Zombi

The zombi is a figure in Haitian Vodou belief and social practice — a person officially dead yet forced back into labor by a sorcerer or bokor, deprived of will and speech, docile until salt restores awareness. Alfred Métraux linked the zombi's imagined condition to the experience of plantation slavery: to be a zombi is to be enslaved after death, stripped of personhood and returned to toil. The figure is also associated with Bizango and other secret societies as a mechanism of community justice and social control.