Accept its invitation to be present. Tune in with the collective body, both human and nonhuman.

Take note of all the skins and places we inhabit, the bones and the lands that bear our weight.

Integrate with a wider metabolism, with a much longer temporality than your human body.

Follow nonnormative and nonlinear time.

Deactivate your cravings for protagonism, greatness, and legacy.

From “Co-Sensing with Radical Tenderness,” Dani d’Emilia, Vanessa Andreotti, and GTDF Collective

This is an essay about the poetry of the undead. Zombies. Vrykolakas. Revenants. We’re the unextinguished, living in dying bodies. The microplastics in our brains gleam in thoracic twilight. Mercury laces our brain stems and heart chambers; it congeals in our kidneys. We’re fleshpots and water bags knit by protein bits churned through the bodies of our forebears, who are in us still. We’re nothing but chimera. We’re stitched to the atmosphere by the air in our lungs, to the oceans by the salt in our blood. We’re in an ecosystem coming undone, and we humans are part of the great unraveling. Zombies, speak!

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The figure of the zombie emerged in Haitian vodou, an expression of the social death of slavery, the body reduced to its capacity for labor. As Kaiama Glover argues:

It is crucial to note, however, that the zombie exists, by definition, in a state that as closely resembles the movement of life as it does the immobility of death . . . As such, while the zombie’s subjugation is profound, it is not necessarily definitive. Rather, the zombie is a creature within whom coexist an utter powerlessness and an enduring chance for rebirth . . . Both alive and dead, neither alive nor dead, the zombie always retains the possibility, albeit slim, of reclaiming his or her essence, and in this sense serves at once as a reflection of Haiti’s extreme misery and of its inextinguishable potential. (1)

As such, the zombie embodies the creativity and resistance that forces of subjection can never extinguish. Zombies, arise!

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In Greece, near the end of World War II, lore about vrykolakas informed how many people in the rural population handled the bodies of loved ones who died during the Great Hunger, when Nazi occupation and rampant looting resulted in the starvation of 300,000 Greek citizens, with the death rate peaking in the winter of 1941-1942. So overwhelmed were the graveyards that the dead were interred en masse in unconsecrated ground. Adding to the psychological toll of mass starvation, family members worried that the improperly buried might return in the form of vrykolakas.

On September 26th, 1940, Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher, intentionally overdosed on morphine in a hotel in the Catalan countryside to avert his imminent deportation to Vichy France and death in a Nazi concentration camp. A few months prior, Benjamin had written his famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” an analysis of how the Marxist governments of the Soviet bloc had devolved into fascist ones. In the essay, Benjamin pushes back against a triumphalist historicism that would cast the present as the justificatory culmination of the struggles of past generations. For Benjamin, the thinker who understands herself to be actively embroiled in the conflicts of the past avoids the misprisions of teleological thought: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious”(2). So long as we do not renounce them, the dead in us might continue to inhibit the enemy’s totalizing victory. Zombies, unite!

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Itself an instance of zombie poiesis, this essay seeks to unearth ways that the living can put in their lot with the dead. We have a choice: to affiliate with the living – those who would extract every resource, fungibilize it, keep it circulating aboveground, burn it into the atmosphere, store it in the cloud, apply it to the development of technologies and medicines that benefit only a sliver of the briefly living. We can affiliate with the living, try our hands at grabbing what we can, turn our bodies into machines for consuming as much as possible and thus transforming the commodity into someone else’s profit. Or we can put in our lot with the legions of the dead, living for, with, and as the defeated, the unconsecrated, the beheaded, the already dead. We can inherit and channel the kernel of resistance embedded within the husk of subjection, confronting the fact that modernity’s edifices rise out of the violent appropriation of bodies, lives, and land and their inequitable distribution; as Machado de Oliveira puts it, “modernity cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, militarization, dispossession, destitution, genocides, and ecocides” (3). We can acknowledge that coloniality/modernity is experiencing self-inflicted death throes and die with it, strangely, perversely, while metabolizing rather than reinflicting its traumas.

In so doing, zombie poiesis resonates with the long legacy of figures of the undead, their imbrication in colonialism, their utility in framing practices of resistance to it. “There is a vital history of thought – an archive of freedom practices – that emerges from the living corpse,” writes Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “from the terrorized body barred from sociality, kinship, and the status of the human” (4). Situating ongoing catastrophes in the history of conquest, zombie poiesis inverts popular commercial reinventions of “zombie culture . . . extracted from Haiti by Hollywood, in the service of erasing coloniality and sustaining ongoing capitalist geographies” (5). Zombie poiesis dives into the murk of colonial modernity’s long durée and comes up in a past that’s (the) present.

