Since the bicentennial of Haitian independence in 2004, the field of Haitian literary and cultural studies has expanded considerably. It is no longer possible to claim with the same degree of urgency that Haitian history and literature are being ignored in North Atlantic academe. Not only have Haitian literature panels become a central part of the often social science-focused Haitian Studies Association (which has been in existence for more than thirty years), but numerous conferences and colloquia on both sides of the Atlantic have now been devoted almost singularly to the topic of Haitian literary studies.1 We are witnessing, in fact, something of a revival in Haitian literary studies. Various scholars from both French and Francophone Studies, as well as English, History, and American Studies, are turning their attention to Haiti’s robust literary culture.

This chapter considers how the zonbi has served twentieth-century Haitian writers as a valuable trope through which to account for and contest the horrors of everyday life under and in the wake of Duvalierism. The chapter examines the literary configuration of the zonbi from three distinct yet interrelated perspectives: as a figure of immanent and even imminent revolt; as a lens through which to reckon with gender in Haiti and beyond; and as a metaphor for the alienation and trauma of exile. The chapter calls for an appreciation of the zonbi as a popular cultural figure whose inherent ambivalence has allowed Haiti’s writers to embrace the unresolved tensions of the nation’s oft-evoked resilience in the face of seemingly relentless tragedy, both within the island and in its diasporas.

It is a deeply peculiar phenomenon, Haiti's ‘popularity’. Marked by qualitative extremes – first successful slave revolt, first black republic, most African Caribbean culture, most dangerous tourist destination, among others – the country occupies a unique place in the collective consciousness of the modern American hemisphere. And it is fair to say that many have been ‘obsessed by Haiti’ over the course of the so-called ‘American Century’, and since. Yet, at the same time, the nation has factored little and only indirectly (that is, without substantive, recognizable agency) in shaping the politics and the policies of a contemporary global order largely crafted by ‘former’ and current North Atlantic imperial powers. In the past decade, many scholars of Haiti have lamented the ways in which the island nation, its history and contemporary realities, have been constructed and circulated outside of the country – by the international media, by political pundits, by development and humanitarian aid workers, by missionaries and even by academics working more or less directly within the deeply interdisciplinary field that is Haitian Studies. Appearing in many forms and emerging from multiple sources, the narrative of Haiti's exceptional nature has been persistent and constraining. At once postcolonially international and colonially French, Haiti has occupied a fraught geopolitical position that, over the course of its more than 500-year history, has determined the singular parameters of its development – and underdevelopment – from colony to modern nation-state. It has also yielded an extremely particular narrative, one that has persistently muted the extent to which Haiti has historically undone the presumptuous demands of empire.

Arguably the most significant source and pervasive vehicle of this narrative is the discipline of anthropology; and so it is that anthropology, specifically cultural anthropology, as it has developed as an academic field and professional practice in the United States, serves as the point of departure for this volume.

From ‘home’ to Haiti

I first picked up African-American dancer, intellectual and social activist Katherine Dunham's 1969 ethnographic memoir Island Possessed with no ulterior motive, no particular scholarly intent. Having relatively recently earned tenure at my institution, I had decided to grant myself the gift of reading for the pure pleasure of the exercise. I had no plan for the text; I did not see any specific way I would incorporate it into any of the work I was doing (or had promised to do) at the time – those at once heady and oddly disconcerting three months between my promotion and the beginning of the fall term. I was fairly certain, of course, that the book would fall at least to some extent within the scope of my ‘professional purview’ as a Caribbeanist with a particular interest in Haiti. Written by Dunham during the 1960s at her home in Senegal, and based on fieldwork conducted in Haiti in the mid-1930s, there was no question but that the narrative would be a ‘fit’ within the intellectual collage I had been building over the course of my academic career to that point. But again, I had picked up Island Possessed without any expectations regarding its usefulness to my scholarly work. I was simply curious to know something about Dunham's story. Acting on this curiosity felt like an indulgence in that moment.

This wasn't the first time that, out of curiosity and with some time on my hands, I had traced the path of an intentionally lone, perpetually expatriated black woman across the Atlantic. There was some precedent for this.