kongolese cosmology with meaning, in terms of birth, death, rebirth, the cycle of life, and the beyond. Ancestors want to return to this world, to our living lineage, which entails crossing the red river, nzadi. This Kongolese influence is patent in the bottle’s predominant colors: “The colors black, white, and red are dressing this bottle to indicate that it is a Petwo wanga,” explains McAlister. “This broadcasts its ‘hot’ nature and its willingness to ‘do work’ (fè travay).”⁷⁴ St. Jean, the bòkò, employed the following techniques in making the zonbi astral, or at least its vessel, the bottle:

• St. Jean had the little boy buy three needles. Asked [my intended’s] name. Took the needles with a magnet and put them on the top of a long green rock.
• Then poured some pink powder into the bottle.
• Then took from under where I’m sitting two human skulls and a – human neckbone – and set them on the floor!!!
• Poured rum over them.
• Set them on fire. . . blue flame.
• Shaved some bone off the skulls with a knife.
• Put the shavings in a bowl with the rock on top.
• Burned an American dollar on a knife and mixed with the skull shavings.
• Poured into bottle.
• Poured in some mixture of liquor and leaves.
• Perfume.
• Another perfume.
• All the while playing a tape of singing and cha-chas. Wrapped the bottle in red cloth, waved the cha-chas and bell at it. Set the bottle in a bowl of rocks.⁷⁵

The key to the bottle’s being effective in bringing “luck” to its owner is its containment of part of a human soul, which is sometimes referred to as zonbi. For, once finished, the sorcerer’s bottle is, in effect, “alive. . . a living grave; a spirit in a bottle.”⁷⁶ The skulls are vital in this regard, and they, and the zonbi element of a dead person’s soul, are to be found, of course, in cemeteries. For a bòkò to acquire such things for creating zonbi astral, he or she (usually he) must gain permission from Bawon Samdi, the Gede lwa who rules all cemeteries. As McAlister explains, in an excellent documentary on zombies in Haiti, such permission is required, and Bawon might respond to the bòkò by refusing altogether, or by permitting “eight” or “three” zonbi to be taken. This is “the way people get the spirit of the recently dead into the bottle,” all in keeping with “a kind of a mystical technology.” For there is energy, perpetual and powerful energy, in us, in human bodies and souls, and Haitian sorcerers who make zonbi astral are adept at “capturing part of a human energy after it has died.”⁷⁷

We have outlined the technologies that go into making zonbi kò kadav and zonbi astral, but they both vary in their manifestations. Some of them are probably not widely known or considered, like the Pentecostal cow or the unwitting, tragically deceased organ donor in Florida. Most famous, even if not common in Haiti, is the zonbi kò kadav, like Clairvius Narcisse and all those victims of zombification who were rumored to labor for the Haitian American Sugar Company. When did such zombies first appear in Haiti? Judging from Moreau’s use of the term in colonial Saint-Domingue, in the eighteenth century they were more or less nocturnal ghouls that Africans greatly feared, but it is not until the following century that zonbi kò kadav were notably forced to labor in the fields. When over half a million people were enslaved in a sugar plantation colony that was roughly the size of Maryland, there was no need to poison people into involuntary labor. This all changed with Haitian independence and abolition, however. Then, explains Lauro, the “understanding of the word was expanding . . . by this time the ‘zombi’ was comprehended as a spirit that could take on flesh or a specter that yet looked identical to the person it once was.” She continues:

As a sovereign nation, Haitians would define (and then redefine) the zombie and its role in society; its emphasis would oscillate from the enslavement of the living corpse to the technology of zombie making and its potential as a weapon, depending on the most pressing political, social, and cultural concerns of the Haitian people.⁷⁸

Such concerns always entail economics, of course, so Haitians devised means by which to nearly kill people and resuscitate them to labor on sugar plantations or in other ways, as illustrated by the various forms that the zonbi kò kadav may take. Kò kadav literally means “cadaver body, a reference to a visible physical body, in contrast to gwo bonnanj and ti bonnanj, which are aspects of the soul.”⁷⁹ The poisoned and interred body that has not died quite enough for mortal permanence is revived by a bòkò, who poisoned it in the first place. The body is disinterred the following day to work, perhaps on a sugar plantation, like Narcisse supposedly did. Such zombies are victims of sorcery who are enslaved and forced to work for their owners, who can also sell them to make a profit. Once disinterred, the zonbi kò kadav “becomes a slave of the sorcerer who zombified it,” per Hans Ackerman and Jeanine Gauthier, “made to work like a robot in a field, on construction sites, in a bakery or a shop.” They can also be accountants or security guards and be “rented out to others.”⁸⁰

