“the suitcase in the closet”: Talking Zombi(e)s with Junie Désil (an Interview)
In this interview, Junie Désil discusses her experience as the daughter of Haitian immigrants. Growing up in Montréal, Canada, and dealing with her parents' silence and hesitance to discuss their Haitian culture led to Junie's investigation and research on zombi(e)s as a significant presence in Haitian beliefs. Junie touches on Voudou spitirualism and the cures for being a zombi as it connects to her experience of Black personhood.
This article ““the suitcase in the closet”: Talking Zombi(e)s with Junie Désil (an Interview)” originally appeared in Canadian Literature: 252 Canadian Literature (2023): 104-127.
The Conversation
Sharon Engbrecht: You start eat salt | gaze at the ocean with this idea: “how to write about what you carry but don’t know” (4). In your memory, when did you first hear about zombis? Or, how did that become part of your identity as a possible Haitian mythology?
Junie Désil: When I was eight my parents were having a small gathering. One of our—my brothers’ and my—favourite activities was going through my mom’s suitcase. She had this weathered suitcase with her old passport from Haiti, [and] this cookbook that she hand-wrote when she was in home economics at school in Haiti. That night I was rifling through and I saw this Enquirer-esque newspaper. It had this scary . . . All I remember is seeing the eyes and an ashy face. And there was a big title, ZOMBI, but it was written in créole. I was kind of guessing what it said. I tried to ask my parents another day, and they freaked out—didn’t want to answer. So, we never talked about it. I didn’t make the connection that the zombies I would grow up with from movies like Night of the Living Dead were the same thing, or at least coming from there.
When I chose to write eat salt | gaze at the ocean, it was hard because I wanted readers to learn about zombi(e)s. I had a moment when I decided to write from the position of a zombi(e), but that got scary—the idea of inhabiting that space. I felt like I didn’t know enough about zombi(e)s or my history. Instead, I just needed to keep it simple and write exactly how I felt about the subject. But I also felt, I can’t help it, writing from a position of a Black Haitian woman who’s never been to Haiti, who just has this imagination of what Haiti is, from my parents and what the media and the world say.
So, as I tried to allude to in my collection, you carry these things but you don’t know—deep culture stuff that I would have understood if my parents weren’t trying hard to assimilate and suppress aspects of their Haitian identities.
SE: The “suitcase in the closet” is an interesting metaphor because the collection talks about bones and skeletons (20), as in those hidden histories, and both the suitcase and those histories are “ne touche pas” (20). I sense there’s a religious critique, especially because the loss of identity is the loss of Vodou2 spiritualism and religion that gets caught up in the “racist image of a devilworshipping, black-magic wielding, and uncivilized tradition imagined by Western popular culture” (Moreman and Rushton 2). Is that part of what you read into your parents’ silences or their fear and skepticism of that history?
JD: Yes. I think there were many layers to their silence. There was certainly the religious element-slash-angle where Vodou, and many spiritual aspects of Vodou, diametrically opposed a fundamentalist Christian life.
That was what I grew up with. We don’t talk about certain things because it might mean something. More to the point, I grew up in a Haitian home where my parents did their best to not be . . . Haitian. I did not grow up with the typical cultural markers like music, art, or artifacts, nor did we celebrate cultural holidays or even visit Haiti.
But I would add that there was also an element of shielding us from racism and the racist assumptions people had of Haiti, including that Haitians were “backwards,” Vodou practitioners, poor, et cetera. Growing up, all news accounts always started with: Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere . . . Then there was the AIDS scare in the eighties, where the origin of AIDS was initially blamed on Haitians. So, I think there were many layers to my parents not answering questions. As I got older, questions that touched more specifically on Haitian Vodou went unanswered or dismissed or were regarded fearfully. Asking those questions could have also meant that I was potentially interested in Vodou, in being a practitioner or dabbling. And that freaked my parents out. I also learned that I had to ask questions carefully; otherwise, I wouldn’t have access to information for quite some time. And I only had this one narrative—my mom’s narrative. But my mom would just shut down if I asked her too much or wasn’t careful about how I asked about certain things.
As an example: When I was twenty-four, I travelled to Portugal, Morocco, and Spain and felt so proud of myself. I bought this beautiful red scarf, and I thought, “This will be perfect for my mom.” When I got back, I went to visit her and gave her the red scarf. And she had this look. Her look didn’t connect for me then, but I also noticed she never wore the scarf. Another time, she came to visit me, and my décor is red, Persian carpets, I had two black cats, incense burning. My mom thought I was a Vodou priestess, like deep into these things. I didn’t know that red could be a symbol that you’re involved in one of the Vodou societies. But I don’t know—I love red! [laughs
SE: It’s the colour of your soul! [laughs]
JD: Right?! But it is that tension: that my mom doesn’t want to talk about her ideas of Haitian culture, doesn’t want to explain what’s good and bad, what we should and shouldn’t do, so I’m bumbling around figuring things out. And I also don’t want to rock the boat because she might panic and spend time figuring out why I’m asking questions, rather than answering the questions.
I remember saying, “Before I turn twenty-seven, I need to visit Haiti.” Well, that never happened. But for a year—I cannot make this up—my mom called every other day: “So, are you going? Who’s making you go?” She has such trauma around Haiti. And I get it; that is what she grew up under. And we just don’t talk about it.