"For Depestre, a zombie has never been as simple a creation as the
bleary-eyed villains of 1930s Hollywood B movies. Instead zombification
is a state of deterioration based on the loss of one's ti bonanj, one's
good angel, which turns one into a vacuous shell of one's former self. A
case can be made that the Jacmel I am visiting now cannot help but be a
slightly zombified version of its former self, having lost many of its
own angels, among them one of its most adept literary chroniclers, to
other shores."
Edwidge Danticat, After the Dance.