Depending on the forms of labor into which they are forced, zonbi kò kadav are categorizable as follows, and surely this list is not comprehensive:

• Zonbi Zoutil (lit.: “Tool Zombie”) – Zombies that are trained to work in mechanical industries, like in railyards or construction, or otherwise “employed in an urban workshop.”⁸¹
• Zonbi Savann (lit.: “Bush Zombie”) – The origin of this term is somewhat unclear, though its literal meaning is straightforward enough; likely this is a zombie who is forced to labor in fields or to forage for food.
• Zonbi Bosal (lit.: “African or Wild Zombie”) – Zombies who have gone AWOL and are renegade; in colonial Hispaniola, Africans were called bosal, as opposed to slaves who were born in the colony; the term bosal carried racist implications of uncivility and wantonness.
• Zonbi Grenn (lit.: “Seed Zombie”) – similar to the zonbi jaden, Zonbi Grenn can also be trained to steal items from neighboring farms and fields.
• Zonbi Jaden (lit.: “Garden Zombie”) – a zombie who is forced to labor in a garden, a field, or a plantation.

Two far more common types of zonbi in Haiti are the zonbi astral and the zonbi ekspedisyon, and the complexities and diversities of Haitian zombic culture are reflected here by Alissa Jordan in her intriguing recent study of Vodou in rural Haiti:

Zonbi are palpable and embodied, belonging in the kinetic realm of multiplicity, portability, bodies, forces, and things. Zonbi do things: sometimes they kill people, sometimes that make people rich, sometimes they just make you cross the road. . . . zonbi are specifically related to the bodies of their targets. . . . against the throat and the mind, and the zonbi itself is drawn from the prime intersections of the body, the crown of the head, the ribs.⁸²

Again, there is more to the zombie in Haiti than meets the eye. But let us wind down our list of zombic types before moving on, in the next chapter, to follow the zombie from Haiti to the United States.

• Zonbi Astral (Astral Zombie) – Part of the soul that is extracted from the dead and placed into a vessel, usually a bottle, which can be put to supernatural work by a bòkò, as we have seen in our summary of McAlister’s work.
• Zonbi Ekspedisyon (Expedition Zombie) – Elements of human souls that are “sent” as something like a bòkò’s invisible minions; forces that can harm others once they enter their bodies, almost like poison darts of a supernatural kind. “The zonbi nanm which inhabits bodily remains can be made to work as a powerful tool in ekspedisyon (a ritual sending of the dead) [and] . . . other travay (work.)”⁸³

Conclusion

Expedition zombies, cow zombies, cadaver zombies, garden, seed, and tool zombies, astral zombies, zombies in bottles—we have met quite a few zonbi in this chapter and explored the technologies used to create them, focusing almost entirely on Haiti, the zombie’s homeland. The zonbi in Haiti is not monolithic. It did not just appear out of nowhere, as if by magic, even though zombies and magic are deeply intertwined in Haiti and in Vodou. There is a long and intriguing history of the use of poisons in Haiti. It was first instituted by enslaved Africans in the French plantation colony of Saint-Domingue, where surely they heard stories from France about the revenant, someone returned from the grave. Generally no bòkò can make any type of zonbi without permission from Bawon Samdi; some element of poison or herb; or extensive ritual and spiritual knowledge and hard work, supernatural work, with nature and the forces of human souls.

In terms of zombic technologies, salt should be mentioned. If sugar breeds zombies, salt can liberate them. While Clairvius Narcisse and his fellow zombies escaped a sugar plantation upon the death of their owner, other zombies can become aware of their condition, as legend has it, upon consuming salt. Haitian filmmaker Yves Médard explains:

We have a legend that when a zombie tastes salt, he becomes aware of his condition, and rebels against it. So salt is awareness. Zombies have forgotten everything: Their names, their families, they have been turned into objects. But the salt gives them the chance to discover their anger.⁸⁴

Sugar enslaves and zombifies, while salt does quite the opposite. It all makes perfect sense. Salt is awareness.

