We call it renaissance and youre callin it apocalypse: Apocalyptic Idealism and Zombie Revolution in Guante and Big Cats!

s An Unwelcome Guest

mstigergun http://mstigergun.tumblr.com

See I've learned a little bit about energy I've learned when it enters you it loses charge So the negative and positive are worth the same amount The passion and the pain, the smiles and the scars Whether you lost your job or won the lottery That energy enters you, like a lightning bolt And no matter how dark its origin, once it's inside you It's yours to control So what this means, is that those Who've been through the most have the most to let go There is strength in our anger, power in our pain Even beauty in the hourglass' grains It all depends on how we use it (Guante, Lightning from You Better Weaponize) Zombies have become an American pastime. In the words of Warren St. John, zombies are back (2). Whether evidenced in the popularity of The Zombie Survival Guide, novels ranging from World War Zsoon to be a movie starring Brad Pittto Mira Grants Newsflesh series, the popularity of the ever-expanding Resident Evil franchise, the epic comic book series The Walking Dead and its subsequent television adaptation, or the recent teen romantic comedy Warm Bodies in which a zombie and a girl fall in love, zombies are on the tip of our cultural tongue. Novels, comic books, and video games about zombie apocalypses are being translated across media forms, into television series and movies, in the desperate scramble to keep up with the cultural

2 thirst for apocalypse and the undead. This obsession is long-standing, even if it ebbs and flows: the zombie is a discursive site with a rich history. Zombies exist as a site upon which the anxieties of predominant social groupsusually white, middle- to upper-class Americanscan be off-loaded and explored. While zombies represent and embody the anxieties of predominant social groups and function as an abjected Other, whether that Other is a person of colour (Canavan 433), an immigrant (Comaroff and Comaroff 797), a threatening colonialized subject (Fay 82), or a racialized terrorist (Bishop Dead Man 24), that same abjection and fear can be utilized to subvert dominant and exclusionary ideologies. By mobilizing abjection as a site of cultural anxiety, abjected individuals can use negative symbolic connotations to break free of repressive structures. This type of activism is what Imogen Tyler describes in her book Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain: [There are] dual meanings of abjection and revolt: the processes through which minoritized populations are imagined and configured as revolting and become subject to control, stigma and censure, and the practices through which individuals and groups resists, reconfigure and revolt against their abject subjectification (4). It is precisely this attempt to take abject subject position(s)in this case, the culturally-loaded zombie with all of its symbolic iterationsand then to use it to break free of repressive ideologies that hip-hop artist Kyle Guante Myhre employs in his album An Unwelcome Guest. By using the abjected zombie, Guante poses an alternate apocalypse, one unlike many of the zombie apocalypses wherein class divisions are reified almost as a means of comforting the ruling social groups. In Guantes apocalypse, the abjected Other becomes a figure for revolution and the social Others reclaim rejected spaces and forge new nations.

3 Travis Gosa, in his review of three books about the intersection of hip hop and activism, writes that, while hip hop has its origins in activist and resistant discourses, it seems to have lost much of its original drive and has become a commercial vehicle for the reinforcement of capitalist, racialized, and sexist ideologies (240, 245). M.K. Asante disagrees, claiming that hip hop has entered the hands of the post-hip-hop generation (qtd. in Gosa 241) one that is concerned with social justice issues including womens rights, gay rights, and the anti-war movement (Gosa 241). Ray Waddell writes that a new wave of artists is taking hip-hop to another level with expressive, message-filled rhymes laced over inventive beats that entertain and informwithout preaching (n. pag.). Activist hip hop, also known as conscious rap, has has a small but loyal audience that has the potential to expand (Waddell n. pag). Ultimately, Gosa finds the case for revolutionary hip hop unconvincing (242), but the case is certainly far from settled.1 Hip hop, then, and its potential for activist and revolutionary thought is just as fraught as the zombie: both zombies and hip hop can be seen as repressive vehicles and potential sites of challenge. First, I articulate my theoretical apparatus, grounded in Judith Butlers understanding of Julia Kristevas abject. A clearer lens through which to approach the same intersection is Jeffrey Jerome Cohens Monster Theory, an approach to analysis that aligns itself with Tylers ideas about abjection and revolt. Next, I trace the many anxieties that have been off-loaded onto the

One might contend that the heart of this debate has much to do with whether anything can ever be truly revolutionary. Certainly, Louis Althusser makes the claim that it is impossible to exist outside of ideological apparatuses (1505); similarly, Judith Butler writes that, even in the expulsion of the abject, the abject is brought back within the symbolic system (Gender Trouble 181). If ideological systems account for revolution and find a way to commercialize and tame that impulse, then no revolution can be possibleor rather, and more hopefully, revolutionary communities must always stay one step ahead of the systems that would tame them. I would thus argue that Goyas contentions have much more to do with the nature of systemic representation and oppression than hip hop in and of itself. Guante is clear in his belief that hip hop can be the domain of activists, and his latest album You Better Weaponize is a clear call for his listeners to step up and engage in activism.

