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.