Notes

1. Douglas A. McIntyre, “Zombies Worth over 5 Billion Dollars to Economy.” 24/7WallSt, October 25, 2011, https://247wallst.com/investing/2011/10/25/zombies-worth-over-5-billion-to-economy/2/, last accessed May 27, 2021.
2. Pilgrimage is of great importance in Haitian Catholicism and in Haitian Vodou. On this topic, see Terry Rey, “Toward an Ethnohistory of Haitian Pilgrimage,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 91, 1, 2005, 161–183; and Terry Rey, “Saut-d’Eau,” in David G. Bromley (ed.), World Religions and Spirituality Project, 2017, https://wrldrels.org/2017/10/24/saut-deau/, last accessed March 13, 2003.
3. Elizabeth McAlister, “The Sorcerer’s Bottle: The Visual Art of Magic in Haiti,” in Donald J. Cosentino (ed.), Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum, 1995, 304-321.
4. Karen Richman, “The Protestant Ethic and the Dis-Spirit of Vodou,” in Karen I. Leonard et al., (eds.), Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America, New York: AltaMira Press, 2005, 177.
5. By the turn of the millennium, “roughly one third of the entire national population of Haiti” was Protestant, and they “generally condemn Vodou as diabolical.” That figure is even higher in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, home to two million people, in a country of eleven and a half million. Terry Rey and Alex Stepick, Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith: Haitian Religion in Miami, New York: New York University Press, 2013, 5–6.
6. Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris, New York, Schocken Books, 1972 (1954), 352.
7. Terry Rey, field notes from interviews with Charismatic Catholics in Malfeti, Haiti, February 2002. See also André Corten, Misère, religion et politique en Haïti: la diabolisation du mal, Paris: Karthala, 2001. On Catholic Pentecostals in Haiti more generally, see Terry Rey, “Fear and Trembling in Haiti: A Charismatic Prophecy of the 2010 Earthquake,” in Stan Chu Ilo (ed.), Fire from Heaven: Pentecostalism, Catholicism, and the Spirit World,  Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019, 280–299; Terry Rey, “Catholic Pentecostalism in Haiti: Spirits, Politics, and Gender,” Pneuma: Journal of the Society of Pentecostal Studies 32, 1, 2010, 80–106; and, Terry Rey, “‘Lavyèj Mari pa sou zafè kawotchou ankò’: Le renouveau charismatique catholique en Haïti,” Journal of Haitian Studies, 11, 2, 2005, 46–58.
8. Anonymous. “Parents Win Organ Transplant Suit.” Associated Press, July 25, 1998.
9. On this topic, see Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1994.
10. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 258. On this matter, see also Benjamin Hebblethwaite, Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011, 303.
11. Cited in Pierre Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs: de Saint-Domingue à Haïti, Paris: KARTHALA, 1987, 15. Unless otherwise noted, all translations mine.
12. Andrew Dial, “Antoine Lavalette, Slave Murderer: A Forgotten History of the French West Indies,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 8, 2001, 40–41.
13. Ibid., 51.
14. Ibid.
15. Cited in Terry Rey, “Vodou Genesis: Africans and the Making of a National Religion in Saint-Domingue,” in Eric J. Montgomery, Timothy R. Landry, and Christian N. Vannier (eds.), Spirit Service in Global Vodu(n), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022, 19.
16. Chelsea L. Berry, “Poisoned Relations: Medicine, Sorcery, and Poison Trials in the Contested Atlantic, 1680–1850,” Ph.D. diss., Department of History, Georgetown University, 2019, 172.
17. Terry Rey, The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, 4.
18. Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
19. Hebblethwaite, Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English, 261.
20. On this question, see Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, 101–136.
21. On pakèt and pwen in Haitian Vodou, see Terry Rey and Karen Richman, “The Somatics of Syncretism: Tying Body and Soul in Haitian Religion,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 39, 3, 2010, 379–403.
22. Hebblethwaite, Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English, 300.
23. Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Colonial Saint-Domingue, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006, 93.
24. Ibid., 93–94.
25. Lewis Ampidu Clorméus, “Les stratégies de lutte contre la ‘superstition’ en Haïti pendant le XIXe siècle,” Journal of Haitian Studies 20, 2, 2014, 109–110. Original sources cited by Clorméus.
26. Article 246 of the 1846 Haitian Penal Code. In Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 89.
27. In Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 131.
28. Ibid., 205.
