Abstract
In this article I argue that Children of Paradise (2014), Fred D’Aguiar’s novelization of the final months of Jonestown, draws different spatializations of political oppression together and situates critique and resistance to that oppression in a parahuman ecology, a concept that develops out of a combination of vital materialist discourse and the writings of Wilson Harris and Édouard Glissant. Jonestown is the name popularly given to the Peoples Temple, an American cult led by Jim Jones that ended in a horrific mass suicide event in the Guyanese rainforest in 1978. Unlike previous narratives and studies on the group, the Jonestown of Children of Paradise takes on the contours of the Caribbean plantation and plot in its obsessive and oppressive control over the lives and labours of its population and its narrative of liberation from and resistance to external forces. Critique and resistance to these power structures emerge at the intersection of politics and ecology to produce an ecologically-inflected parahuman community. This community is represented in particular by the unusually compassionate relationship that develops between Adam, a silverback gorilla caged at the centre of Jonestown’s commune space, and Trina, a young girl who lives in the commune with her mother. As Adam and Trina engage each other and their relationship with the rainforest more intensely, they create a potentially alternative mode of living for those wishing to escape the confines of the commune and, symbolically, the horrors of the plantation.
Everything is gone. It’s now overgrown and reclaimed by the rainforest. […] When the Americans came in, they bulldozed some things, and the rest was taken away. The buildings were dismantled, taken away by locals. […] It’s a virulent nature. The vines and grass grow quickly. You stand still long enough, roots will cover your foot. It’s that verdant. (D’Aguiar, 2014b)
These are the reflections of Fred D’Aguiar upon his return to the site of Jonestown 1 in the Guyanese rainforest in 2004. Treading on land that, 26 years prior, was the location of the gruesome mass suicide of an American cult called the Peoples Temple, D’Aguiar’s response is a mixture of admiration and elegy. He begins and ends with meditations on the loss of what could have become ruins or a memorial on the site. The human tragedy that occurred here cannot, perhaps, be recovered from, and thoughts and memories of it find no material remnant to which to attach themselves. Situated between these expressions of loss is a consolation in the verdant powers of the rainforest to recover itself. Neither ruined nor razed, the rainforest is regenerating.
D’Aguiar’s words, for all their elegiac weight, mischievously mimic the descriptive tropes for the Caribbean environment that explorers, colonizers, and contemporary tourism entrepreneurs have wielded throughout a history of expropriation and exploitation. In each of these phases discourse has focused on the vitality of the Caribbean environment, its ability to grow and overgrow itself, which suggests a fecundity akin to paradise. D’Aguiar’s attention to the lack of ruins also references the significant omissions of indigenous and enslaved life common in colonizers’ and neocolonizers’ descriptions. The superabundance of flora in colonial and neocolonial discourse and its promise of profitability help to mask the populations that inhabit the islands and those conscripted to labour on them. Colonial and neocolonial action has “dismantled” those communities and left them without ruins to mark the decimation of their civilizations. As D’Aguiar points out, indigenous communities 2 who inhabit Guyana’s interior participated in the erasure of Jonestown from the physical landscape. In an ironic historical reversal of actors and victims, it is a mostly American community at Jonestown that has now been erased from the landscape. In his latest novel, Children of Paradise (2014a), D’Aguiar imaginatively repopulates this overgrown spot with the commune, focusing on its final, harrowing weeks.
D’Aguiar has dedicated his writing career to reimagining the past, particularly the past of enslavement in the Caribbean and black Atlantic world. His reconstructions of events draw out lost survivors and rich stories that have gone untold in historical archives. Putting the strategy in psychoanalytic terms, Stef Craps identifies D’Aguiar’s commitments to history as a way for the author and reader to undergo a process of “mid-mourning, […] which keeps introjection and incorporation in a permanent state of tension, [it] is a continual working-over of a history which remains enigmatic and irreducibly other” (2010: 468). D’Aguiar’s work of “mid-mourning” renders strange the power imbalances motivated by the construction of difference. In other words, racism and a racist past are worked on but never worked out. 3 Through his writing on the American cult, D’Aguiar expands the mid-mourning practices directed to racism and plantation slavery to consider other frameworks for marking difference and resisting oppression. Jonestown is worked on but not worked out through collections of survivor testimonies — of which D’Aguiar’s Bill of Rights (1998) is a fictional version — that reveal the charismatic power of Jones, or through scholarly studies that attempt to explain Jones’s appeal through black church traditions, radical black politics, or cult practices. 4 Wilson Harris’s multi-century emplotment of the event in Jonestown (1996) links Jim Jones to a long history of colonial exploiters, pitting its contextualization in contrast with D’Aguiar’s work. However, the choice of setting Children of Paradise in the interior, and exploring the ontological and optic possibilities for the human subject relative to that interior space, certainly aligns D’Aguiar’s novel with a Harrisian way of seeing. Unlike these previous narratives and studies, the Jonestown of Children of Paradise signifies across the definitive structures of Caribbean life post-1492: the plot and the plantation. This vacillation between two structures of agricultural labour and human mechanization is undercut by another way of seeing and being that emerges from living in the Guyanese interior. Through the main character, Trina, and supporting figures, the novel proposes an ecologically-inflected parahuman community as a resistant alternative to the nightmarish oppression of Jonestown and the historical paradigms of suffering with which it resonates in the Americas.
