Jonestown
Authors: Wilson Harris
WILSON HARRIS
For Margaret and Sam and to Zulfikar Ghose and Helena de la Fontaine
There was a man went out one night a-seeking for a soul
And oh he met a skeleton, a grim and grisly skeleton
A-sitting in a hole.
The man who was a gentleman and always most polite
Said ‘since you’re wise and old dear sir, I venture to be bold dear sir,
And ask your help this night.
I wonder could you tell me sir where I might reach my goal,
A place where I might hope to find a something for my peace of mind,
In short dear sir a soul.’
The skeleton looked very wise and rattled all its bones
And asked ‘do you require the thing for beggarman or thief or king,
De Havilland or Jones?’
‘Is that important?’ asked the man, expressing some surprise,
‘I hadn’t thought of class before, it’s just a soul I’m searching for,
I wouldn’t mind the size.’
The skeleton disdainfully it looked him up and down
And said ‘it’s very plain to see you’ve no perception of degree’
And frowned a bony frown.
‘The simplest thing that you can do is find yourself a hole,
And sit and watch the world go by and never mind the where or why
Or seeking for a soul.’
So down he sat for years and years upon a village green,
Until he was a skeleton, a very handsome skeleton,
The finest looking skeleton that ever had been seen.
Margaret Rose Harris, ‘Skeleton Ballade’
The Maya Indians have been called an enigmatic people, and rightly so … How, where and when did this, the most important Stone Age culture, evolve? Why were all their cities, magnificently embellished by the most talented sculptors, abandoned? What is the message contained in their hieroglyphic script, the finest and most intricate of its kind known to us? … How was it possible for the Maya astronomers, the most outstanding of their time, to measure without the aid of any instruments the rhythmic movements of the heavenly bodies with an accuracy that amazes all the experts of our own day? Where were their skilled architects trained, and where did their sculptors learn the arts of carving? These and many other questions have as yet remained unanswered.
H. D. Disselhoff and S. Linne,
Civilizations of Central and South America
(Crown Publishers Inc.,
New York, 1960)
There are other aspects of the Maya philosophy of time … What had gone before and what lay ahead were blended in a way that is baffling to our western minds. Mysticism is not now fashionable, and so writers tend to stress the material side of Maya civilization, but surely it is precisely these (to us) strange aberrations of Maya mentality which pose the most interesting questions.
J. Eric S. Thompson,
Maya
Civilization
(University of Oklahoma Press, 1954)
It means that … the future states of the Universe are in some sense ‘open’. Some people have seized on this openness to argue for the reality of human free will. Others claim that it bestows upon nature an element of creativity, an ability to bring forth that which is genuinely new, something not already implicit in earlier states of the Universe save in the idealized
fiction of the real numbers. Whatever the merits of such sweeping claims, it seems safe to conclude that the future of the Universe is not irredeemably fixed. The final chapter of the great cosmic book has yet to be written.
Paul Davies, in
Chaos
, essays edited by Nina Hall (Penguin Books, London, 1988)
Trinity Street
New Amsterdam
Dateless Day
Dear W.H.,
I have learnt of your sympathies for voyagers of the Imagination and trust therefore that you will undertake the task of editing the enclosed manuscript or book.
I am the only survivor of the ‘tragedy of Jonestown’, which occurred – as many people know – in late November 1978 in a remote forest in Guyana.
The Longman
Chronicle
of
America
tells of the ‘tragedy of Jonestown’ and of the scene of ‘indescribable horror’ which met the eyes of reporters from every corner of the globe when they arrived in stricken Jonestown after the self-inflicted holocaust engineered by a charismatic cult leader, the Reverend Jim Jones.
In my archetypal fiction I call Jim Jones Jonah Jones. All of the characters appearing in the book are fictional and archetypal. In this way I have sought to explore overlapping layers and environments and theatres of legend and history that one may associate with Jonestown.
Not all drank Coca-Cola laced with cyanide. Some were shot like cattle. Men, women and children.
