Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  The insides of Jonah Jones’s Whale were a theatre of Memory’s fire and I glued my eyes into Mr Mageye’s global Camera in order to see the detail of Aboriginal genius in sculpting the evolutions of mutated holocaust, altered spectres of holocaust into the sacrifices (voluntary and involuntary) that humanity makes in striking a chord linking Devil’s Isle to Botany Bay to Port Mourant to dread Jonestown.

  Jones would look for a blazing woman in Port Mourant or New Amsterdam after the wedding. ‘They all love an American to put out the fire,’ he said; And it was true.

  I held my Breath. A house in the Spider Whale was a Camera shot of Jonestown. The house stood on the river bank. I remembered the web of the past in the future. A high wire in the Brain, in Mr Mageye’s Camera, sends one sailing on a wave, sailing on fire.

  Two cyclists were approaching the house in Mr Mageye’s curiously Aboriginal film. I swore I was one Aboriginal survivor (Aboriginals have been decimated on every continent around the globe) and that my Skeleton-twin was the other. It was the bundle of newspapers that we carried on our heads. But in fact the cyclists were Carnival Lord Death and his twin or likeness the grave-digger.

  On arriving at Jones’s house they dumped the newspapers into the river. Then they turned on the house itself. They began to push. The house slipped inch by inch, foot by foot, towards the water’s edge. As it gained the bank I knew it would fall. But as it came upon the brink of toppling it was held or salvaged in the huntsman’s net; seized and converted into a play, fallen, perpetually falling Aboriginal theatre of the globe.

  Mr Mageye’s humour was as unpredictable as that of ancient Jonah who adventured into the Whale in the Bible and from whom Jones borrowed his first name.

  ‘It is necessary, Francisco,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘to see that the perpetually falling Aboriginal globe promoted a dialogue between Deacon and yourself when it catapulted you (and Deacon before you) into the head and form of an angel (as old as Methuselah) even as it catapults Jones into a perverse dramatization of Jonah. I tell you this in order to make clear some of the premises of Aboriginal theatre in any area of the world. Kali – the many-armed Indian Goddess and guardian of Marie – is more, much more, than an individual pin-up or film star. Populations have been catapulted into her. They reside in her at various levels of perversity and virtue, danger and the promise of salvation. The same is true of black Anansi (an actor, as you shall soon see in my film) who arrived in the Guyanas with African slaves. The same is true – as you no doubt realize – of immigrants from Leeds and Liverpool and London who were bundled together into a faceless Prisoner and transported to Australia where for better and worse, in perversity and virtue, they confronted their Aboriginal Twin from whom they began to sculpt the resources of a new Paradise tainted alas by racism … I mention all this to make clear some of the intensive/extensive ground of my film as it proceeds …

  ‘Look, Francisco! Look into the womb of my Virgin Camera.’ Mr Mageye could not help laughing, despite the gravity of humour in his expression.

  ‘Look, Francisco,’ he cried. ‘Deacon approaches within or upon or beneath the back-bone of the Whale. He now embodies the elemental furies of many an adventurer and explorer. He’s the solid ghost who hangs under the Cave of the Moon. He’s a submarine commander about to launch a hidden torpedo. He bundles his constituency into himself. He arrives at Jonah’s house … It took me ages to film that bit … His face is black as thunder. He thunders at the door and sweeps into the dining-room where Jonah sits. Look and listen, Francisco.’

  ‘What in God’s name is the matter, Deacon?’

  ‘News from home. Have you read last week’s papers which arrived today? Bloody November is upon us I tell you! How can you stomach the end of the world, Jonah? This Whale has no back door into the Bank of America.’

  Jonah crossed to the window and looked out upon the river.

  ‘There they are,’ he said. ‘Floating high and dry. I knew there was something in the air. My house gave a slight tremor a moment or two ago. Earthquakes do shake the region once in a while. Water is floating ash.’

  Jonah was clearly disturbed. He felt the turbulence of dying fish in himself within the vista of futures. He felt the rape of species. He felt as if he were being choked by stocks and bonds.

  Deacon was mad, Deacon was angry. ‘The papers say you have broken the law and defrauded the Bank, Jonah. The Inspector is on his way.’

  Jonah moved – turbulent stomach and all – to the dining-table in the middle of the room and polished the shining table-top that the sawyers in the Mission had prepared.

