The Zombie in/as the text: Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Amy Fass Emery

In Picturing Ourselves, Linda Rugg draws an analogy between "the loss of control over the body's image inherent in photographic portraits" and "the loss of control inherent in writing" (4). She further notes that "The photographic situation ... offers the autobiographer a representational image for the autobiographical act of looking at oneself, as well as a metaphor for the intrusive act of reading and interpreting that takes place after the publication ..." (5). Hurston's fear of losing control of the self in her writing is projected outside of the self onto the zombie, who is vulnerable to the photographer and the photograph's viewers in the same way that Hurston was vulnerable to malicious, "intrusive" readers. Hurston's confrontation with the black woman zombie--her uncanny double--thus presents an allegory about the nature of anthropology: about the shared vulnerability of the self and the other, and about the parasitic speaking of the anthropologist through the abject body of the other that produces the zombie-text. By capturing the zombie in the text (for a photograph is fixed, static, not alive), Hurston bears witness to the "epistemological failure" of a science that "kills" its object/victims as it consigns them to a static textual death in life. (12)

Voodoo, which also involves 'killing' object/victims, is a belief system that develops strategies of indirection for overcoming powerful adversaries while avoiding direct confrontation, a system for leveling or disempowering powerful individuals who have inspired the envy of others. An ouanga (or charm), like the infamous voodoo doll, works by affecting the well being of its victim indirectly, through sympathetic magic. Similarly, the black vernacular art of signifying is characterized by its aggressive use of strategic indirection to bring the mighty down. Like irony and parody, signifying is a trope that allows its users to insinuate, to state something without seeming to state it. Hurston's mastery of the signifying art is evident in a chapter near the end of Tell My Horse entitled "Doctor Reser."

Doctor Reeser was an actual former Marine who stayed in Haiti after the US occupation and was given charge of an insane asylum. He was known for being a white man who participated in voodoo ceremonies and for regularly being possessed by the loa, generally while in a drunken state. Hurston meets and spends time with Dr. Reeser and praises him as a great man. She pretends to be a disciple of his ways and professes to find him admirable. Yet Hurston changes the spelling of the man's name "Reeser" to "Reser," creating a palindrome that suggests that the reverse of what she is saying is also true. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., comments on the rhetorical tropes that involve repetition with difference, like agnominatio--the change of one letter--noting that such tropes "luxuriate in the chaos of ambiguity that repetition and difference ... yield in either an aural or a visual pun" (45). Hurston's change of the man's name indicates that she is "signifying," that her use of repetition with difference is "motivated," in Gates's sense, and her intentions ambiguous. (13) She reveals her traitorous intent when she confesses: "I am breaking a promise by writing this" (245).