Francisco Bone is a disguised name that I employ for myself. I suffered the most severe and disabling trauma on the Day of the Dead (as I see and continue to see in my mind’s eye the bodies in a Clearing or town centre in Jonestown on November 18). The shock was so great – I blamed myself for not taking risks to avert the holocaust – that though I was wounded a numbness concealed for some time the physical injury that I suffered. The
consequences
of such ‘numbness’ occupy different proportions of the Dream-book.
When I escaped I dreamt I was dead and gained some comfort from rhymes of self-mockery, from handsome skeletons, all of which helped to promote the theme of Carnival Lord Death in the
Book when eventually I began to write it. One such self-mocking poem – which I came upon when I arrived in New Amsterdam before I had started writing – is the first epigraph that I use. That poem helped me to offset the hell of Memory theatre for a while and to join strolling players on a village Amsterdam green. I relished the Jest that I associated with eighteenth-century Dutch plantation owners who superimposed structures and promenades upon the bank of the Berbice River in the vicinity of New Amsterdam. When I arrived in 1985 to write my Dream-book I strolled on a promenade called
village
Amsterdam
green
that ran from the township to a mental hospital. Patients and townsfolk tended to stroll arm-in-arm dressed in masks of Bone at Carnival time. I sought a pleasant hole to simulate the grave into which I should have fallen on the Day of the Dead. Why me? Why did I survive? It was this thought that drove me to write … Questions as much as thought! No easy answers.
I feared to write in – and be written by – a demanding book that asserts itself in Dream and questions itself from time to time (even as I question the meaning of survival) as you will see as you read. One overcomes the fear of Dreams, I suspect, for I did not stop writing or being written into what I wrote …
I was obsessed – let me confess – by cities and settlements in the Central and South Americas that are an enigma to many scholars. I dreamt of their abandonment, their bird-masks, their
animal-masks
… Did their inhabitants rebel against the priests, did obscure holocausts occur, civil strife, famine, plague? Was
Jonestown
the latest manifestation of the breakdown of populations within the hidden flexibilities and inflexibilities of pre-Columbian civilizations? The Maya were certainly one of the great
civilizations
of ancient America and the fate of their cities – such as Palenque, Chichén Itzá, Tikal, Bonampak – has left unanswered questions. Teotihuacan in Mexico raises similar enigmas. The unsolved disappearance of the Caribs in British Guiana is another riddle of precipitate breakdown. And there are many others. The amazing story of the Arekuna Indian Awakaipu is well
documented
in Georgetown in the 1840s. Awakaipu persuaded representatives from many Indian peoples to offer themselves as
a sacrifice at the foot of Mount Roraima in order to recover an ‘enchanted kingdom’.
The Maya were torn by the notion of eternity’s closure of time and another shape to time, blending pasts and futures to unlock closure or pact or plot.
The weight of charismatic eternity and a capacity to unlock closure became real and profoundly pertinent to me and to my age …
I drifted into what seemed an abnormal lucidity upon chasms of time. The price one pays for such voyages is far-reaching. One becomes, it seems, a vessel of composite epic, imbued with many voices, one is a multitude. That multitude is housed paradoxically in the diminutive surviving entity of community and self that one is.
All this emerges at its own pace in the Dream-book but the preliminary capsule that this letter is shows how vulnerable I still am some sixteen years after the Day of the Dead. The fabric of the modern world has worsened, it seems to me, in that span of time. The torments of materialism have increased …
It is essential to create a jigsaw in which ‘pasts’ and ‘presents’ and likely or unlikely ‘futures’ are the pieces that multitudes in the self employ in order to bridge chasms in historical memory.
To sail back into the past is to come upon ‘pasts’ that are ‘futures’ to previous ‘pasts’ which are ‘futures’ in themselves to prior ‘pasts’
ad
infinitum.