The novel unfolds over the final months of Jonestown from the perspective of its marginal creatures — Trina, an adolescent girl who joined the commune in California; Joyce, her mother; and Adam, a silverback gorilla. These three characters aid Jones in maintaining control over his commune through two approaches: the punitive application of violence and the encouragement, through exemplary models, of a rigorously internalized self-discipline. Trina and Joyce’s varied tasks throughout the novel reveal that work is endless in the commune, though very little agricultural output results from it; the commune depends on imported rations from Georgetown. The commune doesn’t lack for surveillance, though, with many of the young adult men patrolling as guards and prefects throughout the area. The cessation of the working day does not bring leisure but rather draws the population into the tent located at the centre of the commune, where Jones’s oratory lasts long into the night. In spite of this near-constant surveillance and work, Trina and her mother find ways to maintain their bond, and Trina and Adam manage to surreptitiously develop an unusually compassionate relationship to each other and the jungle that surrounds the commune. At the beginning of the novel, Adam grabs Trina when she accidentally comes too close to his cage during a game of tag, and he crushes her body to the point of unconsciousness. Once Trina recovers in the commune’s clinic, Jones and his assistants coach her on how to convince the rest of the commune that she is to be resurrected by their leader, demonstrating his mastery over life and death among his flock. This performance marks the beginning of Trina and Adam’s relationship.
Survivor testimonies such as those collected in Leigh Fondakowski’s (2013) Stories from Jonestown link Jones’s descent into mass suicidal paranoia to increasing pressure from a group of concerned US-based relatives of commune members. The delegation led by Congressman Leo Ryan sent Jones into his final tailspin, ordering Ryan and others to be shot before leaving the Port Kaituma airstrip (with members desiring to escape) and then turning on his own community and ordering the mass suicide/murder that ended everything on 18 November 1978. While the threat of Ryan’s visit looms over Jones in D’Aguiar’s novel, Children of Paradise decentres the political and human struggle in favour of an ecological one, choosing to fictionalize a water rights issue and make it central to the catastrophic end of Jonestown. In the novel, Jones’s total control over his population begins to slip when a delegation of Amerindians lodges a complaint with the Burnham government against Jones. The commune’s pig farm’s waste is polluting a river upon which the Amerindian groups depend, and their communities are growing sick as a result. Burnham upholds the water rights of the Amerindians, and Jones is furious at what he interprets to be a contravention of his agreement with the government. Burnham threatens to allow a delegation of concerned relatives accompanied by an American Congressman (historically, this is Ryan, though his name, like Burnham’s and Jones’s, are omitted throughout the novel) to inspect the commune unless Jones complies with the requests of the Amerindians. On the day the delegation is scheduled to arrive, Trina concocts an escape plan with Adam, and Jones readies the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. The novel bifurcates its endings at this point, imagining Trina and Adam leading a daring escape of the children, while also conforming to the historical conclusion of the Peoples Temple in mass suicide.
Through Trina and Adam, the novel features a series of parahumanist identifications with the very rainforest that threatens the community while it is alive and grows over it once it is dead. Monique Allewaert (2013) coins the term “parahuman” in her monograph, Ariel’s Ecology, to refer to the subjectivity forced upon enslaved Africans in the American Tropics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The parahuman is “beside” humanity, not fully accorded the ontic or political rights of the (white, male) subject. The parahuman also takes on important resistance features in Allewaert’s work, challenging the hierarchical superiority of humans over animals and, in turn, challenging Western conceptions of the human subject itself: “The parahuman is in a particular proximity to animal life […] but it is also true that the parahuman is proximate to but outside the category of the human” (2013: 212). Thus, the parahuman is a term more closely aligned with the descendants of enslaved Africans in the Americas, many of whom comprised the population of Jonestown, than a related and more well-known term, the posthuman. 5 The parahuman possibilities in D’Aguiar’s narrative contest a gendered and colonial discourse of landscape while also bringing the plant and animal life of that landscape into radical proximity with the novel’s primary human characters.
Natural spaces in the Caribbean are doubly marked, according to Elizabeth DeLoughery: they are mythologized as feminine and utopian spaces waiting for masculine conquest, while also challenging humans to “remember a […] history that has been buried by the tremendous tropical indifference of the Caribbean environment” (DeLoughrey et al., 2005: 3, 11). D’Aguiar addresses this discursive tradition of a Caribbean nature that erases human history while also submitting itself to the masculinist endeavours of plunder and control. He allows Trina and Adam to imagine themselves as part of the rainforest, making gender as well as human/non-human animal divisions ambiguous in the space. Rather than seeing human and natural history locked in antagonism, D’Aguiar’s ecological parahumanism sketches an alternative set of interactions between human and non-human living things in the interior. This alternative is not unlike the “emergence of agents who gained power by combining with ecological forces” in the eighteenth-century American Tropics to resist “the order of the plantation” (Allewaert, 2008: 341). D’Aguiar’s novel differs by making Jonestown resonate with both plantation and plot, with spaces of oppression and resistance. And yet, the ecological parahumanist actions of Trina and Adam in particular push the novel into refiguring the concept of community and relation to extend beyond the human — and even animal — world. Instead of representing human domination over nature through work in either a plot or plantation space, the novel envisions ways of being with and alongside nonhuman agents beyond the “agrilogistical” 6 spatializations of plot, plantation, and interior.
