Hadriana in All My Dreams

by René Depestre

THE ZOMBIFIER’S SECRET CODE, OR A ZOMBIFEROUS PHARMACOPOEIA The first stage of the zombification process is the dramatic slowing-down of the metabolism. The houngan—the Vodou priest—who creates the zombie arranges things with an accomplice, usually a member of the victim’s entourage, who administers the precise dose of a highly toxic substance to the target. The formula for the most well-known zombie poison requires the following ingredients: extracts of dried sea toad, a mule’s gallbladder, tibial scrapings from a rabid dog, ground-up bones of a young boy, puffer flesh cartilage, and bones from the middle ear of a garter snake. These ingredients are all ground together in a mortar or using a grindstone, along with a few tcha-tcha seeds, some velvet bean sap, a bit of powdered sulphur, and a few mothballs. That mix is then blended into a solution consisting of rum, castor oil, and asafoetida. Ingesting the drug leads to the apparent cessation of the principle vital functions, which bottom out at about zero, at the point of no return where decomposition otherwise sets in. In the hours following the burial of the zombified body, the witch doctor initiates the reanimation of the bogus cadaver. In order to do this, he gives the victim an antidote composed of zombie-cucumber (devil’s trumpet or jimsonweed) and dried leaves from several trees (including cupiuba, pleomele, and guaiacum). These elements are then diluted in a large calabash shell full of seawater that has served pr...

“The effectiveness of magic (I learned this from Lévi-Strauss) is a phenomenon of social consensus.

Without a personal life or civil status, registered with the local cemetery, torn from the bosom of the family, of the church, of pleasure, dance, sex, friendship, and life itself; bound day and night by the purely physiological and physical exigencies of harsh labour, the zombie adds a fourth episode to the three classic scenarios of black history: brute idiots with backs bent to till the earth; oversized children to be evangelized; angry Black Power militants meant to be rehabilitated en masse. Within the frame of this ternary destiny governed by the basic barbaric/civilized binary, the zombie represents the ultimate biological fuel—that which remains of Caliban after the loss of his identity, his life having been cut literally in two, his gros bon ange of muscular effort condemned to forced labour in perpetuity and his petit bon ange of knowledge and enlightenment, of innocence and imagination, forever exiled in the first empty bottle within reach.