Jim Jones and Me: On Growing Up Guyanese-American in the Shadow of Jonestown
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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.
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.
Read full article at link below.
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