  ‘It’s as bright as a coffin,’ he said. ‘We shall dine on table-top coffins, Deacon. Bring your constituency.’ As he spoke Spider Anansi crept delicately out of the coffin. He danced upon coal.

  Human Spiders, Anansi tricksters, were once the saviours of slaves transported through the Middle Passage from Africa. They secreted runaways in graveyards, in coffins.

  But an irony came into being within the play of populations, the irony of sweet-tasting power that the political firebrand began to enjoy in himself as he roasted his followers.

  Picture him dining now on the fish in Jonah’s stomach: fish reserved for dignitaries in the banqueting hall.

  ‘What more intimate picture may I paint,’ said the Jester Mr Mageye, ‘than to give Anansi access to his master’s delicacies, stomach, temple? They are apparently equal now in the sight of the state. It’s a figure of speech, mind you. Nothing sexual. I’m talking, remember, about populations that these archetypal tricksters represent, the epic embodiment of populations in crisis. Not individual indulgences. We know little of the collective, hidden ambivalences within mixed or heterogeneous societies, the inner trophies that one group may secure from another, the haunting sense of loss or retention of privilege or power, the greed, the longings, the ruses, the strategies, behind the façade of establishments.

  ‘When Anansi becomes as much a ruling appetite – in the banqueting hall of history – as the former missionary or ruler or master with whom he contended – then the establishment and the trickster are equals. Listen, Francisco, to what Jonah is now saying to Deacon.’

  ‘There is some consolation,’ Jonah said slowly, ‘in the thought that – as the end of my mission approaches – blacks and whites are equals. I have converted Anansi, have I not, to cast aside Doubt. He can trust me. His growing appetite for the good things of the world may kill not only revolutionary originality but bitterness at the injustices of the past. We are equals now, black and white.’

  He knew he was lying in Deacon’s teeth. Deacon wanted to say: ‘You are a bloody liar, Jonah,’ but he kept silent.

  Suddenly I was confronted by the ramifications of the Trickster in Mr Mageye’s all-inclusive film. I was down here in the hall looking at Deacon, looking at myself acting up there. Was it Deacon’s ghost up there, or was it me feeding upon his lips as he stifled his words?

  Was it politic to sustain a traffic in lies?

  I touched my flesh-and-blood Mask in order to sift the power of lies within the art of the Camera, lies that bear on Conscience, the trickster-Capacity of Conscience to question itself openly (yet hide itself all the more effectively), to spy itself in the speaking yet self-gagging roles that it plays in Aboriginal, archetypal theatre.

  How integral is the lie in every evolution of collective theatre to know the truth yet kill it?

  Jonah was lying to Deacon. Deacon accepted – or appeared to accept – the lie out of political necessity or fear. I was masked in Deacon in watching myself on the screen. Not myself! I had no desire to lie. Did the screen lie then? Or did I lie? Who am I? Where am I in a mass-media reductive age that Mr Mageye seeks to illumine and transform through the cellular chemistry of interwoven spectralities in others built into unique dialogue and response in oneself?

  My head was spinning but I kept the Mask firmly in place as Mr Mageye’s portrayals continued to unroll down here in the banqueting hall and up there
on the screen.

  ‘It’s a question of pride,’ said Jonah. ‘Pride in God’s will. I must win, Deacon, don’t you see? At all costs. Nothing counts but winning. Even if I have to drag Jonestown into the grave. I must teach Anansi to forget. Anansi populations must fuse into eternity. Eternity is a realm of forgetfulness. I shall persuade my people here in Jonestown to eat or drink whatever I dish out. Poison is palatable when it is braced with projected dominion over all species in a coming paradise or eternity when we shall be millionaires in devouring the planet. Not only doomed fish but doomed species of all sorts. It’s not just cyanide in Coca-Cola or milk or champagne or whatever. It’s the conquest of the lower orders. Don’t you see, Deacon?’

  Deacon wanted to shout NO but he lied to himself and nodded. He pretended all was well but he knew he would have to break the pact and shoot Jones on the Day of the Dead. Perhaps not before but certainly then. He would strengthen his fingers on the trigger by slicing mine off to assist his. Thus he would generate in me the sensation that when he fell under the Cave of the Moon I would shoulder his ambivalent, angelic, ruthless Mask and begin to play him up there in the sky or screen and down here in the soil of the banqueting hall.

