Notes on Zombology Poem by Simen Hagerup

A powder strike. You die at the same time as a hundred Japanese business men of food poisoning in a sushi bar.
The change in the doctor's grip round your wrist when your heart stops. Darkness.
Darkness. Your memories die, they become phantom pains.
You wake up to the scent of datura flowers: a sprinkling of blows with a stick over your body.
Bye bye, good little angel.
Today we give you the tiniest of grains.

*

The Duvalier regime on Haiti recruited witch-doctors to the secret police. State terror, cases of kidnapping, torture, slavery, murder were concealed by rumours of black magic.

*

Monsters, like us, are political animals. Count Dracula and the Minotaur, for example, are both images of the nobility as a monster, individuals that terrorised the local population according to a feudal logic. The vampire had to rest in the family crypt and to feed itself on the blood of virgins (just as the lords and princes had the right to take the bridegroom's place on the wedding night). The minotaur sat as a prince in house arrest, receiving his fourteen human sacrifices a year.
For its part, the zombie is a monstrification of the dregs of society, of poverty. The tale of the walking dead that take over the earth and devour the living is a narrative of a riot, but somewhere between a political revolution and an ecological disaster. The images of the sluggish, unstoppable hordes of zombies can make us think of the swarms of locusts of the desert wars or the epidemic of yellow-fever that decimated Napoleon's forces during the Haitian revolution.
Disaster follows the miserable to the battlefield.

*

The Pro Life movement lost its foothold on the spot. Now theological activists had an even more burning issue on their minds than what happens to us before we are born.
Pro Death saw the light of day: from lobbying to chaining demonstrations against burials, along with the exhuming and reanimation of the dead, headed by the relations or, conversely, without their knowledge or consent.

*

Reintegration into the community began, with TV programmes adapted to the living dead, curling for the reanimated, keep-fit for the deceased, study circles on the use of staircases and doors, as well as annual coach outings to Tivoli.

*

All the living/dead have a right to be meaningful objects.
All the living/dead have a right to a dignified exhumation.
All the living/dead have a right to freedom from religion, speech and thought.
All the living/dead have a right to be or not to be.
All the living/dead have a right to salt in their porridge.
All the living/dead have a right to braaains ... brraaaiins ... BRRAAAIINS!

Translated by John Irons