4 zombie and work to articulate how the zombie has come to be a contested and complex figure in the modern Western psyche. Finally, I analyze Guantes album to expose how he mobilizes the fraught symbolthrough using a musical genre that, as we now know, is similarly fraught in its tension between commercial complicity and revolutionary potentialin order to pose an alternate future wherein apocalypse becomes a renaissance, one wherein marginalized persons forge a reclaimed future.

5 I. The Abjected and Monstrous Other We are all closer. We are all capable. We all have so much tumbling around inside of us, pushing against our skin, kicking at the weak points. They forget. How much pressure is built up inside, how nobly we fight to hold it in, how easily we break. (Guante Yes, God is a DJ; No, Not a Good One) The abject is a concept first articulated by Kristeva in a psychoanalytic sense, although, as a concept, abjection has moved beyond its initial confines and now sees broader play, particularly in cultural studies. Tyler describes Kristevas work: For Kristeva, the abject is a concept that describes all that is repulsive and fascinating about bodies and, in particular, those aspects of bodily experience that unsettle bodily integrity: death, decay, fluids, orifices, sex, defecation, vomiting, illness, menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth. Abjection also describes experiences of bodily affect, moments of physical revulsion [T]he abjecting subject attempts to generate a space, a distinction, a border, between herself and the polluting object, thing or person. Abjection describes the ongoing processes of bordering that make and unmake both the psychological and material boundaries of the subject. (27-28) Tyler goes on to link abjection to social Others, developing what she terms as social abjection. Although Tyler is certainly not the first theorist to apply abjection to socially marginalized groups, she does examine the role government play in abjection, something other thinkers have not done. Tyler writes: [My work] extends what we ordinarily think of as social class to a broader understanding of social classification and declassificatory struggles, in order to think intersectionally about modalities of difference and resistance. In focusing on not one but

6 several different categories and groups of people laid to waste by neoliberal economic, political and social policies (including asylum seekers and other unwanted irregular migrants, politically and economically disenfranchised young people, Gypsies and Travellers), my intention is to produce an intersectional account of marginality and resistance that will deepen critical understandings of the common processes and practices of neoliberal governmentality both within Britain and beyond. (8) Social abjection, then, is the systemic Othering of groups of people. The process of abjection creates a discourse of disgust and revulsion around marginalized persons. This process is one that simultaneously articulates the Self (what I also refer to as the center later on) and creates the Other. Judith Butler describes the ways in which that which is rendered abject is expelled from systems of representation: The abject designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered Other. This appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion. The construction of the notme as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject. (Gender Trouble 181) Butler continues, noting that this stability, this coherence, is determined in large part by the cultural orders that sanction the subject and compel its differentiation from the abject (Gender 182). To approach the idea through different means, the predominant social group names itself draws a boundary around itselfby articulating the Other, the not-me. The borders of Whiteness are maintained by deciding what is not-White; heteronormativity is reinscribed by expelling queerness. This is necessarily complicated, as Butler points out, because the

7 expulsion of the Other creates the Other in the same moment that it articulates the Self. Tyler describes the process in a different way: Waste populations are in this way included through their exclusion, and it is this paradoxical logic which the concept of abjection describes (20). To articulate difference is to create it; in other words, and as will be expanded upon briefly, expelling the abject assigns it power. This idea is at the heart of Tylers book, and it is also at the heart of the theoretical bent of this analysis: if abjection can result in a subject-position from which revolution can occur, then it is a process that must be made visible and utilized. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, in the first essay in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, makes a case for seven theses that show why monsters matter and how they function in the cultural consciousness. His work offers a more practical lens through which to access ideas of abjection and social revolution, and his thesis are certainly more self-evidently applicable in the work of this essay. Cohens seven theses are each meaningful in the analysis of zombies that will occur in the next section, but the theses that are most useful are bolded: 1) The monsters body is a cultural body 2) The monster always escapes 3) The monster is the harbinger of category crisis 4) The monster dwells at the gates of difference 5) The monster polices the borders of the possible 6) Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire 7) The monster stands at the threshold of becoming (4, 6, 7, 12, 16, 20) The monster, Cohen writes as he explains his first thesis, necessarily signifies something other than itself as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment (4). Because it represents a cultural fearbecause it is a projection (4)the monster cannot be destroyed; it must always escape