  The troubling dimensions of the lie were as pertinent as celestial mathematics. Mr Mageye knew that the self-confessional, self-judgemental arts of the Trickster were essential in laying bare a fallen, perpetually falling humanity. He prodded Deacon – as he swung in the sky between heaven and earth and under the Cave of the Moon – to make visible the Virgin Goddess Kali from whom sprang a multitude of arms that were reminiscent of the cosmic Spider.

  ‘A most challenging aspect of my film this is,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Look! There she is! A kind of lightning dance instigated by an angel.’ He eyed me with his quizzical humour. Was I sufficiently paranoid (as brilliant actors need to be) to believe that I – in the Mask of Deacon – had invoked the slow-motion, lightning-shawled dance of Kali in my Dream-book embrace of the peasant Virgin Marie? The question staggered me in the dance, for my Dream-book was more real than the real world.

  ‘As you see, Francisco,’ Mr Mageye continued, ‘Kali dances with you. A dread Goddess. But do not fear. She has conscripted you as another lame – shall I say inoffensive? – giant. She wheels you around with Legba and Siva. But look …’ he paused. I was horrified at what I now saw. Kali was also wheeling in her numerous arms strangled female infants.

  ‘Good God,’ I cried. ‘It’s impossible. She is the guardian of the Virgin.’

  ‘She is,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘We all are, aren’t we? Up and down streets and highways and in the byways – in planes that sail in the sky, in trains, in buses, in saloons, in brothels for that matter – the Virgin resides protected in someone’s handbag or pocket or wallet. Is it superstition, or is it a promise of welfare, or is it an insurance? Yes, we are all guardians … But economic necessity is a plague. Hell is everywhere around us despite heaven. Kali kills out of brutal economic necessity. The male child is privileged, the female is sometimes a liability. I know it’s hideously perverse. Kali is associated with the guardianship of the Virgin yet kills infant females! It’s a bleak parable, civilization fuels Kali, civilization sustains her, when economic necessity incorporates violence into itself and Love, the Virgin’s Love, becomes an ornament. The chasm between necessity and love needs to be bridged ceaselessly … Unless it is bridged the male child freezes into stone, the saviour-archetype is blunted. All this runs deeper than gender. Archetypes run deeper than gender. Their manifestation is partial at the best of times. We need to read them in their broken fabric, we need to read differently. Remember Herod slew male infants in panic and cold-hearted self-interest at the thought of the coming of a saviour that might shake the walls of his kingdom. When one reads reality differently from slavish alignment to literal frame or code, when one reads by way of indirections that diverge from formula or frame, by way of weighing another text (a hidden text) in a given text, then the privileged male discloses privilege as a form of perversity, a trauma, that cracks open to hint at the saviour-archetype dressed in partialities and biases that civilization should never absolutize or it is forever trapped in the venom of history.

  ‘Likewise the pathetic female infant on Kali’s wheel may still break the shell of brute economic necessity to reveal the Virgin-archetype on the Cross of the Wheel. The chasm between gender, male and female, is momentarily bridged …’

  I listened silently and was nudged by my Dream-book into contemplating American Indian peoples that were decimated since the Conquest. Was this decimation driven by brute economic necessity?

  ‘God help children if we succumb to the tyranny of gender and expunge mixed origins in the body of the archetype, saviour-archetype, Virgin-archetype.’

  ‘Children? What children, Deacon?’ Jones demanded.

  Jonah Jones was a naturalist in accepting changeless vice, changeless virtue, the naturalism of the charismatic pulpit, the charismatic preacher pledged to incorrigible eternity.

  He seemed oblivious of the cosmic Spider (the Carnival attire of a Child) on the dining-room coffin. He seemed oblivious of its subtle Carnival metamorphoses as it hopped on the floor and crept out of the room onto the riverbank and into the fabric of Mr Mageye’s Camera. Its eyes gleamed, light-year eyes within the cradle of humanity in the soil of the Earth; light-year eyes sensitive all at once in a peculiar and unexpected way to the wheeling presence of Kali. I felt my phantom fingers move on my hand that had been despoiled by Deacon’s bullet on the Day of the Dead even though they were alive now, it seemed, in the cosmic Spider.

  Jones’s addiction to changelessness made him oblivious of such sensitivity attuned to a changing nature of natures within myself and within a cosmic Child or saviour-archetype or Spider quest in the stars and upon the Earth.

