Annie Dawid on Paradise Undone
Annie, why did you want to write about Jonestown?
In the 1980s, two friends disappeared into a cult. Later, I met others whose friends also vanished, some dying in their chosen communities, like Heaven’s Gate. Our friends who joined cults were people very like us: smart and funny and creative. Not followers. Not zombies, not druggies, as the media portrayed the Jonestown dead. Altruistic individuals, those who care about more than just themselves, seem to be especially drawn to such organizations. If people like me, educated and not naïve, could fall into the clutches of manipulative leaders, I wanted to explore how and why such descents into proverbial rabbit holes could happen then, and continue to happen every day, all around us.
Understandably the subject is highly sensitive. Did you find this difficult to navigate?
It’s very painful to read about so many lives lost, in such a cruel and unnecessary fashion. At the same time, I believe the lessons of Jonestown must not be forgotten, despite the awfulness one must contend with while studying it. General readers, in the US and elsewhere, generally do not want to spend time with history’s most brutal incidents, especially where there are no heroes. I was able to spend four years writing the book because I lived in the mountains, far from crowds, among extraordinary vistas here in South-Central Colorado, surrounded by wild nature and weather. Had I remained in my ordinary city life, I could never have tackled such a subject. But I could hike every day with my dogs in unpopulated, untrammelled scenery, which soothed me. My son was starting life as a pre-schooler that year as well and attending to his beautifully ordinary needs also allowed a kind of spiritual peace to prevail over our off-the-grid cabin at 9100 feet.
Is the tragedy of Jonestown well-known in the US?
Among certain populations, yes. For instance, the massacre touched many in the state of California, where Peoples Temple was based, though it started in Indiana. Forty-six years later, the name of Jonestown resonates everywhere in cult recovery communities online and among academic departments devoted to New Religious Movements (NRMs). Jim Jones and Charlie Manson share a name recognition as outsized 20th century villains, not undeserved.
But outside these specific realms, most Americans know little to nothing beyond the inaccurate and cruel phrase, “Drinking the Kool-Aid,” inaccurate because it was an off-brand, Flavor-Aid, and cruel because it takes the deaths of 900+ human beings as a figure of speech. George Orwell would categorize it in his category of “dead metaphors,” clichés that no longer summon up the original image. In this case, however, living survivors and families of the dead wince at its use and find its prevalence in American discourse dehumanizing.
What were the challenges in writing the character Jim Jones, the man responsible for the deaths of nearly 1,000 men women and children?
After a year of research, 2004-5, during which I read far more than I wanted to about the man Jim Jones, I decided I would focus my novel on some of the other 917 people who died that day. For 46 years, and still today, Jones takes up all the air in the room, darkens all those lives with his shadow. I couldn’t ignore him, of course, and his words, taken verbatim from various documents, separate every chapter in the novel, their resonance shaping the lives of the four people I chose to write about, either real people – Jones’s wife, Marceline, and the Guyanese ambassador to the United Stats – or composites, a Black man and a White woman, both members of the Peoples Temple, whose reasons for joining differ widely. They are based on various memoirs written by survivors, providing many important details and nuances about Jonestown.
In today’s culture wars, Jim Jones would have thrived. He had an ideology that at first glance seems laudable – was that the main attraction of the Peoples Temple, or was it Jones himself?
Often, it’s difficult to separate the message from the man, but the altruistic beginnings of the Peoples Temple must not be minimized or forgotten. From 1955 through 1977, the social justice ethos of the movement prevailed, which included soup kitchens, free medical care, helping the elderly navigate the bureaucracy to get their benefits, rehabbing drug addicts, and other good works. Not only Jones but his wife, Marceline Baldwin Jones, and hundreds of dedicated followers acted toward these benevolent ends, genuinely hoping to improve the quality of life for many. The twisted ending in Guyana, in which a Utopian community failed spectacularly, does not obviate the good works of those who built the village from scratch – carving out a small city in the heart of the jungle – an amazing accomplishment which was admired, honestly, by the congressman and his assistant, Jackie Speier, who nearly died on the runway and writes about it in her memoir, Undaunted. One of the most salient quotes from that period is from multiple survivors, who repeated, “The only thing wrong with Jonestown was Jones.”
Congressman Leo Ryan was the most high profile victim of Jones. Was it his death that prompted Jones to kill his followers?
The murder of the congressman, along with 3 members of the press, was ordered by Jim Jones. (A Temple defector was also killed, but most believe her death was collateral damage — not what Jones wanted when he directed the Red Brigade, his army of shooters, out to the airstrip with their guns.) The death of an American congressman provided the perfect catalyst for Jones’s “final solution” to the troubles at Jonestown, but most scholars believe he was planning this cataclysm from the beginning of the Temple’s sojourn in Guyana, four years earlier. So if the plan to murder Leo Ryan had not been “successful,” some other catastrophe would have provided the spark.
What’s the legacy of Jonestown today?
Unfortunately, at this moment in history, we seem to have learned nothing from the example of Jonestown, where a charismatic man led well-meaning people to their detriment, some to their deaths. Manipulation of facts, which some call “fake news,” broadcast by duplicitous politicians and their helpers in the media, continues to lead unsuspecting innocents toward disaster, most notably in the United States during the height of the pandemic, where nearly a million died needlessly. In many infamous photographs of the corpses discovered in Jonestown at the pavilion, the sign on the wall above them reads “Those Who Do Not Remember the Past Are Doomed to Repeat It,” a variation on the great philosopher George Santayana’s “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” from The Life of Reason, 1905.
Just last year, in eastern Kenya, another Christian pastor, influenced by the same doomsday American preacher, William Branham, under whom Jones had studied, commanded his followers to fast to death, so that they might expedite their meeting with Jesus. Thus far, over 400 bodies have been unearthed in the Shakahola region. Paul Nthenge Mackenzie of the Good News International Church is currently in jail, awaiting trial, along with his coconspirators.
My pragmatic self says Jonestown could happen again, while my idealistic self believes education can prevent it, education which includes studying history and reading historical novels.
Which authors have inspired you?
American writer Melissa Faye Greene, author of The Temple Bombing and First Man Out, non-fiction accounts of powerful historical events, written in engaging narrative prose, is one of my models. Historical novelists like Michael Ondaatje, A.S. Byatt and Edwidge Danticat (The Farming of Bones) made me want to tackle historical fiction. Although this is my 6th published book, it is my first attempt at history-based narrative, and I am hooked.
What’s next?
I am researching for my next book, tentatively titled FATHOM THESE EVENTS, linking short stories about other Peoples Temple members, which I hope to get published in 2028, the 50-year anniversary of the massacre. So much has been published in the last 20 years, so much footage made available, interviews with survivors aired, documentaries produced, that I can read/view so many new materials in addition to re-evaluating prior sources.
“It will take more than small minds, reporters’ minds, to fathom these events. Something must come of this. Beyond all the circumstances surrounding the immediate event, someone can perhaps find the symbolic, the eternal in this moment — the meaning of a people, a struggle — I wish I had time to put it all together, that I had done it. I did not do it. I failed to write the book. Someone else, others, will have to do this.”
attributed to Richard Tropp, Jonestown handwritten document
Annie Dawid is the author of Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown which is available now.