8 (Thesis Two) or, in the case of zombies, it is an endless horde, incapable of being destroyed. Perhaps most crucially is his third thesis: the monster terrifies because it threatens to smash distinctions (6): if abjection is the process through which the integrity of the Self is maintained, then the monster that threatens to destroy that binary is terrifying. In Thesis Four, Cohen argues that monsters are always an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual (7). Monsters become the scapegoat upon which cultural anxieties can be off-loaded (11), but this scapegoating paradoxically empowers the monster to show that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential (12). Because the monster is a constructed category crisiszombies that are both dead and living, for example, or they consume mindlessly, parallel to our consumer-driven culture and economy, while they destroy the systems that propped up capitalism and made consumerism possibleit is empowered to deconstruct those categories that exclude it. While the monster always stands at the borders of the possible (Thesis Five), a creation that is transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic, a lawbreaker (16), the monster is a site of desire as well as a site of fear (Thesis Six). That is, because culturally unacceptable practices are off-loaded onto the monster, it becomes, in a sense, desirable; the abject, though repulsive, can also be appealing in its absolute freedom if that freedom is mobilized.2 This thesis links necessarily to Thesis Seven: monsters, because they exist on the outside, carry with them self-knowledge, human knowledgeand a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside (20).

One need only look as far as the teen romantic comedy Warm Bodies or the novel Cold Kiss to find examples of zombies-made-desirable. In a less sanitized version, the comic series The Walking Dead has Carol commit suicide by walking lovingly into a zombies embrace, exclaiming Oh good! You do like me (qtd in Canavan 450).

9 To reiterate the theoretical position of this paper: abjection is a process that is simultaneously marginalizing and empowering. To become the monster of the margins is to be granted the knowledge of the outside; it is to move beyond the limiting boundaries of the center and to slip, impossible to catch, to name, to tame, right to the heart of terror. Although the creation of the monster is a process of exile and alienation, that process simultaneously grants tremendous power to those who live in the margins: much like queer performativity threatens the imaginary logic of heterosexuality (Butler Bodies 249), so does the monster, as a category crisis, as the site for cultural fears and forbidden knowledge/desires, have the power to destroy the order of the center. However, identifying with abjected identities can be taxing on a psychological level. Critically, Butler writes: The task [of the abjected] will be to consider this threat and disruption not as a permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility (Bodies 3). That is, being made the monster and accepting the mantle need not be a permanent identification: instead, asserting ones unity with the margins, in its abjection and rejection, is to employ identity politics strategically in order to destabilize reified and exclusionary matrices of social power. It is to delve into the intersectionality of abjection with the aims of creating a brighter social world. Abjection occurs as the subject is colonized and repressed (Tyler 44): it is something that is done to persons, groups, identities, actions, values, and so on. However, how the abjected perceive themselves is crucial: by viewing abjection as a failure of the mainstream to construct an egalitarian system of intelligibility, those who are made monsters can work to rearticulate the categories that name them, but can never tame them (Butler Bodies 3).

10 II. We are the monsters abused by the conquerors: Zombies as Sites for Cultural Anxieties for every action, you know the rest so consider this a warning, consider this mourning in America the proletariat is still snoring street corners mirror the faces, lines forming (Guante Yes, God is a DJ; No, Not a Good One) Jennifer Fay writes that the American fascination with zombies and imperiled democracy began in the Caribbean (82). Kyle Bishop agrees: The zombie was a new monster for a New Worldit was discovered in the actual contemporary religious practices and daily folklife of postcolonial societies in Haiti and the Caribbean (Sub-Subaltern 145). He continues: [T] he zombie provides the oppressed the opportunity to oppress, and western civilization is thus threatened (147). As a site of anxiety, the zombie represents the underlying and simmering fear of those who have been Othered. Bishop further argues that zombies are are truly other because of their fundamental lack of humanity (146). They are incomprehensible and utterly alien, despite their apparently human bodies. Zombies, then, stand as the perfect example of the transformation of familiarity into a dangerous strangeness, the self transformed into the Other, the man made into monster. It is this slipperiness, this American anxiety resting upon the fear of contamination, that makes the zombie a powerful cultural symbol. And while critics have argued that zombies are manifestations of colonial anxieties (Bishop Sub-Subaltern 147), or fears of consumerism run rampant (Fay 82), or immigration (Comaroff and Comaroff 797), or media and technology (Cameron 88), Bishop makes the claim that the recent zombie renaissance is grounded in the post-9/11 social consciousness: [T]he primary metaphor in the post-9/11 zombie world is terrorism. The transmission of the zombie infection is a symbolic form of radical brainwashing. Because anyone can

