Jim Jones and Me: On Growing Up Guyanese-American in the Shadow of Jonestown

On July 3rd, The New York Times published an article titled “The Site of the Jonestown Massacre Opens to Tourists. Some Ask Why.” In it, Genevieve Glatsky reports on the mixed reception the tour received from Guyanese locals, those who resent their country’s association with what they consider an American tragedy.

The Peoples Temple was a cult that formed in Indiana in 1955, but mostly grew in San Francisco before relocating to the Guyanese jungle to escape media scrutiny in 1974. It ended in 1978 with over nine-hundred Americans dying when their increasingly paranoid and megalomaniacal leader, Jim Jones, fearing government intervention, ordered his followers to commit suicide. It was a shocking event that has lived on in the cultural imagination, and is where we get the saying “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.”

But, as some of the locals interviewed in the Times article point out, there is no real, deep connection between Jonestown and Guyana. In some ways, the link is happenstance. Guyana had little to do with the tragedy at Jonestown, and Jonestown’s trajectory to disaster would likely have happened similarly had Jones chosen as its home any remote region of any distant country.

I related to Jonestown, I, like it, was another link between the two separate countries of my heritage and birth.

Those who are in favor of opening Jonestown to tourists consider it a site of study for people to confront the horrors of the past, as would be a trip to Auschwitz. However, the reluctance of the Guyanese people to embrace this comes from the idea that Jonestown isn’t reflective of their past. They did nothing to bring about the deaths of those nine-hundred people, and the tragedy, therefore, seems to say little about them, except what it says about humanity in general. So it’s easy for me to understand why Guyanese locals discourage drawing undue attention to their country as the site of a unique catastrophe, to resist having the disaster shape their cultural past or future. However, as a Guyanese American, my identity speaks directly to the link between Jonestown and Guyana. I would even go so far as to say Jonestown has always been woven through my understanding of myself.

As a child, growing up in Phoenix, Arizona, I met none outside of my family who shared my Guyanese heritage. Even fellow Indian kids wouldn’t know what to make of the one remove between us, their parents were born in India; my mother was of Indian heritage, but born in South America, a country filled with Indians who had been brought over by the British as indentured workers. As such, my childhood was filled with moments where my explanations of being Guyanese were met with confusion.

One moment especially stands out: in high school Spanish our teacher gave us a map of the Spanish speaking countries of Latin America, and instructed us, on day one, to cross out the three countries at its northern tip, Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana. Even at the time, I remember this feeling symbolic, speaking to my lifelong frustration at being Guyanese-American.

In childhood, my family, like many immigrant communities, tended to travel in a pack, with my aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents wandering the aisles of grocery stores like a band of nomads. During these outings, our foreignness often drew attention. The question I remember my adults being asked most often, the same question I struggled to answer for curious classmates, was where are you from? I listened carefully to their response, because I was then learning how to adequately give my own. What confidence, what patience, what level or detail or explanation was required for an audience that seemed so unprepared for our answer?

To these American strangers, my adult would say Guyana, and the stranger would more times than not ask whether they meant Ghana. No, my adult would say. Guy-ana. And to further differentiate, they would ask, do you remember Jonestown?

Jonestown then became the answer to the problem of how to locate my Guyanese heritage to Americans. The response to this was never some dawning , third-party sadness for the tragedy, it was delight, that of being able to make a connection between two countries that seemed so thoroughly disconnected outside of this single event. To put it simply, I related to Jonestown, I, like it, was another link between the two separate countries of my heritage and birth.

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My mother came to America in 1981. She met my Iranian father in the mid 80’s, and I was born in 1987. By 1990, my parents had split up. As a working class single mother, my mom didn’t have the means of returning to Guyana. But she didn’t particularly have the interest, either. According to my family, the years after Guyana gained independence from British rule were tumultuous and violent, with physical altercations often along racial lines, between the largely Indian and Black populations of the country. My sense was that my family was eager to come to America, to leave their home country, and that a degree of trauma attended the experience. So I always accepted the fact that my entire relationship to Guyana would be from afar, that I would never know the streets my mom and her siblings walked growing up. I would never hear an entire population, an entire country, sharing their particular accent, that which I heard so fluently, but which my friends often couldn’t understand, leaning close after my mom offered them something to eat and asking me to translate.

Jonestown was that landmark. It was a terrible tragedy, not just worth remembering, but for some, impossible to forget.

There was, I felt, a gap in my conception of Guyana, one I would never quite be able to fill. But as I began to associate it more and more with Jonestown, that event began taking up more of the emptiness. My family wasn’t disturbed by my interest in Jonestown; they encouraged it. They told me there were movies made about it, and I remember going to Blockbuster to find one on VHS. I must have been nine or ten, and I couldn’t now faithfully recall which of the Jonestown movies we chose (though I suspect it was a made-for-TV movie called Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, a title I’m sure the Guyanese locals interviewed in the Times article, for understandable reasons, would find inaccurate and grating). I do remember that as my family and I watched, they had a lot to say about the climate, the vegetation, what felt true or not to the Guyana they knew.

I was curious about these things, but I was also intently focused on the drama of the cult, on Jim Jones’ descent into madness, on the power he held over his followers, and was thoroughly chilled by the death scene. The film was depicting an important moment in history, so important multiple movies had been made about it, and I, somehow, existed at the link between Jonestown and America. I had some claim in history, which I previously assumed never had and never would know I existed.

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My family has no connection to Jonestown. But when I was younger, my mom told me this story:

One day, when she was nineteen or twenty, she was home alone when there was a knock at the door. She answered to a young Black American woman, who she described as having very white teeth aligned within a broad smile. This woman was soliciting donations for what she called The Jonestown Agricultural Project.

I’ve never been able to confirm this, and at this point, whether it happened makes little difference to me. The image, the moment, small as it was, spoke to some larger connection, the clicking together of many separate trains of thought, which is what I think happens when an artist has a new idea. I lived with the image of that woman in my head for many years. Even at the moment my mom told me, when I was in my early teens, I knew that I would write this scene one day. It wasn’t until a few years ago, however, that I felt I had the surrounding story to make it work, to help it convey the kind of meaning to a reader that it held for me.

The New York Times article reminded me of one of the famous signs that hung at Jonestown: Those Who Do Not Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It. Its application here is quite obvious as an argument for the Jonestown tours being available to tourists. However, I’m now thinking about how remembering one’s past is forever an interpretive exercise. The past is not simply a series of events; it is the narrative, the contextual framework around which you present those events.

Ultimately, my relationship to Jonestown speaks to a sensibility which leads me to darker subject matter, both as an artist and a witness of history, which to me is an ongoing lesson on what humans are capable of. I understand the Guyanese who wish to have their heritage untainted by an American tragedy. But I also wonder how many people like me, who didn’t grow up in Queens, New York, or any of the other Guyanese diaspora hubs in the U.S., Canada, or the U.K., but who emerged into these little pockets where our identities weren’t understood, needed some landmark to bridge the gap.

Jonestown was that landmark. It was a terrible tragedy, not just worth remembering, but for some, impossible to forget.

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False Prophet by Afsheen Farhadi is available from Melville House.