One day in class Professor McCoy talked about how there are many paths when talking about zombies. One of those is how pop culture portrays zombies and another is the history side of it which comes from the Haitian island going back centuries.
Zombies has a huge place in American Hollywood and overall American cinema. From tv shows to movies, every which way about it we all have that same image of zombies from childhood in our heads. But in class we talked about zombies a lot and especially Zone One by Colson Whitehead, we dug into the myths about zombies. I have always loved zombies personally, growing up I would watch all the movies I could, and that was hard to do cause my mom would never let me watch those types of movies. So when we started learning about their history and the Haitian culture that had zombies deeply imbedded into that I was all ears.
The first people to believe in zombies and where it truly came from was Haiti during the 1625 to 1800. Originally these people were slaves and they were from Africa. These ideas was all these people had, the ideas of something bigger out there was a huge thing for these people. These slaves truly believed in zombies, in some cases they believed the only way they would be free was if they died. That to me is truly sad, I couldn’t imagine treating a person so badly to drive them to believing in that
The stories were passed down from generation through generation, zombies became common folk tale in a way. But over time this became a bit of culture appropriation, and in Mariani talked about it as white washing. These big media agencies don’t care about culture and especially when it comes to black culture. Over the years it has been an issue in Hollywood and zombies is one of the main ones. It doesn’t respect the connection to slavery it has still to this day for many Haitian Americans. Going forward we have to make sure that the truest history of zombies is told and Hollywood does not white wash the history of zombies and how it enlightened the enslaved people of Haiti.
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