Half-buried in dirt, zombie poiesis also responds to the affordances of ecopoetical antecedents. Per Jed Rasula, a compostal ethics informs the broader category of ecopoetry, which, in his formulation, expresses human entanglement in the materiality of ecosystems. Rasula identifies necropoetry as an ecopoetic subgenre, one that identifies the living as “exiles or outsiders, the most isolate of all minorities” (6). Consumed by the links between the living and the dead like necropoetry, and, like zombies, attuned to the conquest conditioning those links, zombie poiesis would account for the impact of colonial violence on the ecosystem that engulfs humans. Like Scott Head’s “necropoetic gestures,” which interrupt the violence of postcolonial necropolitics, zombie poiesis seeks, in its own uncanny, agrammatical ways, to interrupt necropolitics the eco-genocide of colonial conquest (7). But if the necropoetic gesture resists the powers of death, zombie poiesis perversely draws close to death as a zone of potential affiliation. Zombie poiesis practices capitalist modernity’s negative capability; it succumbs fiercely to the vulnerability of human coembodiment in a damaged biosphere.

In their recent collections, Edgar Garcia and Joyelle McSweeney articulate the stakes of solidarity with the dead and dying ecosphere and show us how to cultivate necrotic camaraderie. Taking themselves as autoethnographic subjects, they use poetry to confront and hack the colonial capitalist unconscious. Garcia and McSweeney’s poems dig a rusty thread ripper into the seams of the present and pull hard to see what spills out, and I shout, “Zombies!”

//Skins//

Edgar Garcia goes zombie in Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, using his own unconscious to mind-meld with the first great colonizer/geno-ecocider (8). Each night for a season, Garcia reads entries from the Journal of Christopher Columbus before sleep and, come morning, channels poems that emerge in the intervening dreams: “You wished to see what, when left to its matrix of associations, your mind made of the colonial story.” Sections of Columbus-journal poems (“Journaling”) alternate with collages and photos, accounts of Garcia’s travels throughout the Americas and Europe (“University Head,” “Nahuali Without Organs,” “Ohmaxac Packs (Tomorrow’s Savages),” and “Bowl-Maker”), and short prose poems channeling Malinowski (“Diary in the Strict Sense”). A robust endnote apparatus unspools the archives of the project, which include Odysseus, Adorno, Blake, the Guatemalan Civil War, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the history of MS-13, Mayan cosmogony, Bob Ross, Barbara and Dennis Tedlock, and much more. The sections on Garcia’s travels, written in the second person to further the dispersion of subjectivity proposed by the mind-meld with Columbus, examine the ways in which the wake of colonial contact has shaped Garcia’s life and the lives of his ancestors. The collages juxtapose disparate cultural fragments in ways that defy Cartesian scale and linear time. In these ways, Garcia weaves the colonial past into the present of his own life, demonstrating a point central to his 2022 Emergency: Reading the Popul Vuh in a Time of Crisis: that the catastrophes of the present not only emerge from but are aspects of the catastrophes produced by colonial contact, and, further, that these catastrophes are part of an ongoing struggle already accounted for in ancient Mayan cosmogony (9).

In addition to emphasizing the entanglement of past and present, Garcia’s genealogy of the commodity form establishes the identity of humans and the ecosystems that environ them. Violence against one is structurally identical to violence against the other. The collection’s Columbus perceives that the socioecosystemic novelties he finds in the Caribbean represent enormous wealth because they have yet to undergo their first transformation into the value form, as in “Thursday-Monday, October 15”:

Hoisted sails, bracelets, legs, and arms

Crystals the shape of diamonds

I touched to make them shudder &

look away & I could take what I want

bracelets on their arms and legs

in their ears noses

and around their necks plus

some dry sliced leaves they prize.

The uncommodified ecosystem presents itself as an unimaginable treasure that appears simultaneously as object and exchange value in “Thursday - Monday, November 12”:

the infinite amount of spices

the archipelago of rivers ripe

from winter and about to flower

fifty thousand ducats.

In precipitating the transformation of material to commodity, the colonial ideology fungibilizes Otherized people, and Garcia registers the impulse towards violence that accompanies the hunger for possession in “Thursday - Saturday, October 27”:

It wasn’t until It was Into my hand

my strength Myself so lovely

that I noticed I wanted to kill them.

Violence against ecosystems and humans must be deployed in creating the economic conditions that would make the appropriated resources valuable, as in “Friday-Thursday, November 27”:

it was easy to achieve our

success because it was an accident

For this reason we must not let

any other stranger to come get

to trade or set foot here

for this is the alpha and omega

of enterprise.

