Toxic disaster survivors describe themselves as living dead whose memory is erased

Evidence

Animal’s People blends the picaresque with, among other genres, the zombie story, which is set in motion by the novel’s opening words—“I was once human. So I’m told”—and culminating in Animal’s drug-addled wanderings among hallucinations of the living dead. This calls to mind the Chernobyl worker who depicts himself as one of the “living dead”: “Our memory is gone. You forget everything—we walk like corpses” (Sinha, Animal’s People, 1, 3). — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 963

Categorization

• XREF: The Chernobyl worker’s ‘walk like corpses’ extends the earlier ch10 claim about Soviet ‘biorobots’ deployed at Chernobyl, and the zombie-figure ties to fiction that makes invisible toxic harm legible. — connects to: Toxic disaster erases a victim’s categorical identity down to uncertain humanity — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 978; Toxicity erases a community’s pretoxic past along with individuals’ human histories — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 144; Chemical catastrophe can erase an affected person’s sense of precedents and future — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 143
• STORYSTEM: The slow-violence zombie—survivors of poisoning described as living dead whose memory and personhood are consumed by chemical exposure—is a ready-made figure for fiction about communities made to disappear while still alive.

Broader Connections

• Chemical catastrophe can erase an affected person’s sense of precedents and future #corroborates (0.92) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 143
• Toxic disaster erases a victim’s categorical identity down to uncertain humanity #corroborates (0.90) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 978
• Toxicity erases a community’s pretoxic past along with individuals’ human histories #corroborates (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 144