From the mountain to the shore: indigenous migration, water crisis and revolutionary zombies from Haiti to Perú

Champion, Giulia (2022) From the mountain to the shore: indigenous migration, water crisis and revolutionary zombies from Haiti to Perú. In, Shapiro, Stephen, Champion, Giulia and Douglas, Roxanne (eds.) Decolonizing the Undead: Rethinking Zombies in World-Literature, Film, and Media. 1st ed. Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 191-208.

Abstract

This chapter aims to excavate the emancipatory Zombie of the Haitian context and use it as a key to read Julio Ortega’s novel Adiós, Ayacucho (1986). The chapter considers the connection between the overlooked Haitian and Peruvian revolutions and investigates the Peruvian work of fiction, which follows the undead Alfonso Cánepa and his journey from Ayacucho to Lima. Cánepa journeys from the mountains to the shore to retrieve his missing bones and give himself a proper burial after he is violently mutilated and murdered by the military police in Ayacucho. The novel is inspired by the investigative commission prompted by the president Fernando Belaunde Terry in February 1983 following the murder of eight journalists in January 1983 in the village of Uchuraccay. This violence, part of what is known as the Manchay tiempo in Peru (time of fear), the period between 1985 to 2000 during which indigenous communities were caught in the crossfire between the Marxist-Maoist Guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso and the military government. Though Cánepa is not labelled a zombie in the novel, this chapter identifies him as such to align his character to the decolonial genealogy and rebellious potential of the Haitian undead figure.

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