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lareviewofbooks:

ALIX OHLIN

on Colson Whitehead and the undead.

Reclaimed Sewer Pipe © Kelly Barrie 2010.
Digital C-Print Courtesy of the artist and Maloney Fine Art.

Colson Whitehead
Zone One
Doubleday, October 2011. 272 pp.

In Zuccotti Park on Halloween, protesters dressed up as zombies in suits, eyes vacant and deranged, fake blood and money dripping from their lips. A directive had been sent from Occupy Wall Street organizers:

Everyone come dressed as a corporate zombie! This means jacket and tie if possible, white face, fake blood, eating Monopoly money, and doing a slow march, so when people come to work on Monday … they see us reflecting the metaphor of their actions.

Oh, the insult of this metaphor — of all the monsters to pick! Zombies aren’t sexy and glamorous like vampires, or changeable and muscular like werewolves. They represent appetite run amok, violence without thought, and total abdication of the individual will. The undead are not just monstrous in their greed, but unreflective in it. You can’t argue with them.

That the corporate zombies on their way to work appreciated the reflected metaphor is, let’s say, unlikely. But the conflation of money and blood in the OWS costumes indicates the severity of the situation — the feeling that economic injustice has grown to a monstrous condition. And though the movement has spread across the country, there is a reason that the occupation started in New York. The city is the beating heart of the crimes under protest, as it is the heart of Colson Whitehead’s satirical zombie novel, Zone One.

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