11 become infected (i.e., conditioned) at any time, everyone is a potential threat; thus, paranoia becomes almost as important as survival. (Dead Man 24) As a discursive site, the zombie is a nexus of many layers of cultural anxieties, and these are largely centered on the Other, on the cultural identities and positions that have been abjected. Despite its linkages to the fear of technology or consumerism, the zombie crucially becomes the symbol upon which all the fears of marginalized communities are placed. I would argue that examining the zombie along these lines is an urgent task: while there are interesting connections to be made between the spread of zombie-as-virus and a fear of science, the ways in which we structure and think about lived realities and identities are at stake. By turning an eye to zombieas-Other, then, we can shed light on how predominant social groups construct marginalized identities; the act of exposing these subtle ideologies makes resistance possible. Fay writes, In Haitian cultural history, the zombie has long served as an allegory for slavery and emancipation from colonial rule (93). As is often the case with zombiesand, as addressed by Cohen, with monstersthe zombie is both one thing an another: it is simultaneously a representation of the slave condition, especially as produced in colonial wars and a figure of slave rebelliona coming into consciousness of ones state of desocialized life (Fay 93). Fay makes the argument that early zombies more clearly address anxieties of a spectral workforce as opposed to racially-motivated fears (95). However, Gerry Canavan argues that, in addition to function as an interrogation of the future of late capitalist hegemony, the use of zombies exudes racial panic and nonwhite life (433). He expands: [O]ne of the ways the State apparatus builds the sorts of preaccomplished subjects it needs is precisely through the construction of a racial binary in which the (white) citizen-

12 subject is opposed against nonwhite life, bare life, zombie lifethat anti-life which is always inimically and hopelessly Other, which must always be kept quarantined, if not actively eradicated ad destroyed. (433) To return to Butler, the abjected must be expelled in order to police the boundaries of the (white) citizen-subject. However, just as Cohen makes the argument that the monster always escapes, we know that zombies cannot be contained: they cannot be kept quarantined. Indeed, one of the chief anxieties around the zombie is that it will engage in the dismantling of social and economic institutions brought on by the plague (Boluk and Lenz 136). The zombie also threatens the integrity of the body: because the zombie can infect, it is a contagion; it can turn the Self into the Other. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz write: Zombies, like plague, are great social levelers and their model of contagion is one dependent on a social model of interpenetration and connectivity (135). They threaten because, Canavan writes, they leave nothing in their wake besides endless copies of themselves (432). The zombie is certainly abjected and arises from a conflicted responses to colonialism; however, it cannot be contained. Its abjection is infectious. The connection between the figure of the zombie and real-world marginalized groups is clear and, beyond that, it is dangerous. Canavan argues that zombies are always other people, which is to say they are Other people, which is to say they are people who are not quite people at all (432). This position, as abjected Other, is both one with great social power and one that is dangerous. He writes: Zombie narrative should be understood as operating under precisely this sort of colonial gaze. Zombieslacking interior, lacking mindcannot look; they are, for this

13 reason, completely realized colonial objects. Zombies cannot be recognized, accommodated, or negotiated with; once identified, they must immediately be killed. (437) By making the destruction of the Other necessaryzombies must be killed; they cannot speak; they cannot reason; they are not monsters that can have intentions beyond destructive impulses zombie narratives often reinforce what Canavan terms imperialistic narratives of alien invasion (439). These narratives sanitize the centers desire to destroy the Other by making it a matter of survival. Zombies are absolute Others who are in essence living death (Canavan 439). By discursively aligning people of colour, working class people, and immigrantsalong with other marginalized identitieswith zombies, a kind of tacit and sanitized violence can be enacted upon the abjected. After all, in our world, the only zombies to be found are the ones we ourselves have made out of the excluded, the forgotten, the cast-out, and the walledoff (Canavan 450). Indeed, there are real world implications to the cultural connotations of zombies. Although, in contemporary America, zombies are discursively-laden and correlate to a kind of symbolic violence, this is not the case in other parts of the world. In South Africa, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff write, zombies are widely taken for granted (786); it is in this case that the link between the symbolic implications of zombies and real-world identities are made most clear. In South Africa, the fear of migrant workers has been allied with the fear of zombies: The fear of being reduced to ghost labor, of being abducted to feed the fortunes of a depraved stranger, occurs alongside another kind of specter: a growing mass, a shadowy alien-nation, of immigrant black workers from elsewhere on the continent. So overt is the

