Stories from Jonestown by Leigh Fondakowski (review)

Stories from Jonestown joins a large and growing body of work documenting the work of Jim Jones, the origins and history of the Peoples Temple, and the tragic events in Jonestown, Guyana. The book chronicles the research and interviews that led to the creation of the play The People’s Temple which opened at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2005. Calling the book “an extension of the life of the play,” author Leigh Fondakowski uses this narrative form to more explicitly explain why this project came to be and how it adds a necessary perspective to memory of Jonestown. Rather than ending the story with the events of November 18, 1978, Fondakowski begins on November 19 and attempts to tell the story of some of the eighty members who were in Guyana, and the thousands still in California, survivors whose experiences cannot be summed up with the labels “murders-victims-cultists” so rampant in other portrayals of this community. Intermixing interview transcriptions with narrative describing the particular difficulties in reaching and communicating with a broad spectrum of survivors, Fondakowski gradually reveals her argument through her methodology. Not brainwashed cultists or hopeless victims, the interviewees in Stories from Jonestown are unified in their initial attraction to Jones’ progressive politics and the tensions and complexities with which they remember the past and reckon with the pain, regret, guilt, anger, embarrassment, and even fondness Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple engender. Particularly telling among these interviewees are Stephan Jones—Jim Jones’ adopted son who expresses anger towards his father intermixed with a desire to humanize him in the public imagination and extreme guilt for not returning to Jonestown upon hearing of the shootings that would eventually lead to the mass deaths. Ex-member Debby Layton’s desire to be paid as a consultant to the project highlights the competing claims to legitimacy among survivors. The difficulty finding African American survivors willing to be interviewed speaks to the continued aura of shame and embarrassment resulting from the events. Stories of second generation survivors such as Michael Briggs show the lingering effects: sexually abused by Jones as a child, Briggs now serves life in prison for a violent crime. Interwoven throughout these interviews are allusions to potential conspiracies and government negligence in interacting with the group during its active period and dealing with the dead and survivors in the aftermath. Throughout the book, interwoven into the production of the play, The People’s Temple, and highlighted in an appendix listing names of the dead, Fondakowski attempts to humanize and name those who died and complexify the image of those who survived. As she concludes, “The process of surviving seems to me one of reclaiming their agency, not of denying it” (321). The way forward, then, is to unearth, talk, and reckon with the path and not run away from it. Fondakowski’s book is an intriguing, engaging, and very human attempt to do just that.