If a zombie uprising were to take place tomorrow, Emily Aboud wouldn’t mind one bit. “The fear of a zombie is only if my lineage has stolen something from their lineage,” she shrugs nonchalantly. “They wouldn’t be coming for me.”
Aboud, who uses she/they pronouns, is a Trinidadian playwright, director and drag king. Her latest play, Bogeyman, explores the question of what we fear and why. Its story is rooted in the history of the 1791 Haitian revolution, when the people overthrew the French colony to free themselves from enslavement. “Nobody knows about the uprising,” she says, “and I want them to know.”