14 xenophobic sentiment that these workers are disrupting local relations of production and reproduction that they have been openly harassed on South African streets. Like zombies, they are nightmare citizens, their rootlessness threatening to siphon off the remaining, rapidly diminishing prosperity of the indigenous population. Interesting, like zombies too, they are characterized by their impaired speech. (789) Stories of zombies, they continue, are used to dramatize the strangeness of what has become real (794). That is, zombies are often linked to capitalist working conditions that disrupt a sense of place, of identity, of individual and communal integrity. As capitalism breaks down the center, the monster at the edges becomes clearer, more real. It is crucial to make clear that, in this case, the position of abjection is not an empowering one; however, it could be argued that, by bringing capitalist tensions to a head, the discussions around immigration and labour may destabilize capitalist systems that function to oppress and alienate those on the margins. While there is a clear distinction between discursive or symbolic violence and physical violence against marginalized communities, cultural discourse cannot be ignored as it both reflects and constructs how we think about issues, identities, and individuals (Gerbner 123-125). How we write about and represent monsters has implications for real world identities; indeed, zombie films, in particular, have always represented a stylized reaction to cultural consciousness and particularly to social and political injustices (Bishop Dead Man 18). The conventions of zombie film and literature, then, reflect how we think about the marginalized identities that are associated with zombies. As previously mentioned, the zombie is not a monster with a single face: Boluk and Lenz call the zombie a contradictory figure that represents both the struggle of capitalism against itself as well as a kind of proletarian revolution (136); the

15 zombie destroys the conditions under which capitalism can function and serves as a figure for capitalism itself (Boluk and Lenz 139); the zombie is the ultimate imperialist dreama slave laborer that is truly a thing and provides the oppressed the opportunity to oppress (Bishop Sub-Subaltern 147). The tropes of zombie cinema and literature, then, can at once be tools for oppressionfor the continued abjection of discursively-connected identities and realitiesor tools for revolution. Bishop writes, These genre protocols include not only the zombies and the imminent threat of violent deaths, but also a postapocalyptic backdrop, the collapse of societal infrastructures, the indulgence of survivalist fantasies, and the fear of other surviving humans (Dead Man 20). While zombie literature and movies almost always represent the break-down of social structures often, social structures that oppress they quickly lead themselves to survivalist fantasies in which the normal rules governing human decency are suspended. As Canavan notes, zombies must be killed (439); however, the suspicion extends even to those inside the community [as they] have to be surveilled at all times for signs of treachery, weakness, of growing infection (445). In the zombie universe, the real fear comes from the other human survivorsthose who can still think, plot, and act (Bishop Dead Man 24). In addition, then, to making the Other easy to kill and as Other as Other can get, the zombie genre also creates a world wherein community cannot hold; those who are on top tend to stay on top. On the one hand, zombies threaten because they destroy the social structures that privilege certain groups of people; however, these same people the rich, the violent, the military, and white men emerge through survival of the fittest (Bishop Dead Man 22, 24). The genre at once terrifies because it gives power to the Other, but reaffirms the social hierarchy that places

16 certain individuals on the top perhaps going so far as to naturalize it, and re-entrench that hierarchy as the product of natural survival processes and survivalist merit. How, then, can a genre that tends to, first of all, enact discursive violence through its history of aligning marginalized identities with abjected monsters and also constantly reinforces social hierarchies that exclude marginalized groups or naturalize their marginalization be used to break down ideologies of repression? To return to my theoretical apparatus, the process of abjection can function to place in a position of power (the monster) while simultaneously bringing back within the problematic system of representation (for example, the monster is nothing more than a monster; hip hop will always be incapable of revolution because it is commercialized). The same systems that exclude and reinforce problematic tropes can be broken down through that very exclusion.

17 III. Motherfucker no / after everything youve taken from me: Zombie Revolution in An Unwelcome Guest [I]ts about how struggle cant be contained; it can be delayed, but when people want something, or want to be somewhere theyre not, theyre going to get there. Its only a matter of time and energy. (43) Is the main character a zombie, or trying to escape the zombies? Do the zombies represent the displaced, oppressed people, or the government displacing and oppressing them? (44) (Guante, An Unwelcome Guest Liner Notes) Despite its history as a symbol of colonial anxieties and its present status as a proxy for fears of immigrants and terrorists, the zombie can also be mobilized as a site of resistance, and hip hop artist and slam poet Guante collaborates with Big Cats to this end. The liner notes describe the album: Over fifteen tracks, the album tells the story of one man moving from east to west in the wake of a man-made disaster and his own personal tragedy. Through the albums unique narrative frame, these [collaborating] artists join Guante in exploring issues of displacement, authority and the difference between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed. Also: zombies. (4) An Unwelcome Guest is a narrative about the zombie apocalypse, but the central message is one of resistance, of an apocalypse that is liberating. Guante claims the powerful and loaded symbol of the zombie to rip a repressive world apart; the zombie breaks down ossified social systems and opens up spaces in which oppressed groupslower class warriors, gay artists, people of colour (No Capes)can forge new realities. In An Unwelcome Guest, the zombie is mobilized as a catalyst for apocalyptic idealism. Although dystopian or apocalyptic literature tends to function didactically, to inform the reader of the evils of the current worldtypically centered on the dangers of technologyin order to motivate the reader to reject what the author

