
Contact: rwetheri@smu.edu
Zombies Can’t Have Babies
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Resisting extinction is probably one of the most forceful drives a species inherits. Not battling death, which is its personalized form, but fighting the loss of the lineage itself. Many endangered species are on the brink, just “hanging on”. Zombies are a fantasized but apt example.
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The notion of the revised dead and their return to the living goes back at least to Mesopotamia in the 2nd millennium BC. In the heroic Epic of Gilgamesh, the goddess Ishtar invokes the undead:
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If you do not open the gate for me to come in…
I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living:
And the living shall be outnumbered!
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The zombies of Western lore have filtered down to us from West African kingdoms through the Caribbean slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries. We find them from Brazil to Cuba, with the most fulsome and fearsome in the voodoo cults of Haiti. They were always problematically real, even there, but they remain influential.
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Most of us don’t take zombies seriously, reveling in their cinematic or literary entertainment value, but dismissing any allusion to reality. But the very idea of the undead kindles chills as it summons a reluctant fascination, the sort of repulsion/attraction that Freud claimed to be the basis of neurosis.
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What we don’t find in any of the attitudes or sentiments towards zombies is sympathy, and I find this curious! The closest approach to compassion is in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and this is only because the zombie is misunderstood and mistreated. But why should not the mere idea of the condition generate sympathy rather than fear?
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After all, the zombie’s status is hapless and immersed in misery. The zombie is neither dead nor alive; it has neither hope for redemption nor expectation of mortality. It is self-limiting. Zombies can’t have babies. Their plight is unfulfilling, yet their struggle is insatiable. “Hanging on” is indeed their appropriate portrayal—seeking to avoid oblivion while sensing its inevitability.
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There is symbolic value here: the zombie forests of California’s coastal conifers and in the Sierra Nevada’s transition zone are real. They survive as old-growth forests of ponderosa and Douglas fir in a new climate “too hot to have babies”. Their original cooler microhabitats have migrated north or up slope, leaving them behind in a transformed chaparral of scrub oak and yucca. The old remnants are prevailing miserably.
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The “zombie apocalypse” has arrived in coastal waters, too, where warmer zones are replacing the cooler, threatening sea life’s reproduction. The sea star is hanging on, the last of its kind, and the kelp is in peril.
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Zombie viruses from 30,000 years ago rest beneath the Siberian tundra and in the guts of frozen mammoths, waiting for the thaw of resurrection. They are the patient undead.
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As the vanishing members of these zombie lineages cling to survival, their lineages are themselves disappearing, and we should be compassionate and saddened rather than revulsed. Extinction is not a happy event, and the individual hangers-on—the zombies—are not to be feared, but pitied. Perhaps even sadly reminisced. Their time here is limited. Ask the Dodo.
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Ron Wetherington
