Necropolitics creates a world of death and promotes dehumanization by depriving human beings of their dignity and destroying their living space, as well as their political status.
By
Saras Dewi
·5 minutes read
ARSIP PRIBADI
Saras Dewi
There is a darkness in the hearts of human beings that light can hardly penetrate. They carry this darkness to the grave, but not before passing it on to their descendants. Violence is the darkness that inhabits spirits of the past. History is incapable of describing the omnipresent abominations people commit against their fellow humans.
This is so very palpable in Haitian memory, that they have chronicled the misery and pain of slavery their ancestors endured in their folklore. One Haitian folktale is about zombies, a creature that is believed to be a dead body that has been brought back to life by supernatural powers.
In modern society, a zombie is nothing more than a monster that rises from the grave and wanders around, hunting for living human flesh. Zombie horror stories appear to be so appealing they have filled cinema, literature, comics, and video games. Horror fans indulge in the sensation of chasing after a throng of zombies and destroying the monsters. However, zombies in Haitian culture depict a sad story.
The word “zombie” is thought to have its roots in Congolese culture, namely deriving from the word “Nzambi”, one of the names of a god believed to reside near rivers in the Congo (Sarah Juliet Lauro: 2015). Although there are other interpretations regarding the etymology of “zombie”, the most prevalent is the zombie myth that was brought from Africa to the Caribbean and then on to the United States during the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
Zombies represent the sheer terror that hung over the slaves who endured the miseries of torture as they were exploited as forced labor on sugarcane plantations. It is told of how a sorcerer used a potion to reanimate a dead body as a living corpse that was able to work nonstop in the fields. The immeasurable horror was that even after death, a person remained shackled in slavey.
The zombie myth is also connected with the religion of the slaves, namely Vaodou. Unlike the perceived exoticism and demonization of voodoo, the Vaodou religion originally developed as a response to slavery. The slaves found respite in the religion in the midst of their despair in confinement.
Vaudou played a major role in the slave revolt in Haiti through the clandestine rituals the slaves held as a form of resistance. The Bois Caïman ceremony became a crucial gathering to organize the resistance. Representatives from various plantations attended the secret ritual, which marked a fraternal commitment to fighting oppression. The idea of zombies being an integral instrument in the slave movement stemmed from their belief that even if they died in their struggle, their souls would be resurrected to reunite with nature in Africa.
Exploring the history of slavery in Haiti, I reflect that Achille Mbembe, the Cameroon-born philosopher, once discussed the idea of necropolitics, or the use of terror as a political foundation.
It derives from the Greek word “nekro”, meaning corpse, dead body, or death. Mbembe refers to necropolitics as a political theory developed from a biopolitical idea raised by Michel Foucault, the French post-structuralist philosopher.
If biopolitics emphasizes on how power regulates physical and social life, necropolitics highlights the use of power to control society. Technological, ideological, cultural, and religious resources are used to achieve goals at the expense of the marginalized without power. Mbembe, specialized in postcolonial research, points out how Africa was torn apart by colonial rule, impoverishment, and slavery.
Necropolitics also shaped the economic structure that legitimizes torture and killing, as well as the slave trade, through industry. Coercion as a means of interaction became common. This triggered the spread and prevalence of war. Bertrand Russell, in his work titled Why Men Fight, says that war is the most enduring institution in human history. He criticizes war as the result of human impulses exacerbated by the glamorization of the cult of war. People look to indulge in the contentment of imposing power over others, Russell suspects.
The ongoing pandemic has exposed the dark side of human ideology, marked by events such as cementing India's Hindu ultranationalist party through the persecution of Christian and Muslim minorities; the violence and terror launched against indigenous communities in Brazil by authoritarian leader Jair Bolsonaro; and the killing of civilians by the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military junta.
In his analysis, Mbembe argues that necropolitics reduces people into living in pathos. He refers to the persecution of Palestine as a form of contemporary colonialism, with the Palestinian people forced to live under the persistent threat of death. Necropolitics also uses racism as a means of exposing spaces clearly intended to differentiate and create sharp divisions between groups.
The politics of death and terror that is going on in Ukraine under Russian military occupation is not only about territorial ambitions. The hallmark of necropolitics is the use of physical abuse to demonstrate power. The Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman has reported systematic rape and sexual slavery of women in Bucha and Irpin.
Rape as a weapon of war is a crime against humanity. This barbaric act is aimed at destroying the self. Necropolitics creates a world of death and promotes dehumanization by depriving human beings of their dignity and destroying their living space, as well as their political status.
SARAS DEWI, Lecturer of Philosophy, University of Indonesia