  The Spider knew how unprepossesing it was, it knew the terror it could infuse into others. He (or It) knew it had edged itself into the lineaments of the nightmare guardians of the Virgin. But, on the other hand, its attunement to the mystical technology of the Gods, exercised in my phantom fingers, gave it a grasp or hold on the Virgin’s unconditional love …

  Outcast from heaven it seemed to be (yet so was Prometheus). It dined at its master’s table in the rafter of coffins, it instigated worms and fishes to transmute themselves into stars beside the Scorpion signature of lightning that breaks the door of the tomb.

  I could scarcely believe the multi-layered, redistributive focus of Carnival which I dreamt or thought or visualized in my Dream-book. Spider-metamorphosis enveloped the cradle and the grave and a resurrection of consciousness through the door of space, a resurrection steeped in caveats, bitter counsels not to be deceived by lies (an age of lies) even when nature appears to change, when human nature in animal natures appears to change, to acquire attunement to a redemptive, evolutionary capacity within a universal creation.

  There was craft, there was daemonic, self-mocking humour in the Spider’s Eye, Spidery ape of Christ, ape of Prometheus. And so – in becoming aware of lies as I gazed into the depths of cosmic Tricksters reflected in a Child’s masquerade in the womb of space, Spider Carnival masquerade in earth and in heaven – I was seized with sorrow, with a conviction of truth one must pursue within the innermost recesses of the living Word.

  I was suddenly aware of the magnetic charm and beauty of the Predator born less of the Virgin and more from the shamanic lore of Tricksters. The Spider itself was unprepossessing and without apparent beauty. Except for his brilliant Eye that mirrored the door of the tomb split asunder by lightning.

  I looked up suddenly as though lightning indeed had flashed through counterpointed immovable and movable doors of the Void. LEAP … LEAP … But I held my ground in fear of counterpointed imageries and spaces, orchestrated paradox … I was fearful still of my capacity to leap backwards/forwards in space and time.

  I looked up at Mr Mageye’s Cinema where I was playing the role of Deacon (Masked actor Bone as D
eacon’s ghost-flesh on the screen). I was confronting Jonah in the whale of the sun upon the screen or stage.

  A terrifying role to play, terrifying Mask to wear on my sculpted yet frail shoulders. Was Deacon satisfied with my performance? Was he pleased with my split performance as I sat in the banqueting hall and looked up at myself/himself up there in space, in the Void of cinematic heaven?

  Such conflict of conscience on my part (which led me to breach or cancel the pact with Jones), such conflict in Deacon’s psyche (which led him to duel on the Moon with Titan Jonah) did not appear to arouse Jonah Jones’s apprehensions. He was firm in his allegiance to unchanged natures since time began, in his mind, its slippage into eternity.

  As such he was less tormented – if at all – by the lie that I had perceived in the perversity of saviours which haunted the womb of space. How to accept responsibility – I asked myself – for a lie (an age of lies), which taints creation, yet submit oneself to the trial and judgement of truth one still (however precariously) embodies …?

  I sat and dined now under the constellation of Trickster-Prometheus in the banqueting hall as if a coffin had been raised over my head from which I would awaken, or had awakened, when I ascended from the Nether World.

  Prometheus, quite rightly, broke a pact with the Titan of eternity. But in so doing – out of fear perhaps (fear such as I had felt when I broke with Jonah Jones) – he invoked the lie in the Trickster’s heart. Deacon and I had lied to Jones on the eve of the holocaust. We had pretended to be one with him when we dined … Prometheus lied to cover his rebellion. He lied in order to conceal himself, in order to plot. Violence was born out of apparent necessity, necessary rebellion, necessary lies. Why did he lie? Why had he not rebuked the Titan openly and inscribed his heart as a token of life in outer space, a token of therapeutic angelic blood to revive creative spirit in a fallen, human race? He saw his chance to rule. That was it! He would rule with the gift of fire though fire was an incalculable element and from its ash would spring birds of prey and predators and all the extraordinary – sometimes nightmare – guardians of unconditional love; from its ash would spring the Predator, the magnetic beauty and charm of the Predator clothed in bars of shadow and fire. So was the Predator born in the vein of species, in the wake of a lie which would convert fire into ammunition and self-injury for humanity. The stress of counterpoint appeared within an inimitable haven (hoped for, longed-for) between fire and fire, therapeutic heart of fire and injurious ammunition of fire that humanity employs. A chastened and chastening music was born (within Love itself) whose sublimity, whose toppling precipice of sound was possessed of harmony and complaint, earthquake, lightning, storm, concordance, dissonance.