Commune life and the plantation
The gradual conversion of increasingly large tracts of arable land into monocrop cultures in the early modern era altered the biodiversity of Caribbean flora and fauna. Thus while the plantation forges historical links across the American Tropical region, 7 it remains at the centre of many of the Caribbean’s defining cultural characteristics — in particular: a history of transplantation, migration, dispossession, ecological antagonism between plantation and bush, and fierce economic inequality subtended by racialized social inequality. Mary Lou Emery sees the scope of the plantation’s effects ranging beyond even the regional designation of American Tropics to include “places of destitution and poverty across the Americas” (2012: 57). Indeed, Vera Rubin avers that “the plantation not only cast long shadows on its immediate social and human environments, but has been a significant factor in world history as well, from mercantilist to modern times” (Rubin and Pan American Union, 1959: 1). In The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination, Elizabeth Russ notes a similar pervasiveness of the structure in the social and economic organization of Caribbean spaces and US Southern spaces, but she also stipulates, quoting Kamau Brathwaite, that “the plantation ‘does not contain all that is planted’” (2009: 4), and that “the history of the plantation is not the only one that has shaped this New World, nor can its reverberations be understood in isolation” (2009: 19). The counterhistory of the maroon stands outside plantation history, but the larger maroon settlements in Jamaica and elsewhere developed through resistance to the plantation system’s presence in the Caribbean. Thus while the American Tropics is a space whose common experience is the plantation, it also holds in common a history of resistance to the plantation, particularly in the Caribbean and South America. While marronage is a highly recognized form of resistance, the “plot” is another spatialization of resistance to the plantation that shares some commonalities with Jonestown, in spite of the commune’s many characteristics that align it with the plantation’s production goals and power structures.
Sylvia Wynter conceptualized the plot in her 1971 essay, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation”, as a third space between the plantation/maroon settlement dichotomy; her work offers some much-needed localized complexity to Emery and Rubin’s elision of the plantation with the impoverishing effects of globalization and Russ’s maroon “outside”. Wynter’s essay takes a broad historical look at the ways in which the plantation and the novel, both products of modern capitalism, take root in the Caribbean. She argues that the plantation system defined social relations in the Caribbean after the arrival of Europeans, and that “we are all, without exception still ‘enchanted,’ imprisoned, deformed and schizophrenic in its bewitched reality” (Wynter, 1971: 95). The Caribbean author uses the novel as a staging ground for a process of disenchantment, liberation, and reformation because its dialogic nature can pit the ideologies of the plantation, firmly rooted in imperialist logic, against the “plot system, the indigenous, autochtonous system” (1971: 96). Punning on the narrative quality of the term, she argues that the “plot” is not only a small land holding that ex-slaves purchased after emancipation, but is also a consciously constructed economic, discursive, and political outside to the plantation. Though the plantation wields hegemonic authority and punitive power in the Caribbean novel, the “plot”, both in its narrative and spatial meanings, gives the novel shape and direction. Thus, Caribbean literature is structured on a central antagonism between plot and plantation. Not only does this theorization powerfully undermine the authority of the white European voice in telling the story of the Caribbean, but it also suggests that the “plot” requires a counterforce against which it can do its work.
With the advent of capitalist growth through the plantation system, Wynter argues that human relations to nature fundamentally changed, whereby humans were reduced to their labouring potential and nature was reduced to its utility as land. The cultivation of the “plot” tradition resists the dehumanization of this system and the instrumentalization of nature. The plot returns humans and nature to a different relationship in which humans cultivated food for its use rather than exchange value and were reunited with an animistic folk tradition rooted in African practices; the peasant who worked the plot was strategically rooted in the Caribbean land while also cultivating his African roots that the plantation attempted to sever. While her formulation of the Afrocentric plot and the conversion of Nature to Land relies on a romanticization of Nature and African culture, not to mention a ringing exclusion of indigenous cultivation practices in the Caribbean, Wynter’s notion of the plot remains a conceptually salient site “outside […] where the traditional values can give us a focus of criticism against the impossible reality in which we are enmeshed” (Wynter, 1971: 100).