There is no absolute beginning, for each ‘beginning’ comes after an unwritten past that awaits a new language. What lies behind us is linked incalculably to what lies ahead of us in that the future is a sliding scale backwards into the unfathomable past within the Virgin womb of time …
The future brings terrifying challenges but it also brings foetal shapes, tender and young possibilities that enliven us to scan gestating resources in the womb of tradition that we have bypassed or overlooked or eclipsed …
As the severity of trauma began to break by degrees uncanny correspondences seemed to loom as I voyaged between Maya twinships of pasts and futures and the Mathematics of Chaos.
Chaos is misconceived as an anarchic phenomenon. Whereas it
may be visualized as portraying an ‘open’ universe. Continuities running out of the mystery of the past into the unknown future yield proportions of originality, proportions of the ‘genuinely new’ …
Composite epic is rooted in the lucidity that fractions or fictional numbers, fictional multitudes, bring. The walls of ruined schools and houses and temples and hospitals and theatres are full with presences and voices though apparently void and empty. Such is the mystery of Chaos. The weight of Chaos is sometimes apparitional, sometimes concrete. Such mathematics enhance an intact mystery in time. Because it is intact yet beyond seizure it acts upon us in apparitional Old Gods or Prisoners (dogma, ideology) locked into the gaols of the past; acts again in dismemberments of such Prisoners who walk on water or in space beyond fixtures or unities of place.
‘Unity of place’ is a dogma or an ideology in some quarters. But my apprenticeship to the furies acquaints me with a different topography or map of the Imagination that breaches the
human-centred
cosmos that we have enshrined. There are extra-human faculties and voices that bring contours into play to lift place into both familiar and unfamiliar dimensions which fall outside of presumed norms or absolute models of fact and fiction.
The trauma that I suffered in Jonestown may have imprisoned me absolutely in a plot of fate. But thank God! it aroused me instead to contemplate a hidden mathematics within the body of language … Language is deeper than ‘frames’, it transgresses against the frames that would make us prisoners of eternity in the name of one creed or dogma or ideology.
Maya ‘twinships’ between the buried past and the unknown future – which are regarded as bewildering to the Western mind – seemed of burning and invaluable moment to me in their bearing on factors of originality and living time. I had no absolute model on which to base my Dream-book except that I sought to salvage unpredictable keys to tradition within the terrifying legacies of the past. I sought to be true to the broken communities, the apparently lost cultures from which I have sprung …
A word about New Amsterdam before I close this letter. I
wandered for some seven years – sometimes in states of partial but acute amnesia – before I arrived there and began writing the Dream-book. I dreamt I was translating from a fragmented text or texts that already existed …
New Amsterdam is one of the oldest towns on the Guyana coastlands. It is a relic of the Dutch empire of the eighteenth century and was absorbed into British Guiana in the early nineteenth century. Its crumbling walls and roads witness to the erosion of townships and settlements and villages along the coastlands that stand as memorials to Spanish, French, Dutch, British colonization across the centuries.
Over the past half-century the population of Guyana has fallen from a million souls, it is said, to three-quarters of a million within a country almost as large as the United Kingdom.
This decline, which is due in large part to emigration, energizes the imagination into an apprehension of earlier peoples,
Aboriginal
ghosts whose presence is visible still in their nomadic living descendants.
Thus the mixed peoples of African or Indian or European or Chinese descent who live in modern Guyana today are related to the Aboriginal ghosts of the past of whom I spoke a moment ago: if not by strict, biological kinship then by ties to the spectre of erosion of community and place which haunts the Central and South Americas.
