The dead do not die; or, the afterlives of ostracism.
by Colin Dayan

The driving force of this talk, the impulse that has shaped its argument, is the particular ways in which different categories of persons are created or terminated: whether “slaves of the state”; the “civilly dead”; the dead-in-law who return to Africa; the ancestors who go under the waters; or the perpetual haunt of the “zombie.”

With regard to this phenomenal ghostliness, does not Calvin help us to understand its manifest materiality? In Institutes of the Christian Religion, he reflects on the passage in Luke when Christ identifies himself: “See and touch for a spirit has no flesh and bone.” We might say that Calvin’s words are prelude to what T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land will name “this familiar compound ghost.” For a long time now, since my first visit to Haiti when I was twenty, I have been haunted by this rumination on the body of Christ. “He proves himself no specter, for he is visible in his flesh. Take away what he claims as proper to the nature of his body, will not a new definition of the body have to be coined?”

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In 1980 at a hounfo in Croix-des-Missions, Haiti, I watched when a devotee was mounted by a lwa in service, and I knew that this was a risky, fabulous, and very fleshly matter: this proximity of the common and the sacred, the apparent arbitrariness of the relation. The spirits unfold their potential in the lineaments of the human, in the material envelope through which they experience life on earth. Ghosts come forward through the materiality and embodiment that appears most to threaten their existence. Or they seek what they most longed for in life. In either case, what we consider ghosts are really quite natural, corporeal, very much a part of everyday life.

In Haiti, the zombie calls up the most macabre figure in folk belief. Whether understood as an evil spirit caught by a sorcerer or the dead-alive zombie in flesh and bones, the zombie haunts Haitians as the most powerful emblem of anonymity and loss. The phantasm of the zombie—a soulless husk deprived of freedom—is the ultimate sign of loss and dispossession. Memories of slavery were transposed into a new idiom that both reproduced and dismantled a twentieth-century history of forced labor and degradation that became particularly acute during the American occupation of Haiti. As Haitians were forced to build roads, and thousands of peasants were brutalized and massacred, tales of zombies proliferated in the United States. The film White Zombie (1932) and books like William Seabrooks’ The Magic Island (1929) helped to justify the “civilizing” presence of the marines in “barbaric” Haiti.

This landscape of death—a realm of broken but obstinate communication between the living and the dead—tells us something about the history of the living dead. Nothing ever dies—neither oppression nor the disfiguring products of this oppression: persons placed outside the pale of human empathy. The haunting continues, and it is preserved most cunningly in legal rules and regulations. Old forms of terror maintain themselves as they find new content. In thinking about how spectacles of terror control the racially marginalised, the weak, and the socially oppressed, I recall Pollock and Maitland’s insight into the witchcraft behind the law: “Where there is no torture there can be little witchcraft…Sorcery is a crime created by the measures which are taken for its suppression.”

With regard to this logic of terror, slaves had reason to be afraid of dismemberment over and above visible desecration or posthumous dishonor. Matter, especially dead matter, was particularly dangerous to the living. Not only were body parts—these relics of the dead—sacred, but also in the hands of the wrong person they could be given a false life and put to magical, malevolent uses.

In the Americas, with particular punitive excess, the redefinition of persons—the creation of ever-new classes of condemned—was sustained by a reasoning that goes beyond the mere logic of punishment. Through this penal logic the rules of law and the exercise of spirit became reciprocal. Legally, how much of a body could be dismembered? In the Jamaican Black Code, as in the French Code Noir, a gradual removal of body parts was allowed: one ear for the first escape, another ear for the second, or sometimes a foot or a hand. The judicial code was preliminary to the utterance of guilt and essential to its efficacy.

In the French code the soul remained, no matter the tortures, whether castration, flogging, roasting, branding, loss of ears, nose, hands and feet. The baptized slave could, however, as some Jesuits claimed, shake off the mutilated flesh and rise again incorruptible. In Jamaica, however, slaves were construed, in varying Acts of Assembly, as things without thought, with no attention paid to their souls. But the duppies, or unquiet dead, returned in varying guises. The relics and scraps of bodies, the slaves who had been called “ebony wood,” “pieces of the Indies” or “heads of cattle,” returned as ancestor spirits, caught in the evil that had created them. Their metamorphoses and the “threat of ghostly revenge” troubled both whites and blacks, recording the rudiments of a legal sorcery that converted humans into things or nonhuman animals.

I take this circuit of stigmatization as a historical residue that turns “metaphoricity” into a way of knowing, that is, acknowledging history. Whether we turn to the English or French Caribbean, or even the American South, these spirits returned as baka or lougawou (werewolves), soucriants (suckers) or vampires, the varying kinds of shape-shifters known to shed skin and suck blood. Condemned to wander the earth most often in the form of pigs, cows, cats, or dogs, these evil spirits are the surfeit of an institution that turned humans into chattels. They, too, tell a history. These residues return, and along with other spirits of the dead, activate the materiality that is so critical to the spiritual beliefs of the enslaved, as well as to the terrible practices of the plantocracy.