Lucy Swanson, The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2023); 208 pages; ISBN 978-1802077995 (hardcover)
Lucy Swanson, The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2023); 208 pages; ISBN 978-1802077995 (hardcover)
Whether on streaming platforms or the silver screen, in comics, popular fiction, or adaptations of classic novels, the figure of the zombie is everywhere. Unmoored from its Caribbean origins, the zombie has drifted throughout the globe, signifying a range of cultural and national anxieties like contagion, globalization, and migration.1 As a result, the Caribbean zombie has been frequently reduced to a footnote in the field of zombie studies, which tends to examine the undead, cannibalistic zombie on offer in television series like The Walking Dead (15).2 While the zombie may be one of the Caribbean’s most prolific cultural exports, a metaphor and figure born of plantation slavery, it is far from a static entity in the hands of Caribbean writers. In The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction, Lucy Swanson shows us how a host of contemporary Francophone Caribbean writers from Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Haiti have consistently chosen the zombie as a narrative device, adapting its image to represent sociopolitical situations from the colonial period to the present day. In this way, Swanson traces multiple paths for interpreting the Caribbean zombie beyond a metaphor for the enslaved.
To restore the zombie to its Caribbean context, Swanson highlights and examines four prevalent manifestations, or “zombie avatars,” in contemporary fiction. An avatar “refers in Hinduism to the bodily manifestation on Earth of a god” and, increasingly, to the way users are represented in video and computer games or in virtual environments (16). This makes the avatar a nimble term for Swanson because it allows her to account for the shifting representation of the zombie over time and to build on existing scholarship on the Caribbean zombie (such as Kaiama L. Glover’s concept of the “usefulness” and “exploitability” of the Haitian zombie).3 Accordingly, The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction features an introduction that traces a genealogy of zombies in the cultural histories of Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique as well as four chapters, each one dedicated to a separate zombie avatar: the zombie slave, the zombie as a figure of mental illness, the zombie horde, and the popular zombie. In each chapter, Swanson draws on at least three works that illustrate how writers use these avatars to interpret or respond to contemporary sociopolitical scenarios in the Caribbean.
If The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction promises to return the zombie to its origins, then chapter 1 forms the bedrock of this endeavor. At the outset, Swanson explains that “the zombie is defined at the most fundamental level by its historical relationship to slavery” (25). In contemporary French Caribbean folklore, the zombie remains closely associated to concepts of forced labor and enslavement, and it represents an amalgam of the Haitian notion of the zonbi kò kadav (a disinterred body whose soul has been stolen by a bòkò, a Vodou sorcerer, and made to perform forced labor) and the zonbi astral (a spirit zombie forced to do spiritual work). For the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, the zombie is said to represent “a symbol of the dangers that confront the maroon or freedom runner” (25). In this chapter, Swanson turns to three works—Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Quiet Dawn (1990), André and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude (1972), and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of Seven Sorrows (1986)—that speak to the tradition of the zombie slave, forced to perform manual labor in the colonial past and the plantation futures of the Caribbean.4 Through readings of these three novels from Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique, Swanson reveals how the zombie represents an active participant in Caribbean reimaginings of historical events like the Haitian Revolution, antislavery revolts in Guadeloupe, and the postplantation economy in Martinique. The “discursive resistance” the zombie exemplifies for each of these writers enables them to innovate within existing zombie lore while also communicating key tenets of that tradition throughout the French Caribbean (49).
Beyond the representation of their servitude, their blank stare and listless wandering is perhaps the next most recognizable attribute of the zombie. Accordingly, in chapter 2, Swanson guides us through the murky literary and cultural history of the zombie as a representation of intellectual disability and mental illness. The chapter begins with an assessment of mental illness in early US zombie narratives in which writers like William Seabrook, among others, described zombies as “poor, ordinary demented human beings, idiots, forced to toil in the field” (60). Zora Neale Hurston and Louis Mars (the son of Haitian intellectual Jean Price-Mars) later provided critical correctives to these assessments by focusing on the psychological “reality” of the zombified individual, such as Felicia Felix-Mentor or Marie M., asserting that perhaps their trauma was at the source of their current state. Swanson then repieces the intertextual traces of the latter in works by three Haitian authors: Jacques Stephen Alexis’s story “Chronicle of a False Love” (1960), René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (1988), and Gérard Chenet’s Haitian Vodou Trances for Dearest Amélie (2009). Taken together, Swanson compellingly argues that Haitian fiction representing the zombie as mentally ill is linked to a larger project to humanize the anthropophagic living dead but also those living with accumulated trauma.
In chapters 3 and 4, Swanson turns her attention to the remaining two representations of zombies in her Caribbean corpus: the zombie horde and the popular zombie. While it might be tempting to conflate the two, based on the common representations of zombies found in global culture, they have specific Caribbean—namely, Haitian—characteristics. The representations of the zombie horde that Swanson analyzes scarcely resemble the ghouls of George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead; instead, for Frankétienne, Gérard Étienne, and Gary Victor, the zombie horde acts as a means of interrogating political power in Haiti during the Cold War, the Duvalier’s dictatorship (1957–86), and the Aristide years from the 1990s and early 2000s, respectively (103). In chapter 4, the popular zombie, like the zombie horde, provides the people with a voice to speak out, or as Gary Victor articulates it, the popular zombie leads to a “vox zombie, vox popili” (159).
The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction is a carefully organized and generous work of literary and cultural criticism that will interest scholars and zombie enthusiasts alike. Beyond the critical achievements of Swanson’s analyses, readers will find an illuminated path to a body of Caribbean literature related to the zombie written in French and accessible in English translation. Just as Swanson’s notion of zombie avatars invites readers to consider the overlapping functions and uses of the zombie within her own corpus, her book will surely encourage future studies of the zombie from Caribbean perspectives.
Nathan H. Dize is a translator and an assistant professor of Caribbean literature in French at Washington University in Saint Louis. His translations include The Immortals (State University of New York Press, 2020) and The Emperor (Seagull, 2024), by Makenzy Orcel; I Am Alive (Caraf, 2022), by Kettly Mars; and Antoine of Gommiers (Schaffner, 2023), by Lyonel Trouillot; and his work has appeared in archipelagos journal, Caribbean Quarterly, Francosphères, the Journal of Haitian Studies, and Transition Magazine.
[1] Swanson adopts the standard US English spelling throughout her book, “unless discussing specific forms of zombie found in Haitian Vodou” or when authors have elected for different spellings. See “A Note on Orthography and Translation,” ix.
[2] Swanson notes that there are exceptions to this trend in zombie studies, such as Sarah Juliet Lauro’s The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Roger Luckhurst’s Zombies: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2015); and Toni Pressley-Sanon’s Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender, and the Haitian “Loas” on Screen (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016).
[3] See Kaiama L. Glover, “Exploiting the Undead: The Usefulness of the Zombie in Haitian Literature,” Journal of Haitian Studies 11, no. 2 (2005): 105–21.
[4] Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe, no. 42 (November 2013): 1–15.