zombies, leopards, and genre-theory

This is going to be a rather lenghty entry: What is a Zombie? The same as an undead person, or a "living dead". You might call it a "contradictio in adiecto", as someone is either dead or alive (although we know, that it is hard to draw the exact line between those two states of the body). Zombies are more or less popular figures in fiction (they have even given a name to a sub-genre of the horror-movie genre - I DO like genre theory a lot). Public notion holds this very concept to be somehow related to the Caribbean, especially to Haiti and "Voodoo".
I would rather call it a topic of folk-belief associated with the shape traditional West-African religions have taken in Haiti. To understand the notion of a Zombie in that particular context, we have to take a look at the concept of man behind it. In Voodoo thought, the human person is held to be guided by more than one soul or spiritual principle. The spiritual elements of the person are: the ti bónanj, the “little good angel”, the conscience of a person; the gwo bónanj, the “big good angel”, the personality of a given person and the lwa mét tét, the lwa, who is the master of the head, a personal "guardian angel". A lwa (pronounced as: lo-á) is a kind of spirit or deity. In the languages of the Bight of Benin it is called either a tro (ewe) or a vodu (fon). This is where the word "voodoo" stems from. In a way, it is the same as the Yorùbá orisha.
After death, the connection between the gwo bonanj and the lwa mét tét has to be resolved in the right way through ritual means. If that was done in the wrong way, it would lead to an imbalance that could be taken advantage of by an evil sorcerer (a bòkò), He will capture the gwo bonanj, and transform it into an evil spirit (a Zombie) that he uses for exerting witchcraft.
Another form of the Zombie is the above mentioned living dead, a corpse without a soul. In Haiti, these Zombies are thought of as corpses that the bòkò has taken out of the grave and revived. Since the gwo bonanj has already left the dead body, it is revived without a soul. The bòkò uses this Zombie to fulfil hard labour as a kind of human working machine. I keep on wondering, whether the circumstances of slavery have taken part in shaping such an imagination.
The latter notion is the movies' classic rendering: a person put into a state of a living dead. We find that in the movie that is commonly held to be the first "Zombie film" ever, White Zombie,  from 1932. It is worth viewing for the fact that it features Bela Lugosi and that it tells us some things about "race-relationship" (I do not think there there is such a thing as "race").



Although the movie draws heavily on (misrepresented) Afro-American religious ideas, and is settled in a Caribbean context, there is only one black person that is not merely depicted but also giving explanations: the coach-driver at the beginning of the film. The story is about a white couple invited by a white plantation-owner to have their marriage at his home. The latter wants to have the woman, so he makes a deal with a white sorcerer (master of an army of white zombies - hence the name of the film, I guess), who turns the woman into a zombie (by using a kind of "voodoo-doll", sympathetic magic). The plantation-owner has to learn the lesson, that in a pact with the devil one is very likely to be deceived, and the faithful husband succeeds in getting back his wife (with a little help from a friendly doctor and a black sage). Happy ending, the couple reunited.
A more sophisticated version of the eternal drama of mankind - will the two come together? (nobody ever is interested in their daily life AFTER THE FACT) - is given in "I Walked with a Zombie". In my humble opinion, Ulrike Sulikowski is more than damn right in highlighting that movie's merits. Obviously taking up the meager plot of "White Zombie", it brings in some reminiscences of Jane Eyre (the woman having fallen in love with the man who has a kind of Zombie wife at home) by darling Charlotte Bronté and unfolds the Zombie-theme against a background of a family-drama. Furthermore, there are dialogues that reflect outer image and inner practice of Voodoo, and black-skinned persons are allowed to act. The movie also stars a then famous calypso-singer, commenting on the family situation of the white patricians in the story's focus ("shame and scandal in the family").

