The Walking Dead in a Dead New York: Family and the Specter of 9/11 in Zone One

Abstract

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• The Walking Dead in a Dead New York:Family and the Specter of 9/11 in Zone One
• Jay N. Shelat (bio)

She is known as the Dust Lady. Marcy Borders walked out of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, coated from head to toe in the cinders of catastrophe, and was immortalized in Stan Honda's haunting photograph. Borders's shocked face reflects the horror and tragedy of the day, and the photo is a dystopian signifier of how 9/11 "usher[ed] in an era of new seriousness."¹ Authors have always thematized the apocalyptic nature of the attacks. Don DeLillo, for instance, uses ash and dust as charnel confetti to welcome this new epoch in his 2007 novel Falling Man: "It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night."² The raining powder transforms the micro street into the macro world and inaugurates a living nightmare. This new age of terror, moreover, would go on to see the decimation of more than the New York City skyline: the Forever War decimates nations, homes, and families, and the conflict underscores how imperial, militaristic response goes hand in hand with the end of the world, or the end of a world.

A popular theme in post-9/11 literature, apocalypse is an imminent menace of catastrophe that characterizes the present age. Take Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (2009), in which Hiroko survives the utter destruction of Nagasaki and watches her father transform into a hellish creature. And in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), protagonists Nadia and Saeed witness the razing of their home city, inaugurating their refugee, dystopian subjectivities. Extensive destruction doesn't only necessitate apocalypse, however. What we could term individualized apocalypse signals the end of the world for a person, an affective position that shouts, "For me this is the end of the world." The world continues to turn, yet a character remains suspended in the inertia of trauma. This is how Oskar feels when his father Thomas dies in the attacks in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud [End Page 105] and Incredibly Close (2005); he is in never-ending suspended animation, where constant reminders of his earth-shattering loss reside in the objects that surround him.

In this article, I not only treat apocalypse as a material event that has distinct physical attributes (gray ash, desolation, etc.), but I also consider it a subjective condition that limns the collapse of social and personal infrastructures.³ As Jessica Hurley and Dan Sinykin argue, "apocalypse mediates the unevenly distributed risks of the contemporary, social, political, and geophysical world. Race, gender, sexuality, disability, indigeneity, citizenship, and class determine our vulnerability to cataclysmic violence, whether fast or slow."⁴ In other words, millions of people exist in apocalyptic realities. I take this reality at face value by examining family at the world's end and inspect how the specter of 9/11 haunts Colson Whitehead's 2011 zombie novel Zone One. Fictions of the undead rose in popularity after the attacks because the genre propagates historical political anxieties and tribulations, namely imperialism and slavery, and more recently post-9/11 "us versus them" racial binaries.

My reading of Zone One considers how family and home teeter on the precipice of ruin because of the roaming undead in a necro-New York. Arguing that the zombies and various reminders of 9/11 represent long-dead domestic dynamics in a novel that participates in post-9/11 literature's nostalgic lauding of family and domesticity, I specifically analyze analeptic (flashback) scenes that divulge how family struggles in the wake of disaster. Yet despite this perpetual death, I maintain, family endures as a capitalistic barometer for American values and hyperpower, and I show how Whitehead criticizes the politicization of family when the new American government wields the white heteronormative nuclear family to scaffold a futile exceptionalist nation rebuilding project. These racialized dynamics purported between family and nation translate onto the narrative's looming zombie threat, and I claim that the monsters embody not only the trauma of perpetual familial loss and historical trauma but also the threat of an...