29. Deren, The Divine Horsemen, 42.
30. Sarah Juliet Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015, 111.
31. Elizabeth McAlister, “Slaves, Cannibals, and Hyper-Infected Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, 2, 2102, 459.
32. Hebblethwaite, Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English, 253.
33. Ibid., 220.
34. Patrick Sylvain, Commentary in the documentary Zombies are Real: The Haitian and American Realities behind the Myth, Duke University, 2015, https://sacredart.caaar.duke.edu/content/zombies-are-real-haitian-and-american-realities-behind-myth, last accessed June 7, 2012.
35. Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1985. Wade Davis, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
36. Davis, Passage of Darkness, 109.
37. Ibid., 119. In Central Africa, sorcerers are widely called ndoki, while in West Africa a diviner is called a bokòno. They are the ancestors of the ritual specialist who in Haiti is known as a bòkò. A bòkò’s work is widely considered to be entirely about sorcery, but a bòkò is also able to heal and to divine. It is usually the bòkò who makes zonbi in Haiti. On this, see Hebblethwaite, Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English, 220, 303.
38. Davis, Passage into Darkness, 119.
39. Ibid., 119, 122.
40. T. Shanmuganathan, et al., “Biological Control of the Cane Toad in Australia: A Review,” Animal Conservation 13, 1, 2010, 17, 21.
41. For a scientific reconsideration of Davis’s work in this regard, please see Ulysses Paulino Albuquerque et. al., “Natural Products from Ethno-Directed Studies: Revisiting the Ethnobiology of the Zombie Poison,” Evidence Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2012, 1–19.
42. Davis, Passage of Darkness, 114.
43. Ibid., 29.
44. Ibid., 116.
45. Ibid., 132.
46. Ibid., 159.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 165.
49. David Ingliss, “Putting the Undead to Work: Wade Davis, Haitian Vodou, and the Social Uses of the Zombie,” in Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton (eds.), Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on the Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011, 44.
50. Ibid, 53, 56.
51. C. Y. Kao and T. Yasumoto, “Tertrodotoxin in ‘Zombie Powder’,” Toxicon 28, 2, 1990, 131.
52. Ibid., 132.
53. Ingliss. “Putting the Undead to Work, 56.
54. Davis, Passage of Darkness, 165.
55. J. Lorand Matory, “Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as a Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic Religions,” Journal of Religion in Africa 37, 2007, 409.
56. Ibid., 409–410.
57. Ingliss, “Putting the Undead to Work,” 154.
58. Paul May and Simon Cotton, Molecules that Amaze Us, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2014, 517.
59. Davis, Passage of Darkness, 154.
60. Ibid.
61. Gino Del Guercio, “The Secrets of Haiti’s Living Dead,” Harvard Magazine, January–February 1986, 31.
62. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York: Penguin Books, 1985, 20.
63. Ibid., 201.
64. Bob Corbett, “The Post-Revolutionary Period: 1804–1820,” http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/haiti/history/earlyhaiti/postrev.htm, last accessed June 5, 2021. ↵
65. William Seabrook, The Magic Island, New York: Harcourt, 1929, 96.
66. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 174. For an interesting glimpse of HASCO’s expansion into the Haitian countryside and outlying cities, see Karen Richman, Vodou and Migration, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005, 100–109.
67. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law­, 172.
68. Ibid., 172.
69. Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 79.
70. Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 345.
71. McAlister, “The Sorcerer’s Bottle,” 305.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., 308.
74. Ibid., 309.
75. Ibid., 311.
76. Ibid., 312.
77. Elizabeth McAlister, Commentary in the documentary Zombies are Real: The Haitian and American Realities behind the Myth, Duke University, 2015, https://sacredart.caaar.duke.edu/content/zombies-are-real-haitian-and-american-realities-behind-myth, last accessed June 7, 2012.
78. Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 42.
79. Hebblethwaite, Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English, 248.
80. Hans-W. Ackerman and Jeanine Gauthier,” The Ways and Nature of the Zombie,” Journal of American Folklore 104, 414, 1991, 474.
81. Ibid.
82. Alissa M. Jordan, “Atlas of Nanm: Shared Bodies, Werewomen, and Zonbi in a Rural Haitian Courtyard,” Ph.D. diss., Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, 2016, 387.
83. Ibid., 365, 97.
84. Yves Médard, “Salt for the Zombies,” Index on Censorship 13, 6, 1984, 38.