In contradistinction to Jane Eyre, the drama unfolds in the colonies, as it is the Jane Eyre kind of woman that goes there, not the man having returned from there - a fine twist in the colonial construction of centre and periphery. The movie also shows some craftsmanship, as it is Jacques Tourneur, who has directed it. It was produced for RKO, and this meant a low budegt situation. Val Lewton was the producer (in charge of the horror genre at RKO), who engaged Tourneur, and most likely they would not have more than the title of the movie when starting to work on it. An example of such a film is the leopard man (click on it to watch the trailer), a story about a murderer who takes advantage of the situation, that a leopard has escaped during a publicity stunt. Nice movie, but no budget for special effects. As in "I walked with a Zombie", Tourneur compensates us with psychological finesse. He does the same in another production for RKO's suspense department, cat people (click on it to watch it), featuring lovely Simone Simon. Another one on cats of prey, this time on a woman turning into one. Her relationship to the psychoanalyst she is finally killing is a fine example of the psychological skills of Tourneur as a director, the way the killing is rendered is a striking example of "no budget". Back in the eighties, they did a remake directed by Paul Schrader, starring Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell, with a nice title song by David Bowie (I tried to find a good version on UTUBE, but there are only some live versions that do not match the original recording). Be that as it may, cat people does not offer us a happy ending. The disastrous energies of the catwoman are killing her lover and herself in the end (although we have a couple emerging out of that disorder). It is, in a way, a film noir, like "Out of the Past". (click on it to view it)
This one movie directed by Tourneur is worth viewing not only for the fact that it features Robert Mitchum as cool as he could be. It is regarded a classic film noir and I do think, more than rightly. It also shows that Tourneur could have been one of the great directors of his time (I like Truffaut, and for that I like auteur-theory). With all the twists of the plot, with all the sophistication of the main character, in a world where there is hardly someone to find you could trust in, it does not give us the classic happy ending. The one woman worth his love, faithfully waiting for the hero's return does not get him (or vice versa). In other words, the order of society is not restored fully, the chaos that has come in could not be overcome fully.
Might be a meek association, but the same seems to hold for the first Zombie Movie of the "apocalyptical type", albeit its ending in restoration of governmental power. Here, the figure of the Zombie is totally void of its meaning in the Afro-American world. For reasons that are not given in the film, the undead rise and invade the world, attacking the living and feasting on their corpses. A group of persons trying to protect themselves in a house does not succeed in its attempt to survive the attack, due to their failure of working together. Without indulging into ritual theory, it has to be mentioned, that funeral rites have to do with re-establishing order, as the order of society is disturbed by a corpse, the remnant of a living person, yet no longer in the realm of the living. Be it the shaman guiding the soul of the deceased, be it the procession accompanying the corpse from the community meeting locale (the church or some secular place) to the cemetry, and other examples galore, the line between the living and the dead has to be drawn clearly in order to have order. Fear of disruption of that order is, in my opinion, archaic both and modern, as it is universal among human beings. With "Night of the Living Dead", a low-budget independent film like White Zombie, a genre exploiting that fear, has been born.

A good read on the depiction of haitian vodu in the movies is: Ulrike Sulikowski, Hollywoodzombie: Vodou and the Caribbean in Mainstram Cinema. In: Manfred Kremser [ed.], Ay Bobo. African Caribbean Religions. Pt. 2. Voodoo, Vienna 1996, 77-96.

schlingensief (not) saving africa

A girl called Britta sent me some links yesterday, concerning Christoph Schlingensief's plans to build a festspielhaus in Africa (he thinks of Burkina Faso or Mozambique). Schlingensief's enterprise reminded Esther Slevogt of nachtkritik.de of one of her uncles who served as a colonial official in a German colony (he lived to an old age, that very uncle). When being carried through the bush in a sedan by some natives, this relative of Ms. Slevogt used to recite Goethe. and other German classics to the "uncivilised". I am sure, the palanquin looked like that:So she started a discussion on the blog of nachtkritik.de, where, among respondents' comments, one can find all the arguments refering to "AFRICA" from a European point of view: "why bring culture there instead of something to eat and settle their silly ethnic conflicts?"; "stop development aid and start fair trade instead!"; "help them to help themselves!"; "we love geldof and madonna!"; "we hate madonna and bono, and we are critical about geldof" and so on, hundreds of posts. I will not take sides (it was so easy to be pc back in the days when I was raised and it is so hard nowadays). Only one question: what part of Africa are you talking about? You're talking about the states Hillary is visiting right now? You are talking about Obama? Nigeria? Mozambique? I got the impression of Mr. Schlingensief being very conscious about the difference of his idea of Africa and some specific reality one could face on the African continent. Beside that, the discussion made clear to me again, that, with all the fuzz about what we could do for Africa, all we do is to foster our image of a helpless continent. Like Madonna, who fortunately has faced severe problems when trying to "raise Malawi". As Lara Stepanovic has pointed out rigthly on her blog, what would we think about Youssou N'Dour adopting a German orphan, his photograph on Times magazine headed "Raising Germany"?
Now, all of that simply reminded me of an article by Uzodinma Iweala in the Washington Post and of Damisa Moyo. Waiting for comments on that one. Me, I am taking sides for Iweala.

nietzsche and the whip

Being some kind of Nietzsche scholar, with my forthcoming book on the Last Disciple of the Philosopher Dionysos, I feel I have to do some posts refering to good old Fritz here, too. First and main objective: Do away with some of the long lasting prejudices concerning the philosopher. He was no fascist, not even a proto-fascist; he was no anti-Semite, and his negative statements on anti-semitism could not be reduced to the idea of him being merely an anti-anti-Semite and so on.