At this crucial inflection point in the history of modernity, economic value emerges from a social relationship (one of privileged access enforced at the root by violence) to natural resources. Commodification of the ecosystem co-occurs with the appropriation of human agency. Garcia’s collection uncovers the processes whereby humans are turned into Spillersian flesh, the formless substance of queer, female, and BIPOC embodiment that lubricates the extraction and accumulation of value and that shores up the coherence of liberated white subjectivity. Garcia names this rapacious force of wealth accumulation “trust fund 1492/1493”: the genocidal, ecocidal dispossession instigated at the moment of European contact with the Americas.

//Toxic//

In the gorgeous hellscape of Toxicon and Arachne, the dead lurk alongside and within the living (10). Where Garcia uses his own unconscious as grounds for accessing and refracting colonial history, McSweeney reads capitalism’s death wish in the bodies of the living. McSweeney’s interrogation of the conditions of contemporary embodiment borrows a page from her earlier work on the necropastoral, defined as

the manifestation of the infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion occultly present in the hygienic borders of the classical pastoral . . . Never inert, the necropastoral is defined by its activity, its networking, its paradoxical proliferation, its self-digestions, its eructations, its necroticness, its hunger, and its hole making, which configures a burgeoning textual tissue defined by holes, a tissue thus as absent as it is present, and therefore not absent, not present – protoplasmic, spectral. It is in this sense that we find the political force of the necropastoral, its ability to stage networks and ‘strange meetings’ (11).

Like other monstrous offspring in the lineage of necropastoral (including Michael Leong’s necrocoastal and necrogeorgic, and my recent elaboration of the latter), zombie poiesis describes the work of poets motivated or compelled to inhabit and channel a palimpsestic underworld: the living world of the dead and the dying world of late capitalism. “I am native to this damage,” McSweeney writes in “Sheep at Derrigimlagh.” The body’s derangement, mutability, and hybridity enmesh the living in the dead and the human in the nonhuman in terrifying and dazzling permutations.

McSweeney’s anti-lyric, zombie I proves to be a heteronomous conglomerate, speaking on behalf of a body that’s little more than a contraption, riddled by poisons and weaponized by the profit motive, imperfectly alive at best. In “Oocyte,” the speaker navigates a world in which reproductive bodies, toys, and nonhuman animals are suffused by an ethos of mechanized killing:

Goldfinger, barf, I shot the queen and lost my lunch,

I shot the queen, and left my tote of Kotex

on the piano and my cast-off screenplay and my addressbook

and my extragun. I beat retreat, made a nest of spun spittle

within my nest of scum. I’m not an actress I’m a writer.

The joystick’d boys sink arrows into the ozone.

If we can’t have bees we’ll have drones.

This “I” speaks as a ravished and raging fragment of a commodified biota. Like a black light, McSweeney’s poetry illuminates the normalized violence perpetrated by the commodity form.

In particular, Toxicon and Arachne attends to the biopolitics of reproductive labor under the regime of colonial capitalism. McSweeney’s poems voice the horror of the female subject confronted with the fact that in coloniality/modernity’s death-spasming underworld, even acts of birthing, nourishing, and caretaking can be construed as forms of violence. In “Leading Indicators,” she writes:

A descent

in the price of dishwashers,

A rise in the striations

in the teeth

of child-skeletons

in a pit

beside the workhouse.

In the convulsed temporalities of the Anthropocene, centuries of poverty condition the grotesque affordances of contemporary consumer capitalism. In fact, historical poverty is not historical in the conventional sense of the word. Addressing living children as they “prepare for school again,” the poem explains that

200-year-old children

whose bones are made of pulverized stars

whose teeth developed even as they ate themselves

superannuate

in the pit

your mouths are open

you are going to be eating

for a long time.

Childhood poverty of previous centuries forms the basis of the glut of commodities that saturate the lives of humans living within the global and chronological buffer zone created by an ongoing regime of extraction. The past is not past; zombie poiesis rages in the everyday.

McSweeney’s poems express wrenching ambivalence about the body’s compulsion to create under the regime of capitalist modernity; the zombie-speaker would to some degree rather be released from the drive to live. The agony of the decision to endure unbearable circumstances emerges with particular force in the section “Arachne,” an account of the death of a newborn child. In “Morning Wants an Eidolon (Line Misheard from Big Star’s ‘Stroke it Noel,’)” the brutality of the creation drive is clear:

That’s a word poets love

Because no one else wants it you can get it cheap

Eidolon, little light that leaks

when a ghost leaves

The bruisey weeds in the garden

ungoogleable

and eyeless, closed around their seedy code

nearby and remote as on the edge

of the galaxy

the Milky Way, naturally

they bend their necks

under all that milk.

Creativity itself feeds on the living and dead with an insatiable hunger. The poems, exhausted and furious, put in their lot with the Benjaminian dead, who will “not be safe from the enemy if he wins,” the “image of enslaved ancestors” which feeds the “hatred and the spirit of sacrifice” of the working class” (12). “Sestina Ayotzinapa,” which chronicles the state- and cartel-sponsored massacre of teacher protestors from the Ayotzinapa Teachers College in Guerrero, Mexico in 2014, proclaims,

If the birds have mercy, they’ll close their wings around the moon

and allow us to sleep together in our common grave.