18 perceives as the problems with the world as it stands (Sambell 248), Guante uses the apocalypse as means of purification, a purification that ironically occurs through a viral plague. This process fits well with the political theories that suggest that an affirmative vision of a better political world must be articulated to restore hope. New meanings must be opened to renew both the past and future, new possibilities illuminated to enlarge the sphere of political options (Sokoloff n.pag). For Guante, the world must dredge itself through an apocalypse before a new future can be forged: he has no illusions about the ease of liberation, about the fight necessary for breaking down oppressive social systems. Guante, a long-standing and vocal activist for repressed communities, comes to this project with open eyes: by accepting that destruction is necessary in order for change, and by mobilizing the zombie as a site of cultural anxieties in order to turn those anxieties into potential grounds of resistance, he creates a future in which the oppressed can forge a new social world in the fire of apocalypse. Although the entire album is a rich site for analysis, I have chosen to cluster my analysis around The Stockholm Syndrome, Welcome to the Border, and Like the Dead Running. Guante describes both The Stockholm Syndrome as a piece of straight-ahead storytelling (41), while Welcome to the Border is one of the key pieces for his original vision of the album (43). Similarly, Like the Dead Runninga spoken word piece and easily the most haunting track on the albumis playing with the idea of perspective zombie perspective. This piece also kind of encapsulates one of the main political themes of the album evil is created, not born (46). The three together, then, encapsulate the narrative of the story while remaining focused on its thematic momentum.

19 The albums first song, If It Bleeds, It Leads, closes with a prayer. It is an invocation of the narrators monstrosity, his connection to disaster: in the name of progress in the name of god break my bones and grant them sharpness cut my face and make me the most beautiful creature in this darkness. Monstrosity is the anchor that drives the narrator: it makes him horrificabjectand powerful at once, broken and beautiful. Later songs suggest that the narrator, a man who lost his partner at the beginning of the war, is very much a part of the Other: his lover was involved in military research that began the outbreak (Raindrops in a Hurricane) and, more poignantly, he later explains that I am the carrier; I will carry you home (Dragons). The narrator is the infectious agent, although he is immune (Raindrops). While the tragedy of his loss remains throughout the album, he mobilizes his monstrosity against those who have oppressed him. His tragedy becomes ammunition. In The Stockholm Syndrome, the narrator traces several journeys after the apocalypse. Each articulates, in its own way, injustices, repeating the refrain: we are waking up in our caskets... / only to find, our lovers are gone. To put it another way, each of the characters introduced in the album is a monster, waking up to consciousness, to seeing the losses and abjection they have suffered. They pass by the endless fences of those quarantined, those with enough privilege to remain on the inside of their fences at this point in the album. Although many havent paid the [power] bill in six months, the lights remain on; social

20 privilege allows the rich the veil of normalcy. But the narrator sees the injustice and refuses to be silent on the fact: (and on the journey I see) the police believe that they are white blood cells and we are the disease the politicians want peace but only the kind they can inject into our forearms freedom aint free; but budget cuts at state and local levels put that fee outta reach and my reason for breathin these days is one more step underneath my feet Unfortunately, many people believe the lies the politicians spin, but the narrator insists that that isnt patriotism, this is the Stockholm syndrome. The abjected have believed, in part, that they are the disease; they have remained loyal to the regimes that reinforce their subjugation, but with the apocalypse, the tides have turned. The narrator turns his fury on the forces of oppression, mobilizing both his monstrosity and his grief as weapons: so dont gimme that nothing to see here, return to your homes, or duck and cover, motherfucker no after everything youve taken from me you better pray this sickness keeps crawlin cause if I had an extra second for breath or could spare a step I would carve her name in every one of your necks

