2 - Zombies Become Warriors

Summary

Les Affres d'un défi

How inevitable are the oscillations from hero to detritus, from power to vulnerability, from awe to ridicule: a convertibility that vodou would keep working, viable, and necessary.

—Joan Dayan

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. In the particular case of Haiti, the zombie represents one of the most useful figures to emerge from the folkloric tradition. Functioning literally and allegorically in several Haitian novels of the mid to late twentieth century, the zombie offers a valuable critical tool with which to access Haiti's literature from a decidedly local perspective. Frankétienne's reliance on this figure as the central metaphor around which coil and uncoil the various elements of Les Affres d'un défi firmly links his Spiralist aesthetic to that of the broader Haitian community.