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Glossary

Antisuperstitious Campaign(s)

Concerted effort(s) by the Catholic hierarchy, often allied with the Haitian state and military, to eradicate Vodou from Haitian society. The most pronounced were orchestrated in 1896–1900, 1911–1912, and 1941–1942.

Apostasy

The act of leaving one religion and converting to another.

Bawon Samdi

A Gede lwa, sometimes understood to be Gede himself. The spirit ruler of cemeteries in Haitian Vodou.

Bòkò

A sorcerer in Haitian Vodou, usually the one who makes zonbi; can sometimes serve as a healer and diviner too. Etymology is West African, from the Ewe-Fon language: bokóno, for “master of knowledge.”

Bufo marinus

Latin species name of the sea toad, the largest toad in the world, which is the source of a toxin used by bòkò to zombify people in Haiti.

Chans

Luck, in Haitian Creole, from the French “la chance”;  in Vodou, generating luck for practitioners is one of the central objectives of ritual.

Charismatic Catholic (Charismatic Catholicism)

Founded in Pennsylvania in the late 1960s and spread throughout the Caribbean and Latin America during the following decade, the form of Catholicism that engages in Pentecostal rituals, like faith healing, speaking in tongues, and witnessing.

Cho

“Hot” in Haitian Creole, from the French chaud, an adjective used to describe certain feisty and fiery lwa, especially those of the Petwo rite or pantheon.

Christophe, Henry (1767–1820)

Great hero of the Haitian Revolution, a general who then became king of a divided independent Republic of Haiti.

Datura stramonium

Latin species name for a plant, simply called datura, that is the source of a toxin used by bòkò to zombify people.

Ekspedisyon

Literally “expedition” in Haitian Creole, from the French expedition, an adjective designating a certain kind of invisible zonbi that is “sent” for various reasons, sometimes to harm, other times to bring luck, the zonbi ekspedisyon.

Fèt Gede

Major feast in Vodou that occurs on November 1 and 2, grafted onto the Catholic feasts of All Saints Day and All Souls Day; the feast of Gede, a celebration of the dead and of life. Arguably the most important holiday in Haitian Vodou. It takes place in cemeteries, temples, homes, marketplaces, crossroads, and elsewhere.

Freemasons (Freemasonry)

Initiated members of a philosophical and spiritual fraternity that draws upon a wide range of mystical and contemplative knowledge from around the world and throughout history to promote human goodness and solidarity, one that is highly popular in Haiti.

Fret

“Cold” in Haitian Creole.

Gangan

Derived from the Kikongo word nganga, meaning healer, an alternative word in Haitian Creole for oungan, or Vodou priest.

Gede (Gede Lwa)

The lwa of all things related to death, dying, and the dead, manifest in multiple forms as the Gede lwa, including Bawon Samdi. Also a lwa of rebirth and regeneration, hence the highly charged sexual innuendos in his dancing and symbolism. Loves to dress in black and purple, and a trickster spirit who is conflated in Haitian Vodou with Saint Gabriel and Saint Gerard.

Gwo Bonnanj

Literally “Big Good Angel,” or “Big Guardian Angel,” a key component of the soul in Haitian Vodou, sometimes considered to be the soul itself. Associated with one’s psyche, in the modern psychological sense. A supernatural force that resides in one’s head, shapes one’s person, and is separated from the body ritually upon a person’s death.

HASCO

Haitian American Sugar Company, an early-twentieth-century sugar-producing company, complete with rail lines, plantations, a large processing plant, and rum distilleries, all of which was widely rumored to have employed zombies for labor.

