Zombified mobilities: clandestine Afroeuropean journeys in J. R. Essomba’s Le paradis du nord and Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore

Abstract

During the so-called migrant crisis, African clandestine migrants and asylum seekers have frequently been represented as invaders trying to enter Europe in order to destroy its cultural, social, political, and economic integrity. The figure of the clandestine migrant shares similarities with that of the zombie: both represent a contagious alterity that should be excluded from the community. In order to fully understand the migrant/zombie parallel, it has to be acknowledged that, unlike its contemporary popular culture adaptation, the Haitian zombie is a product of slavery, and hence not a perpetrator but itself a victim. This article analyses two novels, J. R. Essomba’s Le paradis du nord and Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore, by drawing on the different aspects of the zombie figure in order to elucidate the texts’ representations of contemporary clandestine migrant mobilities. My reading traces the texts’ links between clandestine migrants’ mobile conditions and the zombie figure through imagery revolving around the loss of identity and emotion, hiding, confinement, darkness, and death. The roots of zombified mobilities lie in the travellers’ precarious lives in their failed postcolonial states, and the Europe they pursue is a destination of non-arrival unable to save them from zombification.