XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Post-Covid Zombies: Uncanny Undead in Cristhiano Aguiar’s “Lázaro”

• In Event: Dystopian Futures in Brazilian Literature and Cinema

Abstract

State neglect and popular attitudes around Covid-19 forced the dead to walk among us, either as ghosts –loved ones whose physical bodies were never released to their families after death– or as zombies –deceased whose bodies were not transported from their homes, causing their families to cohabitate with them as they mourned–. In the context of Brazilian author Cristhiano Aguiar’s short story “Lázaro”, in which both society and a young woman learn to grapple with the return of their previously dead relatives, termed lázaro, after a variant of Covid brings them back to life, I analyze the uncanny nature of this encounter with the dead on a social and individual level. The lázaro serve as social mirrors that awaken repressed fears, rhetorical devices used to express collective anxiety around death and negotiate one’s own relation to the deceased. I argue that the protagonist, Olga, finds herself on the line between the living and the undead, disgusted by her reanimated grandmother yet sympathetic to the abuses suffered by the lázaro. Olga’s acts of solidarity with the lázaro, despite her conflicted stance against society’s expectations for her as a young woman, problematize the division established between the living, survivors of the pandemic, and the undead, regarded as disposable beings. Thus, through working through her own repulsion, she overcomes both the expectations set for her by her family and the collective attitudes around the existence of the lázaro.

Author

• Jack Brown, Cornell University