Curdella Forbes’ useful articulations of plot and plantation in terms of crossings helps to problematize the characterization of Jonestown as plot or plantation. In her article, “Between Plot and Plantation”, she argues that the “plot” is bound up in the legitimacy of the family and in its self-articulated status as liberated. Crossing the plot’s boundaries amounts to trespass and is not invited or celebrated as a politically powerful form of tricksterism. The plantation, before and after emancipation, signifies as government-owned land, and disobeying its borders signifies as transgression, which is “illegitimate but communally reputable” (Forbes, 2012: 24), particularly given the absolute necessity of such border crossings in resistance actions against enslavement and colonialism. These space and border variances reflect the difficulties in categorizing the commune space. Jonestown is a government land gift from Burnham, intended to develop a large-scale agricultural project resonant with plantation structures. However, the rainforest also seems to be subject to plot-like ownership of the Amerindian tribes in D’Aguiar’s novel. When the commune begins polluting the water source of many communities through their dumping of pig waste in the water, the indigenous communities wage threats of trespass. When commune members escape, though, or when the Amerindian delegation frightens the commune guards, we see trickster behaviour associated with transgression. It is also worthwhile to note that the commune’s labours are generally too small in their yield to produce a high level of exportable product like sugar, textiles, or luxurious leisure. Jones’s rhetoric of liberation and trespass link the commune to the dynamics of the plot in D’Aguiar’s novel. However, the narrative focus on commune member experiences alongside connections to Burnham and the Amerindians align the site with aspects of the plantation.
Children of Paradise tropes on the signifiers of plot and plantation to suggest that for Jonestown there is no “outside”, no clear distinction between plot and plantation, or the prevailing powers of Jones as a sovereign figure. Rather than merely extract resources like timber and bauxite, the Peoples Temple intend to cultivate the land for mass production of food products. Jones’s plans transform the commune from plot to plantation, but they also scrupulously ignore the fact that the interior has already been settled and cultivated by the Amerindian communities that have made it their home for centuries. By bringing this group of indigenous inhabitants of the jungle into the narrative, D’Aguiar draws a different map of Caribbean modernity that locates exceptional sovereign violence in racial inequality and dispossession, but also in the expropriation of land from Amerindian communities. Resisting this violence depends on forging new relationships between humans and the rainforest ecology. As a space that signifies polyvalently between these opposing forces, D’Aguiar’s Jonestown encourages other ways of envisioning collective, ecologically-focused action through his attention to the lives of plants, children, and the gorilla in the commune.
Commune life and vital materialism
D’Aguiar’s Jonestown signifies as both plot and plantation when conceived of as a land on which humans labour, but Children of Paradise also prominently features the strategies by which humans interact with their environment beyond the requirements of their labours. In these actions, they exceed the plot/plantation dyad and emerge into what I am calling a parahuman ecological relationship with their surroundings. This relationship produces a radically reconfigured sense of personhood and collaboration, which resonates with current theories of vital materialism, particularly as they are put to work on the American Tropics. For example, Allewaert considers the possibility that an “ecological account of resistance” (2013: 49) in eighteenth-century writing and cultural practice is not committed merely to converting Africans to a Western ideology of revolution — that ascension into the ranks of liberal individualism — but rather is pursuing a radical reconception of the human, and, correlatively, a reconception of the human’s relationship to the environment. Allewaert argues that an ontic position of parahumanity and an aesthetic of the “swamp sublime” illustrate how humans saw themselves undone as citizen subjects and vulnerable to the transformative effects of the tropical natural world around them. Enslaved Africans were classified as parahuman, which is Allewaert’s term to explain the zone of subjectivity afforded to Africans by colonists. They were not citizens, which would grant them access to full humanity; nor were they simply animals. Rather, they occupied a variant position between the two. Enslaved Africans and Maroons marshalled the concept of parahumanity in their folktales and religious practices to embrace a levelling of the hierarchical distinction between man and animal, and it is this resistant function of parahumanity that Allewaert finds to be most productive in terms of ecological resistance efforts. Not only did the conditions of slavery and marronage put humans and animals on equal footing through parahumanity, but the seemingly limitless fecundity of the tropics produced an aesthetic response in which the human could not but be altered by her physical environment. Plant life, in particular, was granted powers of mobility; this and even microscopic particulate matter was considered a constant penetrative force, invading human bodies and transforming them accordingly. Together, the parahuman and the swamp sublime decentre human activity in the American Tropics and make the human subject to the powerful ecological forces that surround her. Allewaert’s concepts, informed by vital materialism and deep ecology, shed light on the parahumanist links between Wilson Harris’s writings on imagination and landscape and Édouard Glissant’s theory of Relation and amplify the ecological dimension of their shared ideas.
Though Harris and Glissant write extensively about cross-cultural exchange, philosophies of history, and cultural production in the Caribbean, they also repeatedly call for a reconfiguration of the human in relation to her environment. Like Allewaert, they argue that these concepts and practices emerge alongside imperialist activity in the Americas, not as a belated reaction to them. Both writers argue that while the slave trade and plantation labour bore out horrors on indigenous and dispossessed populations, techniques of survival, art, and community emerged alongside the hegemonic doctrine of imperial ideology. While these resistant and survival techniques can be broadly associated with the cultural project of creolization, both writers also attend to the human relationship with the environment and the Western conception of human subjectivity as key points that Relation and Harris’s concept of the imagination are capable of refiguring.