21 Although the narrator was once afforded a type of security in his relationship with his partner, he has been thoroughly betrayed; he now sees the injustices that the previous social systems held in place. The apocalypse has opened his eyes: it has precipitated the collapse of societal infrastructures and has thrown back the mantle covering oppression (Bishop Dead Man 20). In this scenario, however, survivalist fantasies are not played out: we do not see a pecking order re-established and naturalized. Instead, the sickness itselfthe embodiment of abjectionis weaponized. Welcome to the Border marks a change in the album: the walls that have kept the elite quarantined will no longer hold. The song opens with a refrain: crawling, walking, running pressing up against your lovely lines we are underwater breathing we are walking through your fire pressure building, running pressing up against your lovely home we are so close we are so close Importantly, there is an assertion of unity: although the narrator begins his journey largely along, he becomes part of a we. This is typical of zombie film and literature: zombies are always part of a horde. Allan Cameron describes the convention: the zombie lacks a truly intentional relationship with its victims. Confrontations with zombies are, generally speaking, shaped and propelled not by fate or planning but by chance of bad luck. Furthermore, the zombie is not an individual threat to the same

22 degree as other monsters Rather, by virtue of its viral provenance and its generic behaviors, the zombie is always already a multitude. In this context, the iconic image of the zombie attack is the undifferentiated mass of undead faces or hands, filling the frame with random movement and foreclosing three-dimensional space. (80) However, while the zombies in An Unwelcome Guest are part of a we, their unity comes with intentionality; indeed, as the narrator indicates, they are threats individually. Propelled by grief, rage, and their beautiful monstrosity, the abjected demand revolution, both as individuals and as a collective: You call this a wall? these people have crossed history and empires we don watched em fall and all in all weve gotten stronger we are the soil underneath every city youve conquered we are the monsters abused by the conquerors the conscripts in your army fraggin officers we are the flood waters from the origin and aint no brick in existence thick enough to hold us in we are passing you by you want to stop progress with an imaginary line? The narrator is clear in his assertion: we are the monsters abused by the conquerors. Sharing in a collective experience that arises from having crossed history / and empires, from having been conquerered and abused, from waking up in caskets to find everything they have cared for

23 and worked for destroyed, the community of disenfranchised spirits is one that cannot be held back. In Yes, God is a DJ; No, Not a Good One, the narrator explains that We are all capable. We all have so much tumbling around inside of us, pushing against our skin, kicking at the weak points. The disenfranchised can crawl over the top and under the radar, leaking through the cracks in your foundation (Welcome to the Wall). The monster, after all, always escapes; it is omnipresent. Even when those in the center attempt to destroy the monster, they fail: you call this a headshot? I can still smell you, and I can still tell you have no heart your blood just sloshes from left to right when you walk and my fingertips are sharp and I dont need catharsis, I dont need closure I just need to be a little closer for the screamin of the ghosts of everyone who never had shit to erupt from my lips: its over That which oppressive structures have created cannot be dispatched with a headshot. Although the narrator is the undead, he notes that it is his oppressors who have no heart, only a pulse; the infected narrator is also ascribed a voice (for the screamin to erupt from my lips), one that grows louder throughout his trek. Instead of being the sub-subaltern, Guante takes the image of the zombie and ascribes it what it has lacked: intentionality. Throughout the album, the narrators monstrosity is revisited. In Welcome to the Wall, he notes that his fingertips are sharp. In Red States, he says his hands are spiders, his teeth are sharp as they need to be, with fingers flexin. This song takes on a predatory note:

24 categorized as roaches by the government, he growls that we can see in the dark, man / we will rip you apart, man. The narrator has been made into a monster, and, while the process is not one he would necessarily have chosen, he decides to use his monstrosity to undo the powers that wounded and continue to wound the conquered multitude. This ideathat abjection is enacted upon individuals, but that it can then transform into a site for resistanceis highlighted in the albums spoken word piece Like the Dead Running, quoted almost in its entirety below: When I find him, He is tied at the wrists between two tent stakes trapped under the earth by cinderblocks, arms at 45 degree angles, as though his body were an arrow pointing to wherever is furthest away from here. The dull afternoon sun soaks into his bruises. Dried blood and matted hair hide his eyes. Too tall and too jagged to be a child but a child still, he is smiling.

Do you know why they left me here? he says. They thought I was one of the bad guys.

Are you? I ask.

