The Soul-Snatching Truth About Zombies And Enslavement
We deserve to live fully while our ancestors rest easily. Many enslaved folks feared being stuck on plantations, even in the afterlife. That fear birthed "zombies” as we know them today, but there's a message about liberation within the myth.
When most people think of zombies, they think of horror films. Zombies have been a hallmark of the horror genre for centuries, but they originated in Black spirituality.
In Haitian folklore and Voodoo religion, zombies are the product of spells by a Vodou sorcerer called a bokor. While the zombie is mythical, it is a projection of the real-life experiences of enslaved people.
Zombies mirrored the manifestation of what the enslaved feared most: spending eternity in plantation fields as soulless creatures bewitched for free labor. Many enslaved people were convinced that death would release them back to their homelands in Africa, where they could be free.
But there was a way to break the spell that zombies were under.
Salt. It was believed that feeding salt to zombies helped them regain their senses so that their souls could rest, as we all deserve.
We can ignore the modern zombie tales and focus instead on the ancestral version, which reminds us that despite how the system tries to snatch our souls, our bodies are ours, and liberation will be, too.
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