Wilson Harris repeatedly returns to the Guyanese interior in his writing, claiming that the space invites the imagination to conceive of a new novelistic mode of writing that will evade the collusion between narrative realist genres like the novel and imperial paradigms of domination. This imagination is marked by an “unusual treaty of sensibility between human presence on this planet and the animal kingdom” and is part of “pre-Columbian tradition” that persists in the post-Columbian world (Harris, 1994: 185). In “Originality and Tradition”, Harris asseverates that “we can do marvelous things to others” if writers would “draw upon resources which are very strange to ourselves” (1992: 133). For him, these resources are the “living landscapes” found in the Guyanese interior, which “have their own pulse and arterial topography and sinew which differ from ours but are as real — however far flung in variable form and content — as the human animal’s” (Harris, 1999: 44). In highlighting the strangeness and otherness of the nonhuman world, but in also evoking its riches and material reality, particularly available to the literary imagination, Harris forges a powerful image of Caribbean writing that emerges from the complex cultural crossings of human and other communities. Significantly, these communities are not just composed of humans, nor are they only composed of other animal species. By living landscapes, Harris refers to the botanical variety of the rainforest, as well as the rocks and waterfalls that populate it.
Like Harris, Glissant finds that the complexities of Relation develop across and through the accumulated experiences of the Middle Passage, plantation slavery, and resistance to it. In Poetics of Relation (1997), he states: “right from the first shock of conquest, this movement contained the embryo (no matter how deferred its realization might have seemed) that would transcend the duality that started it” (Glissant, 1997: 56, emphasis added). Glissant’s theory of Relation is proposed to transcend this duality. In the opening of Poetics of Relation, he illustrates and historicizes Relation through a powerful concatenation of land, sea, and fibres: The Slave Trade came through the cramped doorway of the slave ship, leaving a wake like that of crawling desert caravans. It might be drawn like this: African countries to the East; the lands of America to the West. This creature is in the image of a fibril. (1997: 5)
Proclaiming its birth in the crossing of slave ships from Africa to the Americas, he links a collection of images: the slave ship is doorway and animate object that leaves a wake, which tropes on both aqueous imagery of waves and on cultural practices of remembering the dead. And yet, it is also imagined through the land-based image of “crawling desert caravans”. Most intriguing, though, is his visualization of this route, which refuses the typical triangle, that icon of the slave trade. Instead he draws what he calls a “creature” that is “in the image of a fibril”. Combining animal, plant, and matter images here, this visualization of the slave trade is preceded by a tense constellation of mobile, immobile, aqueous, and earth-bound images and then rendered as a miniaturizing fibre that is also referred to as a creature. Because “fibril” can mean both a fibre found in textiles and the botanical fibres found on the young roots of certain plants, Glissant’s slave trade fibril signifies at the micro- and macroscopic levels while also figuring as a creature and image. The complexities of Relation develop out of this image.
Therefore, even though Relation often appears to be a cross-cultural form of ethical recognition and exchange, Glissant establishes its vital materialist foundations in this powerful initial image. In fact, Relation resonates with Allewaert’s notions of vitalism in the eighteenth century: “an ontology in which combining and not being was the first principle” (2013: 62). In fact, later in Poetics Glissant describes Relation as “the possibility for each one at every moment to be both solidary and solitary there” (1997: 131). The fragility of the fibril resoundingly diminishes the colossal power — economic and political — amassed by the Global North through the slave trade. Indeed, Glissant returns to the notion of the fragile and the perishable that also curiously endures through his exaltation of the fragility of local Martinician products over the “affective standardization of people” through the circulation of desirable, globally recognized goods (1997: 148; see also Glissant, 1989: 51–52). Relation, like Allewaert’s transformative potential of the swamp sublime, is an aesthetics of “disruption and intrusion” (Glissant, 1997: 151).
Harris and Glissant strategically decentre the human subject and experience in order to narrate the lively and vital world of beings and matter — non-human all — in which humans can participate as one among many actants. Because they situate this vital materialism alongside a history of conquest and human domination over other humans and the environment, they establish a useful framework through which to interpret the parahumanist ecologies at work in Children of Paradise, alongside the plot/plantation conception of space. By focusing on the vital materialist theories of these Caribbean writers, we can see how D’Aguiar is drawing on this tradition while also bringing its historicization to bear on the Jonestown occupation of the Guyanese rainforest. Updating the historical parameters of the plantation matrix to now include a kind of allegorical US occupation and exploitation of Caribbean land and people, D’Aguiar’s novel focuses on the ways in which a parahuman ecological relationship to the world can exist alongside and in spite of dominating structures rooted in the logic of forced and extractive labour on a mute, insensate earth.
Combining with the rainforest
Working from the hostile dichotomy that pits nature against culture, Jones uses the threats of the rainforest — in addition to the prying US delegation of concerned relatives and the Amerindian delegation suffering from water pollution — to reinforce the closed nature of his community (D’Aguiar, 2014a: 72) 8 and to refigure the outside of the plantation from plot to violent wilderness. In opposition to his efforts, the children’s imagined links to the rainforest and biotic material in general refuses to accord with Jones’s characterization of it (82). The child–rainforest connection does not overturn or replace Jones’s community, but rather, it exists alongside and in spite of it. In Trina’s mind, the rainforest promises total absorption as a manner of escaping: “they can easily disappear without a sound, absorbed by the trees” (85). She sketches a potentially parahuman community that relies on ecological bridges among humans, animals, and plant matter.