Then, Nietzsche and women. Not an easy one, so I will start with it. To have a rousing starting-point, let's take the whip. Sensational. Rendered like that in online-versions of "Thus spake Zarathustra": "Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!"-- Thus spake Zarathustra.
Now, this is a widespread rendering, and it is wrong, at least an erroneous translation. It does not read: "thy whip", but "the whip". It is not Zarathustra, the protagonist of Nietzsche's book, who brings forth that "little truth". It is an old woman. One like truth (on certain occasions Nietzsche makes fun of the eroticist Plato by using the metaphor of "old woman" for "truth"). The story goes like that: an old woman asks Zarathustra to give a speech on women. He refuses. She convinces him to do. He utters some commonplace "wisdom" on gender-relationship according to the bias of his time (we know, what he has thought about the latter in principle). She thanks him and, in return, whispers a "!little truth" into his ears (the one rendered above). She admonishes him to hold its mouth, so that it will not scream too loudly, that little truth.

And how that big falsehood has screamed! Screamed in the name of Nietzsche, as if he had said that. He has not. He has written a book, the protagonist of which has not uttered it, too. So even if we thought, that Zarathustra was Nietzsche's alter ego, we were wrong to say, that the whip-sentence was a comment from Nietzsche's perspective. That is the milk for the beginners. Meat for the adult: No clue is given in the text about who is holding the whip and what the person is doing with it. "Do not forget the whip" - as Annemarie Pieper (a woman) has pointed out in her commentary on "Thus spake Zarathustra", it could be the woman holding the whip and she could use it in different ways. To the left we see a picture of a woman holding a whip. This is a nowadays-style of depicting a woman with a whip. What is she about to do with it? Punish the poor man? Use the crack of the whip as a rhythmic device for danceurs? Draw a circle of reverence around herself? Annemarie Pieper suggests the latter, if I remember it rightly. May be an idealistic interpretation. What we do know, is, that in Nietzsche's writings, we find the first use of the whip as a practice he ascribes to the moralistic interpretation of the world. He does not like that world-view, as we all know, and he has some pretty good arguments, too, as some of us might know after having read the Genealogy of Morals. On the right, we see a woman holding a whip in her hands, an image more likley to be one that Nietzsche in his time could have had in his mind. What he could have had in his mind when relating to the use of the whip, is supposedely the rhythm of the dance. At least, we find that metaphor in his writings used in an affirmative way. The same holds for the practice that Annemarie Pieper has in mind. Whatever interpretation we tend to, we must be aware of the fact, that it is "the whip", which according to the old lady the man that goes to women should not forget, not "his whip". We cannot be sure, that it is her whip, but Nietzsche - giving us a rather harmless version of the use of the whip - makes sure it is in the woman's hand, as we can see on that famous photograph on the left again, that he has arranged. It features Paul Rée and lovely Lou Salomé. I would have liked to go on with some remarks on gender-construction chez Frédéric, but this will be another post, albeit not another topic. So I close with popular culture again. The song that first came to my mind was the Rolling Stones' When the Whip Comes Down, a two-chord rock'nroller from "Some Girls" (A-D; changing to G-D for one chorus). For the sake of featuring good music here, I decided to bring in Beast of Burden from the same album. In first place, it fits with the picture of Lou, Paul and Fritz, and secondly, beasts of burden (the camel and the ass) are prominent as caricatures of the representatives of the moralistic world-view in Nietzsche's writings. Although I do not agree with his overall interpretation of the "doctrine" of eternal recurrence, I still do think that Gilles Deleuze has given insightful comments on the donkey and the camel as metaphors in Nietzsche's works.

For all the scholarly stuff (quotations, refined arguments and the like), read my book!!!

Popular Religion again: Jacko!

Born on August 29, like Charlie Parker, Ingrid Bergman, John Locke, Diamanda Galas, GG Allin & me (amongst others), 1958 (exactly one year older than me): Jacko!. Seems like the only song of him I do like is Billy Jean. Therefore, no comment, not even trying to...


I came upon this today (walking the dog) in my neighbourhood (a small forest [copse] at the border of a village in southern Lower Austria). This is (a concretion of) religion, however we may define it (a place of manifestation of the Sacred, a symbol for dealing with contingency and so on). Recently, Hubert Knoblauch (my favourite sociologist of religion) has published a book on "Popular Religion" - I have bought it today and am eager to find out what lurks behind the subtitle "On the way towards a spiritual society" (Auf dem Weg zu einer spirituellen Gesellschaft). Whether the folk that have created that little memorial want Michael Jackson to live long or to rest in peace, is not the question. The issue at stake is transcendence.
I wonder: did they conduct some ritual when establishing that memorial place for their hero? If so, what were the elements, what was the shape? A little sacrifice, a libation, some prayers, dances, candles lit? Did they do it at midnight? In the moonlight? Moonwalking? Do they go there at regular intervals and repeat some of those activities? Will a cult be established?

Shatner Reading Palin