The 1978 “Jonestown massacre,” as the opening paragraph of Annie Dawid’s Paradise Undone calls the horrific historic event at the novel’s core, soon became simply “Jonestown,” a global trope for what most remembered as a zombielike mass-suicide: crazy, mesmerized followers of a faith leader, Jim Jones, willingly taking their own lives in blind obedience to his delusions. As “Jonestown,” Jones’ Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in the Amazonian jungles of Guyana became a quasi-religious community whose members “drank the Kool Aid,” wiping itself from the map.
Dawid’s 2023 novel offers a welcome correction to such generalized misunderstandings. Her deliberate choice to use the art of fiction teases apart the complexities of so unsettling an event. Though “Jonestown” persists as shorthand for the largest mass suicide in modern times — 918 people died in all — the event in truth was not a mass suicide. The body count includes 70 or more people who were injected with the poison — and it is impossible to know how many of these were injected against their will — and 304 children, many of whom received the cyanide-laced Flavor Aid by oral syringe. Others, including United States Congressman Leo Ryan (D-California), were gunned down at Guyana’s Port Kaituma Airport and within the compound. Further complicating the willing-zombie-cult-suicide image was the menacing presence of many armed enforcers who surrounded the tubs of poison as Temple members filed forward to drink.
Dawid, whose six books include collections of essays, poetry and short fiction, here offers a story that is more about the energies and lives of women than about Jones, whose presence takes its strongest form in the all-caps, single-page quotes between chapters. (The shortest of these delusional rants: WITHOUT ME, LIFE HAS NO MEANING.) Dawid turns most of the dreadful final hours of Jones’ cult over to the actions of two women, both historical figures: cult member Christine Miller and Marceline Baldwin, Jones’ wife and Peoples Temple cofounder. Dawid uses Miller’s actual words from the “death tape” recording of Jones’ final assembly as she defied the leader, attempting to derail what he termed their “revolutionary suicide.” Dawid dedicates her work to Miller, “who refused to submit.”
The novel’s most moving passages may be that chapter’s deft interweaving of third-person narration with the stream of Baldwin’s consciousness as she observes what is unfolding around her. Dawid’s masterful imagining of Baldwin’s unknowable last thoughts evokes those of other Temple victims and, more generally, that all-too-common, despairing freeze response that trapped victims feel when fight and flight are obliterated by terrifying, immediate circumstance.
In her frozen observer’s state, Dawid’s Baldwin recalls her husband’s constant sense of victimhood, the idealistic qualities of the Temple’s once-noble mission of racial equality, and her husband’s forgotten stands against violence as that last day steadily darkens. She begs Jesus’ help, internally cheers on Miller’s opposition, which she tries to goad herself into joining, wonders, “Do I have to kill my husband?” Most of all, she berates herself with constant rebukes. All the while her paralyzed mind records what Dawid’s research has shown actually happened, including Miller’s failed effort to tip over a vat of poison before the guards subdued her.
I read Dawid’s novel because I’d known her briefly as a colleague at the University of North Dakota’s English department. After she’d left (and several years after the massacre), I came to know the religious scholar Rebecca Moore, who lost two sisters and a nephew at Jonestown. I place the event’s name-as-shorthand in quotation marks at the beginning of this essay out of respect for the complexity of that unspeakable occurrence. I first considered such challenging interpretations through Moore’s eyes and now find them richly embodied in Dawid’s novel.
Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown stretches far beyond the events of that dreadful day in Guyana nearly 46 years ago. It imagines young Jim Jones meeting Marceline Baldwin at Mercy Hospital in Richmond, Indiana. “Aren’t you the sweetest thing,” Baldwin is saying to the abandoned, sick “Negro child” found in the hospital lobby with a “Baby Doe” tag on it. She had taken the baby from another hospital employee “who was holding the infant as far from her[self] as possible.” New employee Jones joins Baldwin in washing the girl. Eighty percent of the Peoples Temple membership was poor Blacks, many of whom had been following the Joneses since the Temple’s Indiana days in the 1950s.
The novel concludes in 2018 at the Jonestown Memorial site in an Oakland, California, cemetery, where a fictional Black reporter is covering the 40th anniversary of the massacre. It is that reporter who calls “Jonestown” a massacre rather than a mass suicide in the novel’s opening paragraph. But Dawid signals her owns nuanced views early on by having that first chapter end with the journalist’s excitement over a scoop. Not even she is above media sensationalism.
Jonestown was no Masada (73 A.D.) or Heaven’s Gate (1997) suicide. (“Nike-wearing woo-woo types,” a character terms that latter event; Dawid can be funny, too.) Neither was Jonestown a fight to the death with would-be liberators at the gates, as happened at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993.
Nor is Paradise Undone an easy read. But it is a profoundly satisfying one for any reader who wants to recognize and feel more deeply how such a terrible thing might have come to pass in our culture. It lifts the Jonestown story free of lazy generalization and sensational media spectacle. Dawid’s novel does not hide behind bloodless, statistical, psychosocial argument: It’s a novel. Her story is an explanatory, collective eulogy; an ambitious, respectful account that devotes fewer than 80 of its nearly 300 pages to the last six weeks of Jonestown life, not quite 40 of those pages to what happened on Jonestown’s last day, November 18, 1978. Paradise Undone gives full voice to the large, difficult truths that this historic, all-too-American tragedy manifests.
James McKenzie, professor emeritus of English at the University of North Dakota, lives and writes in St. Paul, Minnesota. His occasional essays for Notre Dame Magazine include “The Redeeming Grace of Manual Labor.”