Adam’s “fatal” grasping of Trina and the flute she is given as a reward for her sham resurrection bind the ecological to the human. These scenes reframe the human–ecological relations that can temporarily evade the plot/plantation structures of Jonestown. When Adam holds on to Trina, refusing to release her, she imagines that she is being crushed by a giant fallen tree trunk in the forest, but these are not the manicots that surround Jonestown; rather, they are the California redwoods from her home: “Under pressure, Trina’s mind switches from the reality of her predicament with Adam to the weightlessness of a dream built from memories of trunks of fallen trees. […] She feels trapped under a fallen tree” (9). When she yearns for home at other points in the novel, it is not a father or other family members that she thinks about; it is the redwoods of California where she imagines herself. Her sense of being crushed positions her in the Guyanese rainforest, pinned by a manicot, and in the Californian forest, pinned by a redwood. Her double placement imaginatively removes her from this central and observed site in the commune while also, paradoxically holding her there. She imagines an “outside” that relies less on the contours of the Afrocentric plot and more on the proximity to twinned arboreal forest giants. Trina roots herself in the forest rather than imagining her actions through mobile tropes of trespass or transgression.
Trina’s figurative reminisces in this passage bridge the animal and plant worlds of two different forests on different continents, but she also constructs an ethical bridge between the human and animal when she attempts to look at Adam to “convince the mind behind the face to free her” (9). Trina is wordlessly attempting to plea for mercy and care at this crucial moment in her crushing, and while she does not succeed in seeing Adam’s face, the language and intention behind her attempt suggest that an ethics of care can be shared beyond the human realm and, most significantly, that the “animal” can act with care towards the human. Thus, through Trina’s figurative and ethical endeavours to cope with this frightening moment in her young life, she draws the human, the animal, and the arboreal together in a matrix of being and caring for each other.
When she plays her part in her resurrection so perfectly, she is awarded a new wooden flute 9 as a bribe to remain silent about the trick of bringing her back from the dead. Trina’s flute playing cements an affective connection with Adam and reroutes her rooted connection to wood into a human–ape relation facilitated by a musical product fashioned from that arboreal object. Trina constructs melodies that sonically recreate the contours of the forest (96). While she is playing for Adam early in the novel, she imitates the boat whistle of the Coffee, the ship and its captain, Aubrey, that attempt to rescue her, Joyce, and a dozen children at the end of the novel. When she continues playing, she shifts her thoughts from the natural world around her, which was her previous source of inspiration, to Anansi stories, shared by the Captain (54).
The flute draws Trina and Adam into the vital materiality of the rainforest; the flute itself becomes an “actant”, meaning “an entity that modifies another entity” (Latour qtd. in Bennett, 2010: viii). As such, they participate in “an active becoming, a creative not quite human force capable of producing the new” (Bennett, 2010: 118). Though the scales of time and distance are more compressed, Trina’s relation across forests and living beings also evokes what Harris refers to as “numinous inexactitudes” that produce “a variable and fluid life-enhancing diversity” and a “variable identity” for the human subject (1994: 187, 191). This newness corresponds in some ways to the rainforest’s inevitable growing over of Jonestown, as D’Aguiar reports on the ruin-less space in the epigraph to this essay. Trina’s interactions with Adam recall her flute playing even when she is not playing the instrument. As she gives Adam a back scratch, she closes her eyes and pictures her hand crawling up and down the gorilla’s back. Her fingers are insects exploring the undergrowth. But the terrain is alive and makes her fingertips feel like they are playing her flute but without sound, just movement. (159)
At first, Trina’s relation to the rainforest ecology is reached through metaphor, but when she begins to experience the sensation of flute playing in this action, she exceeds the metaphorical connection to the rainforest and enters into an assemblage of actants, drawing on the rich notions of contiguity and penetration from Allewaert and actant theory as mobilized by Bennett. 10 This particular interaction between Adam and Trina produces an array of effects: Trina confirms her suspicion that Adam can speak; the back scratch strengthens the compassionate connection between the two; their interaction provokes an overzealous guard to beat Trina, which will incite Jones to command that Adam beat the guard while the commune looks on. The effects of this action work in contradictory directions. They strengthen Trina and Adam’s links to the rainforest while also providing Jones with another opportunity to demonstrate his control over commune space and its inhabitants. This quality of working alongside a dominant ideology links the ecological counter-narrative in Children of Paradise to Harris and Glissant’s formulations of a resistant narrative emerging and developing simultaneously and alongside the doctrine of domination associated with imperialist ideology.