Hispaniolan Laughing Tree Frog

Osteopilus dominicensis. It spends most of its time in trees and its ribbit sounds like laughter. Indigenous to Hispaniola, hence the name. The tree frog secretes a toxic substance through its skin, used by bòkò in Haiti to zombify people.

Kò Kadav

Haitian Creole term that derives from French, literally meaning “cadaver body,” or our physical human body that will be placed into a grave when we die (at least in Haiti) and from which the elements of the soul will depart.

Le Grand Cimetière

French for “The Big Cemetery,” the largest in Haiti, located in Port-au-Prince, the capital city, and home to many zombic experiences; the largest sanctuary for Haitian Vodou’s most important annual ritual, Fèt Gede.

Lwa

Name for a spirit in Haitian Vodou, and the chief focus of the religion. The etymology of this term is disputed among scholars.

Makandal, François (d. 1758)

Escaped slave and maroon leader in Saint-Domingue, likely Kongolese, who used poison to lead a resistance movement against white oppression in the colony’s northern province for nearly twenty years. So feared were Makandal’s and his followers’ poisons that, to this day, in Haitian Creole a cognate word for pwazon (poison) is makandal. Captured and executed in public in 1758, but believers hold that he morphed into a fly and escaped this grizzly fate.

Manbo

A priestess in Haitian Vodou.

Medsin Fey

Literally, in Haitian Creole, “leaf doctor,” a key ritual specialist in Vodou, essentially an herbalist.

Nanm

Derived from the French “une âme” (a soul), a complex, varied, and important notion in Haitian Vodou, a form of supernatural energy that resides within us and within nature that can be operationalized for spiritual work. Usually translated simply as “soul.”

Narcisse, Clairvius (1922–1994)

The most famous alleged zombie in Haitian history; buried in 1962, only to return to his hometown eighteen years later, claiming to have been dug up from his grave and forced to work on a sugar plantation in the interim.

Nzadi

“River” in the Central African language of Kikongo, which spiritually refers to the body of water that the living cross when being born and the dying cross when dying. Considered to be red in color, a key element of Kongo cosmology and symbology, which are cornerstones of Haitian Vodou.

Oungan

A priest in Haitian Vodou.

Ounsi

A novice or apprentice to the religious leadership in Haitian Vodou.

Pakèt

Haitian Creole for “packet” (from the French paquet, lit. “packet or package”), a charm or amulet manufactured to do supernatural work.

Pentecostal (Pentecostalism)

A highly popular form of Christianity based on a careful reading of the Pentecost experience in the Book of Acts, where the apostles of Jesus Christ receive the Holy Spirit and various gifts (charisms), like speaking in tongues and faith healing. Though Protestant in its origins, it has also swept the Catholic Church in recent decades. A highly emotional and deeply ecstatic form of Christian religious experience.

Petwo

Kongo-based or -derived pantheon of lwa in Haitian Vodou. Usually fierce, fiery, explosive, and protective spirits. Most lwa have both Petwo and Rada manifestations.

Postcolonial Theory

A theoretical reconsideration of the power disequilibrium that resulted in scholarly fields such as anthropology and a way of interrogating the categories that have long been presumptively employed in these fields and assumed to be real.

Postmodern Theory

A theoretical reconsideration of the power disequilibrium that resulted in scholarly fields such as anthropology and a way of interrogating the categories that have long been presumptively employed in these fields and assumed to be real, like “modernity.”

Pret Savann

“Bush priest,” literally in Haitian Creole. A ritual specialist in Haitian Vodou who generally recites Catholic liturgical prayers in Latin and French at the opening of many Vodou ceremonies. Blesses a corpse on the way to the cemetery.

Puffer Fish

Endangered species of spiked fish native to the Caribbean (and elsewhere) that takes its name from its ability to inflate its body. The most prevalent in Haiti are Diodon holicantus and Sphoeroides testudienus; the source of the most prevalent toxin that is used in processes of zombification in Haitian Vodou, tetrodotoxin.

Pwazon

Haitian Creole: “poison.”

Pwen

Literally “point(s)” in Haitian Creole (from the French le point); amulets, sometimes invisible, used in Vodou to do spiritual work.

