Mar. 14 – 17, 2013
Omni William Penn Hotel,
Pittsburgh, PA
The Changing Landscape of American Multiethnic
“Transcultural Undeadness: Histories and Incarnations of Multiethnic Hauntings and Horror”
Zombies and René Depestre’s Caribbean Creolization
The trope of the zombie, a liminal figure that encompasses both presence and absence, has been present in the Haitian imaginary for centuries and plays an important role in René Depestre’s strategy for subversion and liberation. Most depictions of the zombie found in literature and popular culture reflect a figure that lacks agency, a metaphor for the men and women who were condemned to a life of servitude, the incarnation of an abomination, offering a gloomy vision devoid of any beauty. And yet the zombi takes on a very positive character in the works by this Francophone writer born in Haiti.
The zombie not only appears frequently across Depestre’s poetry, novels and essays, manifesting a particular obsession for the writer, but is invested with extraordinary vision, superhuman strength and, at least in his fictional world, with the capacity to change the course of history. The recurrence of this image does not prolong the negative textual attitude that years of ideological literature have managed to create around the first independent republic in Latin America, nor does it exoticize the only nation in history to be born out of a successful slave revolt. Rather it becomes the writer’s imaginative strategy for reappropriating a local myth and using it as a vehicle for undoing the damage produced by an ideology that disseminated a view of Haiti as barbaric and its inhabitants as passively acquiescing to the status quo. This paper will show how the zombie is used as the metaphor for creolization to trump previous manipulations of this image in Haitian literature.