Not only does Trina’s flute playing offer a sonic, material, and intertextual bridge between subjects, spaces, and cultural texts, but her emplotment in the novel offers a formal bridge between the human and animal worlds. Before the children scatter in a game at the beginning of the novel, they are boasting about who can carry more water in a day, demonstrating their indoctrination in the commune’s plantation-like ethic. Rather than complaining about their chores, they compete for who can complete them best. Trina claims that the children carry so much water their arms are getting to be longer than Adam’s, subversively rerouting their boasting by likening them to Adam rather than exemplary commune members. The children’s antics in these first two pages take them through a dizzying variety of postures in relation to the commune: from full-scale acceptance of its work ethic, expressed through their boasting; to human/animal transformation, expressed through their mimicry of Adam; to a chant that expresses an awareness of how far Father’s control extends in the human and natural world around them: “Speak no evil. Or the commune gorilla will get you” (2). Dissident speech in the commune is not tolerated; by drawing Adam into her call and response song as the figure who will attack if the children speak ill against the commune, Trina shifts him from a marker of their humanness to an agent of Father, in league with the prefects and the rainforest itself to control them. On the other hand, if we take the phrase “get you” in a more colloquial direction, then “get” could connote comprehension, meaning that when one speaks ill of the commune, Adam is attuned to understanding such a disposition. 11 His dreams of flight to find his mother, his secret tunnel, and his efforts to help Trina and Ryan suggest that Adam prefers to understand rather than attack dissidents. Trina draws Adam into this complicated relationship with the commune that balances between identification with its mission and resistance to it.
The narrator’s free indirect discourse allows Adam’s perspective to take over for the rest of the scene in which he moves the children along a spectrum of non-human living beings, from water-toting gorillas to vegetation. This complicated series of transformations that can be attributed to Adam’s thinking propose his status as a user of language and manipulator of human roles and relationships, well before he implausibly utters words in human-like speech at the end of the novel. Thus, Adam’s indirect speech conveys a being with a complex mind receptive to the possibilities of transgressions that are both political and ontological. Because his sense of being in language arises through the narrative feature of free indirect discourse, D’Aguiar also strategically withholds the scope of the gorilla’s linguistic and cognitive abilities from the characters in the novel, but not the reader.
Adam, positioned between the human and non-human living worlds in the rainforest, sees in the children the possibility of resistance to human control over this world through an overtaking of their humanness by the rainforest itself. The gorilla thinks that the energy the children exhibit in their game playing “seems to come from the thick vegetation, energy that bears no relation to their bodies” (3). After locating the source of the children’s energy in the rainforest itself, rather than the expectations of Jones, the paragraph continues in a long, periodic sentence that details the many kinds of work in which the children are regularly employed. Rather than concluding with just one more chore, however, the description of shelling peas thematically returns to the rainforest’s influence on the children: “shelling peas until their hands are so green, they seem grafted from the vines and leaves, properties not of children but of creatures formed by the rainforest” (3–4). If Trina’s actions and speech create a behavioural and political bridge between Adam and the children, then Adam and the narrator see in the children the potential to imagine a different way of living in the rainforest, one that destabilizes the border between commune and rainforest, human and plant, human and animal. 12
Later in the novel, Jones uses Trina to shore up support for him as it begins to falter in the commune’s final days. Trina’s speech is exemplary of obedience to Jones, but the narrative interweaves a vision of Trina, her mother, and sycamore seeds. Though she grips a microphone, “she feels a sycamore seed newly plucked from the air”; though she is surrounded by anguished Peoples Temple members in the night, wailing with Jones, “the seeds swirl down in whispers. Branches wave in the trees” (175). Combining her connection to arboreal and aqueous imagery fortifies Trina to remain still as Jones allows a tarantula and scorpion to climb across her outstretched arms. Trina performs and articulates his politics, binding the congregation to Jones in moments of questioning or upheaval like this one, but the narration’s focus on her visions amplifies her differences from him. This double narrative effect pits the human-centric drama against the parahuman ecology that has developed over the course of the novel and is carried through to its conclusion.
The novel’s double ending, in which the commune children, Joyce, Aubrey, and Adam, are the very characters who attempt to escape, suggests that their subjective troubling or self-decentring, their transgression of the limits of their human bodies and Adam’s nonhuman body with the botanical and aqueous organisms that populate the forest, are modes of resistance against the controlling powers of the commune. Because this escape is one of two endings in the novel, it functions like a possibly alternative past, a bit of mid-mourning enveloped in the inevitably tragic mass suicide that the historicality of the novel’s form cannot avoid.
The dual ending of the novel exhibits a host of parahuman ecological possibilities, indicating that in either the historically accurate or imagined alternative ending, these alternative relations productively resist Jones’s presumed domination over his human community. In the imagined alternative ending of escape, Trina and the others demonstrate a consistent reliance on parahuman relations to facilitate their survival under Jones’s final, terrorizing days. Once they are rescued by Aubrey, they will ostensibly be folded into the Amerindian communities that threaten Jones throughout the novel. Given the turn to human communities in this alternative ending, the parahuman and vital materialist strains of the novel remain suspended in future possibility.