Religious Syncretism

The blending of two or more religious traditions into one, like Haitian Vodou, which is part West African, part Central African, and part Catholic.

Religious Translation

The process by which foreign or alien religious ideas, symbols, and beliefs are interpreted and often reworked in a receiving culture, as with Haiti’s experience of Catholicism.

Revenant

French, literally meaning “returned,” often a reference to a dead person who has somehow reappeared, whether as a ghost or, in the Haitian context, a zombie, though the term is not used in Haitian Vodou. A European influence on zombic culture in the Caribbean.

Rosicrucians (Rosicrucianism)

Medieval form of spirituality from Central Europe that derives wisdom and forms of practice from a wide range of historical traditions, one that is quite common among Haitians, especially Haitian women.

Sèvitè

Literally “servant” in Haitian Creole, reference to a believer in Vodou, one who serves the spirits, the lwa.

Sortilège

French for “spell,” as in hex, not as in grammar. A term that has long been used to denigrate Haitian Vodou.

Tetrodotoxin

A dangerous neurotoxin that is derived in Haiti from the puffer fish, one that some scholars believe to be the ultimate zombifying substance in the transformation of a human being into a zonbi kò kadav.

Ti Bonnanj

Literally, in Haitian Creole, “Little Good Angel” or “Little Guardian Angel,” a key component of the soul in Haitian Vodou. Associated with one’s personality and agency, which is ritually separated from the body and the other element(s) of one’s soul when we die. To be judged by God after one’s death.

Travay

Haitian Creole for “work,” from the French travail, a term often used in Haitian Vodou for the ritual preparation of amulets, charms, poisons, etc.

U.S. Occupation of Haiti

On the pretext that its national economic interests in the Caribbean were threatened, the United States sent a large segment of its Marine Corps to take over Haiti, which it occupied from 1915 to 1934; this ramped up the persecution against practitioners of Haitian Vodou.

Wanga

A magical amulet or powder that is manufactured by ritual specialists in Haitian Vodou for healing, causing harm, or creating luck or misfortune for their clients and/or their clients’ adversaries or loved ones.

White Zombie

First movie about zombies, set in Haiti and directed by Victor Halperin, starring Bella Lugosi. Premiered in 1932.

Zonbi

Haitian Creole for “zombie.”

Zonbi Astral

Invisible zombie that is created by the extraction of part of a human soul, from a cemetery, and its insertion into a vessel, usually a bottle. Literally meaning “astral zombie,” this powerful amulet or charm can be put to work by a sorcerer to either harm or help clients.

Zonbi Bosal

Literally, in Haitian Creole, “wild zombie” or “African zombie,” a term designating a zombie that is renegade, unmoored from its original purpose. Zombies who have gone AWOL and are renegade. In colonial Hispaniola, Africans were called bosal, as opposed to slaves who were born in the colony, and the term carried racist implications of uncivility and wantonness.

Zonbi Ekspedisyon

Elements of human souls that are “sent,” as something like a bòkò’s invisible minions; forces that can harm others once they enter their bodies, almost like poisonous darts of a supernatural kind.

Zonbi Grenn

Literally, in Haitian Creole, “seed zombie,” similar to the zonbi jaden. Zonbi Grenn can also be trained to steal items from neighboring farms and fields.

Zonbi Jaden

Literally, in Haitian Creole, a “garden zombie,” a zonbi kò kadav who is forced to labor in a garden, a field, or a plantation.

Zonbi Kò Kadav

Literally, in Haitian Creole, “zombie cadaver body,” a previously entered human being who is exhumed, stupefied, and forced to labor.

Zonbi Nanm

Literally, in Haitian Creole, “zombie soul,” referring to a spiritual power in the remains of the human dead that can be extracted by a bòkò and put to work to harm or heal for his/her/their clients.

Zonbi Savann

Literally, in Haitian Creole, “savannah zombie” or “bush zombie.” The origin of this term is somewhat unclear, though its literal meaning is straightforward enough; likely this is a zombie who is forced to labor in fields or to forage for food.

Zonbi Zoutil

Literally, in Haitian Creole, “tool zombie,” or a zombie that is trained to work in mechanical industries, like in railyards or in construction, often in urban settings.