Instead, they’d be condemned to skulk the Hispaniola plantations for eternity, undead slaves at once denied their own bodies and yet trapped inside them-soulless zombies. Though suicide was common among slaves, those who took their own lives wouldn’t be allowed to return to lan guinée. Haitian slaves believed that dying would release them back to lan guinée, literally Guinea, or Africa in general, a kind of afterlife where they could be free. The zombie archetype, as it appeared in Haiti and mirrored the inhumanity that existed there from 1625 to around 1800, was a projection of the African slaves’ relentless misery and subjugation. The original brains-eating fiend was a slave not to the flesh of others but to his own. In the hundreds of years since, the zombie myth has been widely appropriated by American pop culture in a way that whitewashes its origins-and turns the undead into a platform for escapist fantasy. Slavery in Saint-Domingue under the French was extremely brutal: Half of the slaves brought in from Africa were worked to death within a few years, which led only to the capture and import of more. It first appeared in Haiti in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the country was known as Saint-Domingue and ruled by France, which hauled in African slaves to work on sugar plantations. The last 15 years have seen films and TV shows including Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, World War Z, Zombieland, Life After Beth, iZombie, and even the upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.īut the zombie myth is far older and more rooted in history than the blinkered arc of American pop culture suggests. By the time Dawn of the Dead was released in 1978, the cultural tide had shifted completely, and Romero had essentially reinvented the zombie for American audiences.

All Forgotten Now by Jennifer Mariani