In the historically accurate ending, which interrupts Aubrey’s call and response with the children, Trina lines up with Ryan and Rose to take her drink from the ladle and soon, to lie dead in the rainforest. According to the historical record, they were poisoned by cyanide, a material Jones was able to purchase in large quantities with a jeweller’s licence (Nair, 2013: 84–5). Though Jones never used the cyanide he purchased to clean gold (its purported function for jewellers), the reference to gold and a maddened white man in the Guyanese interior allusively links to Sir Walter Raleigh and the search for El Dorado. One might argue that Raleigh’s failed expedition is the smaller one because England and Europe generally still managed to colonize South America, despite being denied mythical amounts of gold. Jones, on the other hand, destroyed the utopia he created, leaving behind nothing monumental but the trauma of survivors and jungle overgrowth that D’Aguiar reports in the epigraph to this essay. Building on this negative notion of waste, Supriya Nair points out the dehumanizing effect of NBC’s news coverage of the mass suicide/murder, focusing on their phrase, “strange fallen fruit rotting”. She reads this as “deliberately dehumanizing to convey the sense of human waste, the bitter, unfruitful harvest of cumulative social marginalization and unbelonging” (2013: 84).
While Nair’s interpretation of the descriptive images used to narrate this tragic outcome is perceptive and convincing, the ecological orientation of Children of Paradise and the vital materialist strands of thought that I have been reading through the novel can offer an alternative reading alongside this important political critique. As rotting “fallen fruit” the bodies of the Jonestown dead no longer occupy the roles of human subjects, oppressed citizens, or even cult members. Though they no longer exhibit signs of life typical of human existence, in their metaphorical translation into fruit, they take on a new kind of vitality. Allewaert’s reading of “vegetating” is useful here. She notes how plants were described as “vegetating” in the swamps of the American south, meaning that they are “a sentient force [acting] in an ecology that acts on and through it” (2013: 34). It is a powerful verb to use because it refers to growth and life when used with plants, but inactivity and dullness when used with humans. However, to imagine humans as occupying a space outside the traditional expectations of the Western liberal subject, it becomes possible for a vegetating human body to be quite life-giving indeed. While I am not advocating a “happy ending” reading of the Jonestown massacre, I am suggesting that D’Aguiar’s ecologically-attuned narrative raises the possibility of this reading alongside (but not instead of) the tragic line that focuses on unnecessary loss of human life. One of Trina’s final thoughts, to “shape-shift and escape” (362), both foreshadows and challenges this aspirational reading.
Conclusion
I have been arguing that Children of Paradise focuses on life and communities in the interior of Guyana to shift attention away from the more predominant settings of Caribbean literature, such as plantations, cities, and small villages populated by Afro- and Indo-Caribbean inhabitants or those inhabitants’ lives in an ever-widening diaspora. Wilson Harris has repeatedly turned to the interior rainforest landscape of Guyana, but for him, this space evokes the clash of imperial and indigenous desire. A history of catastrophe is written into the natural world of the interior. Like Pauline Melville (1998, 1999), who has also staged her novels in the interior of Guyana and focused on cultural and ecological concerns in a non-imperial age, D’Aguiar also uses ecological issues to allegorically layer US occupational politics in the Caribbean in his narrative. The interior stages both the exceptional sovereign powers of the state as well as an alternative to state power and US-dominated global power through radically reconceiving ethical responsibilities to natural resources and non-human subjects. Like other contemporary Caribbean authors, 13 D’Aguiar is writing within an ecological framework that challenges the paradigms of plantation/plot and trespass/transgression without forsaking some of the key characteristics, settings, and persistent questions that Caribbean literature addresses.
As Jonestown fails in its production agreements with the state, unable to grow food to even meet the subsistence needs of its population in spite of the endless forced labours into which it conscripts its inhabitants, it ceases to function as a plantation. Children of Paradise imagines another possibility in the ecologically-minded parahumanist actions of its most marginal characters — children, and a silverback gorilla. Through these characters D’Aguiar develops a powerful set of relations among actants, but one that relies on the relinquishment of mastery over nature. Both the alternate and historically accurate endings of the novel bear out the fruits of this imaginative experiment. This extension of human life into the workings of the jungle, with an awareness of how their perception of the jungle changes as they become awakened to its being, envisions a radical decentring of humans in their environment, but also a restraining of how humans imagine the function of their technology in an environment that is not only vibrantly living but also vibrantly “being”. While historically the children of Jonestown die, D’Aguiar’s novel imagines them into a new and rescued life, listening to Aubrey’s Anansi story on the deck of his boat as they sail away from the horrors of Jonestown. What Allewaert refers to as the “swamp sublime”, the commingling of human subjects and ecological objects along the terraqueous edges of plantations in the US South, comes into play in D’Aguiar’s doubled ending. Like the ending of Walcott’s (1990) Omeros as well, the rainforest was “still going on” at the conclusion of Children of Paradise. This indicates that in spite of the limited effects that Trina and Adam might have had over the parahumanist reorganization of human and animal political ecology in the novel, their efforts signal a need for human communities to negotiate with their environments in new ways in order to conceive of political orders beyond the histories of oppression and division that mark the modern Caribbean experience.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jennifer Ballengee, Anne Gulick, and the anonymous readers at the Journal of Commonwealth Literature for their feedback on various versions of this article. Their invaluable commentary has improved the essay immeasurably. Its remaining faults are entirely my own.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.