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Zombies Become Warriors: Les Affres d’Un Défi

Abstract / Excerpt

In a geo-social context in which there has long existed a marked distance between intellectual and popular culture, the writer of the (French speaking) Americas has had to take particular care in negotiating the necessarily elitist world of letters. Whether through Creole terminology and proverbs woven into written texts, or extended imaginings on the lives of unsung Caribbean heroes, many of the region’s most prominent writers make use of folk elements as springboards for their literary endeavors. Such borrowings from popular culture, when looked to for more than a source of colorful content, provide the foundations of these works, shaping them both formally and thematically.

About the Author

Kaiama L. Glover

Zombies Become Warriors: Les Affres d’Un Défi

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Zombies Become Warriors: Les Affres d’Un Défi

Untitled

Liverpool University Press

Haitian Literature, Zombie, Politics, Oppression, Frankétienne

Chapter

16 pages

Link

Zombies Become Warriors Les Affres d'un défi from Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon on JSTOR

Zombies Become Warriors, Haiti Unbound, pp. 56-71

www.jstor.org

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Citation “This chapter from Kaiama Glover’s book was an exhilarating and enlightening experience! We discover in this chapter-long piece how very different and how much more complex (and interesting!) the Haitian zombie is than their counterparts produced by Hollywood! Through a discussion of the novel Les Affres d’un défi by Frankétienne (1979), K. Glover presents an analysis of the Haitian zombie as victim rather than as predator; there are characters who have been literally zombified by evil masters and forced to work in subjugation, while others live in a more figurative state of identity absence, caught in cycles of perverse mutual dependency and loss of self. From the spiritual living death of the individual, the reader spins out to find bondage and demoralization on the level of the collective, allowing zombification to serve as the central metaphor in an engagement with the country of Haiti, its past and its present. Most powerful of all for me personally was the realization that the Haitian zombie, while not totally alive, is not at all dead, and is always on the brink of being awakened from the grip of passive lethargy; and once awake, this zombie is sure to rebel. There is, in the end, a fragile thread of not-yet enacted potential, and there is hope. This chapter of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon provides a critical lens through which to discover not only the work of Frankétienne, but also the thought and aesthetics of the spiralist movement, its place in Haitian culture and its connections to the country’s history. I did not know Les Affres d’un défi before, but now I can’t wait to read it!” - Laurie Postlewate, Senior Lecturer in French