Zombies - from Dreams by Derrick Jensen

part 2 of a series of excerpts from Derrick Jensen's Dreams.

Zombies

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. 
~Hannah Arendt

What are zombies?
My early knowledge of zombies primarily came from movies like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie.  These encounters seemed to affect me little more than to make me afraid to walk through thickets at night (although i kept telling myself that these movies were set on tropical islands, and that with the exception of late-night statements from such unreliable sources as my older siblings there were no confirmed sightings of zombies in Colorado).  But later I came to see these movies as tales of white supremacy, conquest, empire, Christianity, civilization and slavery.  Lately I've been reading a very interesting collection of essays called Sacred Possession: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Carribean.  In the essay Voudoun, or the Voice of the Gods, Joan Dayan writes, "Born out of the experience of slavery and the sea passage from Africa to the New World, the zombi tells the story of colonization:  the reduction of human into thing for the ends of capital.  For the Haitian no fate is to be more feared.  In a contemporary Carribean of development American style, the zombi phenomenon obviously goes beyond the machination of the local boco.  As [Rene] Depestre puts it, 'This fantastic process of reification and assimilation means the total loss of my identity, the psychological annihilation of my being, my zombification.'  And Laennec Hurbon explains how the zombi stories produce and capitalize on an internalization of slavery and passivity, making the victims of an oppressive economic and social system the cause: 'the phantasm of the zombi...does nothing but attest to the fulfillment of a system that moves the victim to internalize his condition.'  Rene Depestre also stated, "It is not by chance that there exists in Haiti the myth of the zombi, that is, of the living dead, the man whose mind and soul have been stolen and who has been left only the ability to work.  The history of colonization is the process of man's general zombification."
...
In the last few days I've been thinking about this particular evolution of portrayal of zombies and zombification, and although there have been an extraordinary number of academic studies portraying zombies through every type of lens from Marxism to Christianity to anarchism to pop culture to consumerism, ..., I think the pattern I'm seeing, from passive victim to ravenous monster, is real.  As one analysis puts it, and I quote this at length because it feels so right, 'Modern zombies, as portrayed in books, films, games and haunted attractions are quite different from both voodoo zombies and those of folklore.  modern zombies are typically depicted in popular culture as mindless, unfeeling monsters with a hunger for human brains and flesh, a prototype established in the seminal 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.  Typically, these creatures can sustain damage far beyond that of a normal, living human.  Generally these can only be killed by a wound to the head, such as a headshot, or can pass whatever syndrome that causes their condition onto others.
"Usually, zombies are not depicted as thralls to masters, as in the film White Zombie, or the spirit-cult myths.  Rather, modern zombies are depicted in mobs and waves, seeking either flesh to eat or people to kill or infect, and are typically rendered to exhibit signs of physical decomposition such as rotting flesh, discolored eyes, and open wounds, and moving with a slow, shambling gait.  They are generally incapable of communication and show no signs of personality or rationality, though George Romero's zombies appear capable of learning and very basic levels of speech as seen in the films Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead
"Modern zombies are closely tied to the idea of a zombie apocalypse, the collapse of civilization caused by a vast plague of undead.  The ideas are now so strongly linked that zombies are rarely depicted within any other context."
...Remember the primary difference between indigenous and Western ways of being is that indigenous peoples perceive the universe as composed of beings with whom we should enter into relationships, and civilized people perceive the universe as composed of objects to exploit, as dumb matter.

from The Toe Bone & Tooth - Martin Prechtel

the first of what i hope are many selections from the fantastic work of Martin Prechtel.  these two principally
concerning elements and their use, from The Toe Bone & Tooth

--

These particular Gods, the sovereigns of the wild mountains and untouched ravines, truly hated steel.  They hated the steel of plows and axes, the steel of saws and machetes, the steel of hooks, nails, rifles and swords.  They hated the steel of horseshoes and wagon tires, and would come to hate anything that steel could make, cut, carve or contain.  When it came to metal, gold was good enough and silver they could abide, copper was a favorite and about lead they would negotiate, but to the Gods steel was the tooth in the jaws of a consuming monster called comfort to which humans were addicted.  Steel had a soul that was a natural coward and demanded blood and it was the earth it cut.  Because the Gods saw the problems of their grandson as having come from steel and for some other reasons, not all of them clear, Gaspar was to them an ally now.  After several meetings of all the Gods and Spirits of the Mountain, Gaspar was shown to a hall where young extravagantly attired Rain Gods sat waiting for the day when they would armor up in hail and windstorms, hoping to rush forth to wound the annual troops of dryness, whose clear blood was rain, and whom they fought to pierce with their thundering arrows, lightning spears and jade axes.

--

"No, you see, I'm Gustavos Rodas and I go barefoot," holding up his callused feet to show me, "because I hate to see animals killed, eaten or made to suffer.  I don't eat the flesh of any animal and I don't use their leather, even for shoes.  I don't use plastics because it comes from petroleum, which comes from ancient animals as well.  Using gasoline or diesel to me is the same as wearing leather, using plastic or eating meat.  I don't ride horses, drive mules or pack donkeys either because I hate to see them suffer.  I have caballerias of lands, thousands of cuerdas everywhere which I loan out to all the Indians and Ladinos everywhere, who send me little bits of what they grow or make and that's how I live.
"No, i'm Gustavo Rodas and because I'm Gustavo Rodas I love all the people, even those from the Big Cities and other countries, but I don't like at all what they do to animals by the lives they live and of course those people hate me for not allowing any of those rich babosos to build on the land that crowns the holy water of the river that my family owns, who are themselves descendants from Quiche' kings, not Tecun the general, but from the kings themselves from G'umarcah.
"No, I'm Gustavo Rodas and the rich people, though none of these morosos are as rich as I am, have paid off even my children to betray their father and these things that I believe, who now only want me to sell off all my land to these horrible developers and rich folks who are killing this canyon and the entire lakeshore, illegally, for you know only villagers can own the communal holdings and nobody can legally own within two hundred feet of any shoreline, but they find ways around it.
"No, I'm Gustavo Rodas and the rich people here have fingered me to the police, who they have paid off to harass me into selling and giving in, and to whom I refuse to counterpay to keep them off, the police who are supposedly here to protect us from thieves are thieves in the employ of thieves.
"No, the green bottles and broken glass and Sonya and Momon are only there around my house to keep the cowardly paid-off police from entering my little garden while I'm away, because the police persist on trying to transplant marijuana bushes so they can come by with the Gaurdia de Hacienda and haul me off to seven years in prison, so they can confiscate my holdings and auction off my land.
"No, now you know, I'm Gustavo Rodas and that these dogs only bite people who come over the walls.  The entire world comes through the gates and gets all the roses they might need.  Now answer me this next thing, my friend, there are only two reasons for a man to risk his health to jump a wall bristling with razor glass and rushing in front of angry powerful dogs just to steal three roses he could've gotten by walking through the gate.  The first one is a woman and the second one is a girl.  Which one is she?"