In the eyes of Westerners in the 19th century, any element of African culture was seen as barbarism. In Haiti, the agitators who emerged from the rebellion of 1791 and the revolution were used as proof of a connection between voodoo and savagery. The same same apprehension was invoked in the 20th century to justify the American occupation of Haiti in 1915 and turned the island into something seen as a deadly land of living dead. (4)
Weekly World News
October 18, 1994
As a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural
society, the United States should not necessarily have developed an attitude
of scorn or rejection toward Vodou. At most, it could have maintained
a certain indifference. But this has not been the case.
Anti-Black racism being one of the major characteristics of
American society, contact with Haitian culture was forged on the basis of
racist prejudices, with fatal consequences.
After Haitian independence was won in 1804, many colonists
from the north of the country found refuge in the Sates. Rumors about
the political events in the country, and about the revolts that had preceded
independence, tended to depict Blacks as creatures hungry for blood and
vengeance. After the Civil War anti-Black racism was far from losing
its intensity. At the end of the nineteenth century, Vodou, which was
of African origin, could not be appreciated as a religion equal to other
religions. As the colonists had revealed it to be, it was essentially
a heap of superstitions, and of magical practices and sorcery, stripped of
coherence.
(2)
The Emperor Soulouke
Honore Daumier
19th century. caricature.
Poster for the film I walked with a
Zombie
1942, directed by Jacques Tourneur
These characterizations led
to the belief that independence came prematurely to Haiti and that the black
people still had need of the whites' guidance in order to take their place
among civilized nations. The clear link among race, voodoo, and
despotism in American public opinion paved the way for the American
occupation of Haiti. In 1915 U.S. Marines landed in the guise of
liberators to begin an occupation that would last until 1934.
Haiti became painted as a land of "zombies" and voodoo became
known as having the power to revive the dead. The zombie and voodoo
death gradually became a favorite theme of American horror films.
Jacques Tourneur's film I Walked with a Zombie came out in 1942, and
told how numerous zombies, kept until then by voodoo priests, took advantage
of the troubled times to escape. Walking in the countryside meant the
risk of coming upon one of them in a corner of a sugarcane field.
Tourneur displayed Haitian voodoo as a series of bizarre practices, chief
among them the sorcerers' ability to kill people and then reanimate them in
a state of living death. (4)