This over-arching Ghost throws some light on the play of ‘extinction’ within my Dream-book … I was driven in my flight from Jonestown to reflect on myself as an ‘extinct’ creature. I dreamt I had been robbed of my native roots and heritage. I suffered from a void of memory. I belonged to peoples of the Void …
But
there
was
a
catch,
a
shock
of
breath,
in
this
sensation
… The
shock
of the ‘peopling of the Void’, the animals of the Void, the creatures of the Void, became so extraordinary that ‘extinction’ imbued me with breath-lines and responsibilities I would not otherwise have encompassed. I became an original apparition in my wanderings within over-arching Ghost in coming abreast of extremities of loss, in visualizing my own ‘nothingness’ as intangible ‘somethingness’. Memory theatre was born in such
theatres of humility. ‘Extinction’ attired itself in many parts – as an actor may learn to play staggered roles and numinosities – it grew into bodily extensions, masks, limbs, prompted and sculpted by the comedy of ghosts within active traditions. A train of disturbing rehearsals and heart-searching conscience came into play …
Yet I was reminded that I lived in a world threatened by an explosion of numbers,
not
by declining populations. But this deepened, if anything, my inner experience of place and time. Without Memory theatre – and the art of self-rehearsed ‘
extinctions
’ in a series of stages upon which one retraces one’s steps into a labyrinth of deprivations and apparent losses – the ‘peopling of the Void’ in all its extremities of
explosion
and
implosion
will not embody heart-searching conscience, heart-searching caveat, but will cement predatory blockages, predatory coherence.
Keys to the Void of civilization are realized not by escapism from dire inheritances, not by political glosses upon endemic tragedy, but by immersion in the terrifying legacies of the past and the wholly unexpected insights into shared fates and freedoms such legacies may offer. In the death of politics (however ritually or conventionally preserved in the panoply of the state) may gestate a seed of re-visionary, epic theatre rooted in complex changes in human and animal nature …
The mystery of the Virgin-archetype in the ‘peopling of the Void’ implies a form virtually beyond comprehension, a form shorn of violence in its intercourse with reality, but – as with all archetypes – it comes to us in its brokenness to activate nevertheless, it seems to me, a reach of the Imagination beyond all cults, or closures, or frames …
I suddenly realize that I should not close this letter without a comment on variations in the spelling of ‘Guyana’ or ‘Guyanas’ or Guianas’ …
I appeal to your tolerance, W.H. – when you edit my
Dream-book
– to accept these deviations or distortions as meaningful in the context of partial amnesia and confusions that I endured in the great forest.
My fluctuations of memory, in my wanderings for seven years
in the wake of the ‘tragedy of Jonestown’, are rooted as well, I am sure, in the amnesiac fate that haunts the South and Central and North Americas across many generations overshadowed by implicit Conquest.
Hidden textualities of pre-Columbian and post-Columbian place are hinted at in the word ‘Guiana’ which British colonizers framed, for political convenience, when they came into possession of the Colony in the early nineteenth century.
‘Guiana’ springs from a variable Amerindian root-text which means ‘land of waters’. It is as if one becomes aware of fragmented page after page in a volume or book long suppressed or hidden. How apparitional is ‘British Guiana’ or ‘French Guiana’ or ‘Dutch Guiana’? How concrete are ‘Guyanas’ in vowel or innermost anatomy of flexible texts extending
backwards
into pre-Columbian age?
‘British Guiana’ became ‘Guyana’ in 1966. A link was implied with an older frame one may perceive in Spanish maps of the region encompassing the ‘Guianas’ and Venezuela and South Brazil. Cross-culturalities running through ‘Guianas’ and ‘
Guyanas
’ are invoked, it would seem, in the Dream-body of history, and in implications of the indebtedness of one convention to another through layers of space and time.
It may seem inevitable or convenient to submit to one frame or name but, in so doing, cultures begin to imprison themselves, involuntarily perhaps, in conquistadorial formula that kills alternatives, kills memory. Not only were Africans who came through the Middle Passage deprived of their names by
slave-masters
but in the twentieth century Arawaks and Macusis and Warraus and others have begun to adopt English or Portuguese or French or Spanish names and to suppress their native place names or animal names … There may be no harm in such adoption provided an inner/outer masquerade or Carnival lives in the imagination and is susceptible to many worlds, to parallel universes of sensibility, in Memory theatre. And what is Memory theatre but an acceptance of amnesiac fate that diminutive survivors begin to unravel …?
