by MV Clark
I’m a plump, shortsighted, middle-aged woman, and I’m pretty sure I won’t survive the Zompoc – the zombie apocalypse.
My concern, as a writer, is with the bit before, when civilisation is gradually necrotising as zombification sweeps though it, and humanity is tottering and struggling to regain its balance. The early tendrils of cataclysm insidiously creeping into our familiar day-to-day world.
I believe this is a real battle for which zombies are just a metaphor. There are active forces denuding people of their humanity right now – war, political terror, inequality, exploitation, discrimination, individual violence.
One that a lot of people overlook, however, is Human Resources.*
HR is the part of the modern corporation where a compassionate recognition of our humanity meets capitalism, and the two have an awkward schizophrenic conversation. Essentially the compromise is this: ‘You can be human, but only in this prescribed way that makes a certain amount of money for the organisation’.
It’s perfectly logical but it’s also, I think, a form of zombification. This is why part of my novel, The Splits, is about the corporation and HR.
I was excited when I saw that a critically acclaimed author had also made this connection. If you haven’t met them before, let me introduce you to the ‘ladies of HR’ in Colson Whitehead’s amazing zombie novel, Zone One.
Zone One is actually set after the Zompoc, in a ravaged New York. It’s told from the perspective of Mark Spitz. He is part of a unit which has been charged with clearing the city of its remaining zombies so it can be repopulated. This involves going through each and every room in each and every building checking for ‘skels’.
One day he kicks down a locked door marked HR and finds four infected. One has a once-fashionable haircut, ‘the Marge’, named after a sitcom character popular at the time of the zombie apocalypse. (This is I presume inspired by ‘the Rachel’, the haircut worn by Jennifer Aniston’s character in Friends.)
Mark is caught by surprise and grappled to the ground by a skel with only seven fingers.
He was the first live human being the dead had seen since the start and the ladies of HR were starving, the book comments wryly.
Surely this one possessed the determination befitting a true denizen of Human Resources, Mark thinks. He remembers his first job which had been marred by the ogre head of Human Resources… she served the places where human beings were paraphrased into numbers, components of bundled data to be shot out through fiber-optic cable towards meaning.
Paraphrased into numbers… components of bundled data … Is this not the ultimate expression of what is already going on in our workplaces – a conversion from human to machine, a deadening?
We meet these skels long after the cataclysm has occurred. But I think the ladies of HR are a fantastic example of how the logic of the real, supposedly uninfected world leads us towards a kind of death-in-life.
That’s why I will continue to write about pre-apocalyptic, almost ordinary situations in my Splits novels (my current work in progress, set in the same world as The Splits, has the working title Zombies in a Brothel).
I love a good Armageddon as much as the next person, but in my own writing I prefer to tackle what’s happening now.
I know I won’t be able to run fast enough after the Zompoc. I will lose my glasses, and stumble, and that will be that.
*Of course there are lots of good people doing good work in HR. But at its worst, this is how I think it is.
Check out The Splits: Personal Histories of Scott-Lapidot Disease from the Splits Archive by MV Clark now.
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