The Film “White Zombie” and the reading of “The Magic Island” both share commonalities in terms of what a slave was back then referred as and how it was remembered to be a slave. A specific scene that refers to this topic is when the man had followed the ‘zombie’ into the factory and saw other ‘zombies’ enslaved and working hard. This scene portrays how the ‘zombies’ were in sort helped captive as they worked tiredly just as a slave would back in time.
The scene where the man sees all the ‘zombies’ for the first time is very much more understood after doing a close reading of “The Magic Island” as there are quotes in the reading that show how a slave was remembered. It is said that ‘zombies’ were made a “servant” or “slave” after the body was dug up and used magic upon to revive it so it can move and do as it is told (page 93). This shows that the zombies in both works were following the same main idea of being enslaved, evident as dead bodies were dug up as well just to eventually do work for their master.
I feel like this truly conveys the topic of “the memory of slavery” because there is a comparison between the ‘zombies’ and the Africans that were enslaved back in the day. They have a code name of ‘zombie’ in the movie and in the reading to convey a deeper meaning to what and how slaves were treated and are remembered. From these two works, it is safe to say that since a zombie has no human qualities, slaves were treated as not human as well. Possibly by the way they were overworked and treated as well. The slaves were dehumanized as much as possible and this is to why they are referred as ‘zombies’ in both works to show how un-human they were.
I agree with your observation of how people viewed slaves as zombies because of how they were treated. I believe it is pretty hard to say that they were not zombies, even though it is considered fake, but in the “Magic Island” reading, the doctor at the end, insist that zombies are made by a substance that enters into a persons body. So I believe it was true that there were zombies because these readings provide a great amount of details of how many people did encounter these non responsive people. Other than that I like how you said that zombies resemble slaves and also the slave owners did want to regain a sense of power so they took these zombies with pleasure for their own benefit.