Wilson Harris - Jonestown

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’.