25

His voice, a great empty space, replies: I am now. The child in this piece is trapped, a symbol for wherever is furthest away. He becomes embodied difference, bruised and bloodied in the perpetration of violence upon him. It is this process that renders him monstrous, however; he is abjected and then comes to own his own monstrosity: he is smiling. He has been made jagged by the world, but retains a kind of innocence that marks him as a child still. In a world where children can become monsters, can willingly take up that mantle, the potential for revolution is endless. In The Damp Foggy Midnight, the refrain repeats: so many of us are so close all we need is one more push so many of us are so close so many, so all alone so many of us are so close all we need is one more push so many of us are so close watch how we explode On the precipice of monstrosity, monsters are made. They are pushed into a strange sort of power. The song continues, peace is meaningless in the absence / of justice so we willingly ride to war. The action is unapologetic: all I want is to say Im sorry / but Im not. When monsters are made, the consequences cannot be avoided. It is an equal and opposite reaction (The

26 Damp Foggy Midnight) that isnt an excuse or a justification / shit, this is just what happens. This apocalypse is, then, the result of long simmering tensions; monsters have already been made, but they can now flex their claws. Unlike survivalist fantasies that re-establish hierarchies of power, An Unwelcome Guest proposes that this apocalypse was inevitable: it is one wherein the abjected are finally empowered to weaponize. Indeed, this ideathe power of momentum, the necessity for an uprisingflows logically into Guantes subsequent album You Better Weaponize. An Unwelcome Guest is not an album that creates a utopia at its finale: The Damp Foggy Midnight concludes with the smile of a nightmare woman, perhaps the lover that the narrator lost to the machinery of government. But, throughout, there is a growing sense of empowerment: survivors who scratched their way through woods and through sickness at the beginning of the album, who ran terrified from cities, become part of a collective that cannot be stopped. Individuals who have been held down and beaten become agents for change; they gain the teeth and claws to fight against oppression. Regimes of power are shattered by the monster that cannot be quarantined; the narrator is an agent of infection, a beautiful creature / in this darkness (If It Bleeds, It Leads). Having shaken off the propaganda of the elite through apocalypse and reclaimed abjection, those who have been marginalized rise up from their caskets and fight their way to a better future. Disaster leaves tracesmy heroes are burning and getting stuck in my eyelashes / so I rock sunglasses through the nuclear winterbut it can be claimed in the name of the monster (The Damp Foggy Midnight).

27 IV. Conclusion We are more than the sum of our parts They are less than the sum of our fears I think the guard is asleep at the gate And we got all the weapons we need right here (Guante, To Young Leaders from You Better Weaponize)

Zombies are culturally-loaded and complex symbols. While they have represented ideas as diverse as immigration (Comaroff and Comaroff 797), digitial media (Cameron 88), and capitalism (Fay 82), they tend to be associated most strongly with the oppressed and the abjected. As the living dead and as a viral plague, they are anathema to the integrity of the body; they therefore must be abjected. By aligning zombies with Othered social groups, predominant culture has created a site upon with cultural anxieties can be played out and those fears can be safely dispatched. Social order may be destroyed by the zombie, but some sort of hierarchy reemerges, and it is one wherein the fittest survive; it is one wherein community cannot exist, save for dictatorships. In the time of zombies, there can be no human connection, only the desperate fight for survival and the scramble to the top. However, that which is made a monster is simultaneously empowered: if monsters must always escape, if they patrol the borders of the human, they can also destabilize those same borders, haunting the edges of social hierarchies. In An Unwelcome Guest, Guantes narrator begins in isolation, but soon develops a sense of collectivity: unlike the unthinking hordes of zombies in other cultural products, the zombies in An Unwelcome Guest use their monstrosity to dismantle the barriers that have held them back. They are fed by rage, by hurt, by abjection; these monsters accept the mantle and use all of their weapons to end injustice. In the liner notes to An Unwelcome Guest, Guante includes a poem that did not make it onto the album (The Last Words of a Roach, Underfoot). Several times in

28 the album, the narrator referred to his community as roaches, as those who have been abjected are associated with an insect met with horror and revulsion. The poem concludes: So go ahead turn the lights on. I dare you. What you call night is just a fumigation tent over the earth, and the stars are your last hallucination before the poison pools in your rotted lungs and overtakes you. We will dance on your insides. Our children will inherit your homes. And a million years from now, when your species is extinct and all your songs and poems and joys and struggles and heartbreaks are forgotten, we will still be here... intertwined, fucking, a billion of us, in the dark places youll always be afraid of. The monsters that have been abjected, relegated to darkness, have also been granted the power of fear. They dance, they will inherit the earth from those who fear them, and they will, most importantly, endure. The monster cannot be killed; the zombie is, in fact, already dead. Through abjection and the reclamation of abjected identities, the disenfranchised can tear apart the imposed systems that try to keep them at bay. Through a strategic assertion of unity, through surging over the top of walls and squeezing through keyholes (Welcome to the Wall), those made monstrous can dismantle oppressive structures by the very powers granted to them by their monstrosity. They can, in short, weaponize.

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