{"id":123918,"date":"2023-09-11T15:45:28","date_gmt":"2023-09-11T22:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=123918"},"modified":"2023-10-28T12:48:53","modified_gmt":"2023-10-28T19:48:53","slug":"the-rectification-of-jonestown-the-place","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=123918","title":{"rendered":"The Rectification of Jonestown, the Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

(The short film <\/em>Hyacinth is <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I came to the idea of Paradise<\/em><\/a>, the larger project of which Hyacinth<\/em> is a part, through a course I took in graduate school on cultural geography.\u00a0 In that class, we talked about how landscapes where tragedies occur are treated after the event and how we can read cultural attitudes toward what or who was lost by the treatment of the land in the aftermath.\u00a0 When a site is rectified \u2013 that is, returned to a natural or undeveloped state \u2013 that speaks to the desire to forget. These are the sites I was interested in throughout the project, which took eight years to complete beginning in 2006. \u00a0How and what we want to remember says a lot about what we value \u2013 not what we want<\/em> to value, but what we actually value.<\/p>\n

To sensationalize a thing is to keep it Out There, to see nothing of oneself in it. I was passingly familiar with the story of Jonestown \u2013 that the term \u201cdrinking the kool aid\u201d was a dismissive reference \u2013 when I watched Stanley Nelson\u2019s excellent 2006 documentary Jonestown: The Life And Death of Peoples Temple<\/em>. I was struck by the fact that a number of surviving former members still recall being a part of Peoples Temple as one of the most beautiful and important things they had ever done, despite its infamous and tragic end in which they lost both friends and family.\u00a0 There was nothing sensational about the loss they experienced. It was complicated and real, and I felt I understood it as grief.\u00a0 I wanted to explore the story of Jonestown as a story that was not Out There.\u00a0 For me, in this context, that meant visiting the geographic sight where it happened.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The 2007 trip to shoot at the actual location of Jonestown, near the town of Port Kaituma in Guyana\u2019s interior, was a trip into the unknown for me.\u00a0 I\u2019m grateful to my friend Jake Galle for being willing to accompany me, particularly as I was advised by an anthropologist who\u2019d worked in the region not to go by myself as a woman. Guyana has a negligible white population, and so Jake and I, who are both white, were rather conspicuous. Everyone assumed we were missionaries. At the time, Guyana basically had no tourist infrastructure \u2013 the Lonely Planet<\/em> guide had literally yet to be published \u2013 so we traveled there on the hunch that the resources for the gold mining industries that drew on Port Kaituma would mean there would be somewhere to stay and somewhere to eat.<\/p>\n

The only place we could find to stay in Kaituma was a government-run guest house which was otherwise occupied by a utility company worker, and the woman who managed it cooked us dinners in her own kitchen.\u00a0 When the local government got word a couple of Americans were looking for someone to take them to Jonestown, we were summoned to the municipal office where we met with a not especially welcoming official in a military beret who wanted to know what exactly we were planning to do there.\u00a0 When we said we were artists, he immediately relaxed and, in my memory, waved his hand, saying, \u201cOh then do whatever you want.\u201d\u00a0 We would learn that Jonestown is a painful national memory in Guyana, probably at least in part because it was the first and only time many Americans had heard of Guyana in 1978, a less than positive turn on the world stage.<\/p>\n

Stanlry Nelson made the explicit decision to never use the word \u201ccult\u201d in his film, and that allows viewers to tune into the human community that was Jonestown.\u00a0 After doing some research, I found plenty of theories about brain washing at the settlement \u2013 as well as verified evidence of CIA presence \u2013 it seemed clear to me that community could be powerful enough without explicit manipulation to carry us along on a current that we would otherwise never allow to take us. That many people apparently did not go willingly on that day in November should not be ignored or forgotten, but that they were in Guyana in the first place speaks to the power of an idea, an ideal, a community, a desire to be part of something larger than oneself.\u00a0 It was not hard for me to imagine being enamored of such a group in its earlier and healthier days as many of those who died at Jonestown were.<\/p>\n

I thought maybe I would feel something of a ghost or presence when we finally ended up in the jungle where our local guide assured us was the spot Jonestown stood. We weren\u2019t GPS savvy so we will never know where our guide took us, really. I didn\u2019t feel or sense anything.\u00a0 It could have been anywhere and really it was nowhere in particular.\u00a0 The rectification seemed to speak to the desire to forget the community and how it ended.<\/p>\n

And yet there were still the people in Nelson\u2019s movie saying it had been too beautiful once to ever forget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(The short film Hyacinth is here.) I came to the idea of Paradise, the larger project of which Hyacinth is a part, through a course I took in graduate school on cultural geography.\u00a0 In that class, we talked about how landscapes where tragedies occur are treated after the event and how we can read cultural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":123916,"menu_order":33,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-123918","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=123918"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":123925,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123918\/revisions\/123925"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=123918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}