McSweeney’s poetry finds itself to be radically coembodied with a dying earth. Toxicon and Arachne identifies with, embraces, and grieves for the ongoing destruction of a livable planet under the aegis of economic growth.

//Prophetic Zombies//

Zombie poiesis embraces the radical vulnerability of human entanglement in ecosystemic instability; it calls out and leans into the phenomenology of fragmentation and extraction. In this respect, zombie poiesis overlaps with what Margaret Ronda calls the poetry of “remainders,” which include “obsolescent commodities . . . polluted air and toxic matter,” the leftover and the fragmented (13). But where the poetry of remainders might best be characterized through a melancholic refusal to relinquish attachment to a lost object, zombie poiesis evokes a more manic affect: it embraces the colonial brokenness of the world, defies the doctrine of separation, and conjures weird know-how that is orthogonal to established systems of compartmentalized knowledge production. In so doing, zombie poiesis takes up the work of the “daykeeper,” a figure in Mayan religions who was tasked with “the care and healing of individuals and communities” by accruing knowledge that allows them to maintain relationships with the gods and the ancestors (14). Through its practice, zombie poiesis teaches that the struggle of the planet against the billionaire class is the ongoing struggle of the Indigenous people of the Americas against conquest; of the wretched of the earth in the wake of their passage through the door of no return. The present has not passed beyond the predictive scope of ancient mythic texts but remains embedded in them.

Zombie poiesis claims vulnerability as an act of endurance, and endurance as the act of the warrior, insofar as generosity and care for self and others defies the impulse towards self-blame, withdrawal, and defeat. McSweeney’s poems exhibit these qualities of manic empathy and fierce care. For all their rage, they seize their moment lustily and issue a rude shout from inside the toxic erotic of late capitalism:

It’s me, JonBenet, and Lynndie

We’re in our PT Cruiser

We’re driving into the crisis

Because we are motherfucking marines.

The zombie figure in which speaker and reader meet is chilling and fierce and weird, as in “Warp Spasm”:

my eyes are smart with stars

like I always wanted them to be

mad with

black brilliantine

suave as a boozy crooner

white with a concealment powder

thick as clarifying cream

made from arsenic

imported from Inchon . . .

I cleave

I leave

black blood issues its data reams.

Even though creativity itself comes off as a cruel compulsion towards an obsolescing and murderous newness, McSweeney seizes on the generativity of language with a rabid zest that signals the will to resacralize and endure. If we’re already in the trenches with the dead, death has no sting. We rage, we create, we endure on behalf of enslaved ancestors and forsake the ignis fatuus of liberated grandchildren.

For his part, Garcia looks to the past to imagine a future, concocting a primal tableau in which human sociality is given new form in “Ohmaxac Packs (Tomorrow’s Savages)”: “Packs of creatures who could no longer remain human kept alive what ancestral rites they could remember. They listened in the forests but to nothing. And they gazed at the open sea with blank stares. The rites they could not remember they reinvented.” Reanimating the sacred, zombie poiesis frames an epistemology capable of accounting for and addressing the socioecosystemic violence manifesting in the climate crisis. With the tools at hand, it excavates the world under our world and creates rites that bind us into unstable and chronodivergent collectives. It resacralizes intuition, sensing, touching: our strange and dying bodies.

(1) Glover, Kaiama. Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010.

(2) Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations. Harry Zohn, trans. and Hannah Arendt, ed. Houghton Mifflin, 2019 [1955].

(3) Machado de Oliveira, Vanessa. Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. North Atlantic Books, 2018.

(4) Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “Zombie Biopolitics.” American Quarterly 71, no. 3, pp. 625-652, 2019.

(5) Dillon, p. 647. Tiffany Lethabo King emphasizes the rhetorical work done by words like “settlement” and “plantation,” which suppress the histories of enslavement and genocide essential to settlement. See The Black Shoals.

(6) Rasula, Jed. This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry. U of Georgia P, 2002.

(7) Head, Scott.  “Necropoetic Gestures.” Horizonte Antropologicos 29:67 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9983e670406.

(8) Garcia, Edgar. Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography. Fence Books, 2019.

(9) Garcia, Edgar. Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

(10) McSweeney, Joyelle. Toxicon and Arachne. Nightboat, 2020.

(11) McSweeney, Joyelle. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. University of Michigan Press, 2014.

(12) Benjamin, p. 204.

(13) Ronda, Margaret. Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End. Stanford University Press, 2018.

(14) Garcia, Skins of Columbus…, p. vii.