¢â‚¬Å“Let the Night Roar with It: ¢â‚¬  Dark Tourism at Jonestown

— Brian Collins

The title of this essay is a quote from the last recorded sermon of the
Revered Jim Jones. The speech was accompanied by an exultant ululation from
him and his people  ¢â‚¬“ a penultimate act of defiance against the U.S.
government emissaries they believed had come to Jonestown, Guyana to destroy
their way of life. Their ultimate act of defiance was far more
consequential.

Jones delivered the sermon on November 18, 1978, the infamous  ¢â‚¬Å“White Night ¢â‚¬ 
in which he led approximately 900 inhabitants of the Peoples Temple
Agricultural Project to their deaths by murder and mass suicide. Now, after
thirty years of trying to understand what happened to the hundreds of
hopeful Americans who tried to build a communal paradise free from bigotry
and exploitation in the South American jungle, a growing movement wants to
turn the site of the massacre into a  ¢â‚¬Å“dark tourist ¢â‚¬  attraction.

The term  ¢â‚¬Å“dark tourism ¢â‚¬  refers to the type of tourist industry that has
grown up around places like Auschwitz in Poland and Alcatraz prison in San
Francisco. An article that appeared earlier this month in *The New York
Times* describes a diversity of opinions among the Guyanese about adding
Jonestown to the list. Recently, Guyana ¢â‚¬â„¢s environmentally destructive rice,
sugar, and mining economy has been supplemented by green investment from
Norway, an effort to preserve the rain forests that cover seventy-five
percent of the country, including what used to be Jonestown. For some,
opening the site to dark tourism would be a welcome economic boon, but to
others it would be an uncomfortable reminder of the past.  ¢â‚¬Å“The government ¢â‚¬â„¢s
green initiatives redeem us from a crime which was overwhelmingly committed
by Americans on Americans, ¢â‚¬  says Guyana ¢â‚¬â„¢s UNESCO delegate David Dabydeen,
reminding us that America ¢â‚¬â„¢s largest civilian loss of life prior to September
11, 2001 occurred outside our borders in an impoverished-post colonial
nation  ¢â‚¬“ and with no contribution from the natives.

There is nothing necessarily ghoulish about the idea of turning Jonestown
into a tourist spot. The idea of tourism as we now know it goes back to the
European Grand Tour of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in
which young elites spent months visiting historical destinations and
cultural centers across the continent. The purposeful travel of the Grand
Tour, with stops at the ruins of long-gone classical civilizations, was the
capstone of a pupil ¢â‚¬â„¢s education. The great Indo-European epics that pupils
read before they embarked on the Grand Tour endorse the idea of travel as a
necessary part of entering maturity. And in many epics, like the *Odyssey,
*the *Aeneid*, and the Indian *Mahabharata *(which the Grand Tourists did
not read), the hero ¢â‚¬â„¢s travels include an instructive visit to the world of
the dead. Odysseus summons and speaks to the ghost of the seer Tiresias,
Aeneas follows the Cumaean Sibyl into the Underworld and speaks to his dead
father, and Yudhishthira, hero of the *Mahabharata*, descends into the
coldest and darkest region of hell as part of a test of his virtue.

In the classically informed European worldview and the pieces of it we have
inherited, travel is education. And learning lessons from the dead, either
through examining their crumbling ruins or communing with them in a ghostly
netherworld, is a necessary part of that education. The 900 dead at
Jonestown clearly have something to teach us. But it is far from clear, even
thirty years on, what exactly that is.

*Reference*

Brian Collins is a former Marty Center dissertation fellow and a PhD
candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

*Sightings* comes from the Martin Marty
Centerat the
University of Chicago Divinity School.

Attribution