Zombies, Fabric, Prayer

Aline Duriaud

[Glamour Bomb] • Sera Beak, author of The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark, suggests widening one's conception of prayer to "allow your entire life and your entire self to become living, breathing creative prayers ... Who said praying had to be beige? As a creator, your palette is wide open. Carve your own meanings from life's "ordinary" aspects and events; see them with fresh eyes."[1]

Any activity done with love and care, she proposes, however mundane, constitutes joyful, embodied prayer.

In an article in Detroit's Metro Times, Sarah Klein charts the genesis and development of Tiki culture, a syncretic blend of orientalist fakery and American kitsch fuelled by U.S. soldiers returning home from the Pacific islands loaded with anecdotes and souvenirs. In its heyday Tiki was a palm frond and bamboo accented lifestyle encompassing food, aesthetics and, particularly, cocktail culture. A famously potent Tiki cocktail, The Zombie, is a mixture of apricot brandy, rum, sugar, lime and pineapple juice.

Wikipedia describes a zombie as "an animated human body devoid of a soul", originating "in the Afro-Caribbean spiritual system of voudoun where zombies are people who have had their "Ti Bon Ange" ( Creole from the French "petit bon ange", or "little good angel") or soul stolen by supernatural means..." The creole word zombi refers to a returning spirit or ghost pulled back to the surface world. Horror films, fantasy literature and other forms of Western entertainment have mined this archetype and appropriated it into metaphors of viral infection and evil often heavily inflected by "racist attitudes and negative stereotypes of black culture."[2] But more recent zombie inflected films including the seminal Night of the Living Dead have cut and pasted the original zombie archetype into post-apocalyptic critiques (for example of "Zombie-fied" consumerism), of the film maker's own cultural milieu.

This cultural mixing echoes the syncretism of Haitian Voudou, melded from West African, Caribbean and European religious practices, borne of slavery. It is tempting to leave it at that, to celebrate a liberating, anti-author methodology of eclectically makeshift, jammed-together elements with the seams showing, to set up a neat parallel between different types and traditions of appropriation in a spirit of "it's all one big free for all." But, as Kenaz Filan says in his excellent The Haitian Vodou Hanbook: Protocols for Riding with the Lwa, "Like it or not, we do come to Haitian Vodou from a position of privilege. Over half of Haiti's children suffer from malnutrition; 15% will die before their fifth birthday; only thirty-eight out of a thousand will ever complete high school."[3]

I'm not sure what to do with this information, or how, in my own attempts to make things, to avoid confusing the radical and subversive aspects of syncretism with rampant, indiscriminate consumption. I intensely want to think and act embodied. Eating/consuming is often a diversionary substitute, a trick side street that leads back to myself.

I tried to stitch together a coherently argued essay on the concept of the Zombie. It didn't happen. I aspired to be "serious", to invest in/give myself over to the totalizing dream of a self-contained premise, to make it unfold from a smooth internal logic. Instead I present a choppy patchwork of quotes, phrases and imagery, a blend of descriptive and informational.

Browsing in a bookshop I find a coffee table book of American pulp novel cover art. I flip it open to a blue skinned beach woman with frothy blonde hair and a Jayne Mansfield silhouette. She undulates in a swatch of orange purple flame. Stick-on rhinestone jewels line her cheekbones and eyebrows. The artist is Stan Willard, possibly a ruddy individual with thick hands and deft fingers. I imagine him in the summer of '52, in a corner of his bungalow garage, perspiring over an angled draughtsman's table, hashing out cover art for "Blood Beach Voodoo Frenzy." In the background evidence of cartoonishly sinister blood rites; revellers with Anton Lavery style goatees cluster around a pyre, the woman an inflated totem of their quote unquote bizarre desires. Deviance as "feminine." Superimposed over her blue body in watercolour wash, collapsed perspective style, two preppy innocents who presumably stumbled onto this seaside scorpion's nest of cannibalistic reveries (searching for somewhere to crash they mistook the pyre for a barbecue grille and assumed they'd be welcome) flee the scene, feet sinking in the moonlit sand. The young Americans will be captured, skewered and eaten as offerings to alien Gods resembling Tiki lampshades invented by baby boomers.

In his book Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture, David Chidester states that "American popular culturuthentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Cultue produces fakes, not only things that are made up and invented, but also people who are frauds and charlatans. Often, these fakes are religious fakes, because they involve artificial or fraudulent religious claims about transcendence, the sacred, or ultimate human concerns...despite their fraudulence, these religious fakes still do authentic religious work in and through the play of American popular culture."[4]

Everyday detritus formed into offerings. I'm in the bookshop evading research for a story called The Binge Cult. In The Binge Cult, a woman returns to England from the U.S.A. with a severe binge eating problem. She has no money. She moves in with her parents and spends her time in internet cafés surrounded by a rain of mouse clicks and watching from behind her plywood cubicle wall the manager stroll up and down the aisle with the thuggish authority of a sweat shop supervisor. On the internet she finds an organization called "The Viridian Foundation", whose members convene in a large rain forest theme restaurant and entertainment outlet named The Amazon Bowl. She attends a meeting and is introduced to a method of prayer-in-action based on embroidery techniques. The woman is sucked wholeheartedly into the organization and changes her life for the better.

Dwapo Lwa and Dwapo Sevi are sequined vodou flags created for artistic or ceremonial purposes. "Traditionally, the flags are designed by hougans or mambos, and hounsis or apprentices painstakingly stitch on the sequins. The cloth is clamped onto a wooden stretcher and ... each artisan works on a different area ... A single flag may take a month or more to complete and require more than twenty thousand sequins."[5]

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Footnotes:

1. The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark, author Sera Beak, pub.

2. Voodoo: Search for the Spirit, author Laennec Hurbon, pub. Discoveries series, Harry N. Abrams Inc.

3. The Haitian Vodou Handbook: Protocols for Riding with the Lwa, author Kenaz Filan, pub. Destiny Books

4. Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture, author David Chidester, pub. University of California

5. Voodoo: Search for the Spirit, author Laennec Hurbon, pub. Discoveries series, Harry N. Abrams Inc.