By Rene Madrigal

I sit in a graveyard as I write this, I thought it would give me the necessary mindset to begin writing this piece, but the scenery is far too lovely.

People sit here not thinking about death, but life.

I cleaned my uncle’s headstone today, tenderly and gingerly wiping off its surface as if wiping the sweat off a baby.

Yet as I sit here, mere feet from his ashes, I don’t remember him living.

I remember the funeral.

I remember the sobs, the wails, going to the restroom, and vomiting as a horrified grounds worker slowly slipped out.

I remember the body, people telling me to go say bye to my uncle, yet I saw nothing of him in this corpse.

Though George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” is often credited with beginning the American cultural idea of the zombie as we understand it today, the origins are far older.

According to Mike Mariani’s article for The Atlantic titled “The Tragic, Forgotten History of Zombies”, the zombie myth stretches back to the days of French sugar plantations in Haiti.

Then known as Saint-Domingue, Haiti was a brutal place for slaves even compared to the already repugnant standards of chattel slavery; slaves were commonly worked to death within a few years (Mariani).

For the enslaved Haitians, the original “zombi” myth served as a cautionary tale against suicide. Death would traditionally grant them access to their afterlife, a return to lan Guinée (Guinee or Africa in general), while suicide would instead force them to walk Hispaniola forever as soulless zombis.

Today this version of the zombie myth is largely forgotten in favor of Romero’s ghoul, a corpse which rises into undeath to feed on the living.

Yet that one bit of Haitian lore remains the soulless body, the corpse.

And there I am back at the funeral, I stand beside the corpse that people insist on calling my uncle. My father cries, my uncle’s ex-wife howls in agony shouting at the corpse to get up, for God fill his limp body with life once more.

I stared at the body so intently, “I should feel something” I thought to myself, I should have started crying like everyone else, maybe recoiled in disgust, but nothing.

There was something undeniably creepy about the body, but nothing that could evoke the feelings I was seeing around the room.

It was just an empty vessel, a house with the lights off, more ominous than sad.

This is what I believe to be the root of fear within the human psyche that makes zombies so resonant with popular culture.

Not the unnatural prospect of undeath, not the rot, not the feasting on flesh, but to see your loved one again with no remnants of the person you once loved. Which is exactly what a funeral is.

The zombie’s relentless, animalistic hunger only serves to further emphasize the lack of humanity within the risen human form.

While The Spirit stays with us, The Corpse is distinctly temporary, it is burned and buried.

The Zombie is the antithesis to this, the corpse walking.

In the way I experience him, my uncle is a zombie, more a corpse than a man.

While his spirit lingers around my family, his corpse stays with me.

As the funeral winded down that day, the churchmen told those around the body to tell everyone who still wanted to see the body to do so now, as the cremation limo had arrived.

"How am I going to tell my father that this is the last time he will see his brother?", I thought to myself. What right do I have?

And yet I did, I told everyone to gather around as they closed the casket.

I vividly remember standing at the back, towering over my short family, watching the casket slowly close.

This is how I remember my uncle, the corpse in the casket, the zombie.

Monster of the Week: The Corpse (On Zombies and the Transformation of a Human Into a Body)