Guyana. Elise Turcotte

Her mother and grandmother whispered in the kitchen; it was as if evil spirits had taken hold of them since her cousin’s death, and she would have liked to drive them out by burning jacaranda leaves in the hammock on the little veranda. The world around her had become so violent that she couldn’t even go to the market without a sense of foreboding. She went out anyway, breaking all the family rules; in any case, soon enough she would be leaving forever. She had said as much to her friend Tamala, whose radio-host father had been assassinated for speaking out in support of the opposition. She had told her cousin John, her little sisters Aria and Lydie, her brother Légende, who knew how to keep a secret when he had to, and finally her parents, who had approved, much to her surprise. Then she told the ghost of her cousin Sattie, who had been raped and strangled, her body found pitching like a log on the shores of the Demerara River.

      The country invited tragedy. The words and facts arranged themselves naturally from this idea I had of it. Death herself provided the backdrop to my story. The year Kimi turned eleven was the year of the mass suicide in Jonestown. This was one of the first documents I came across that morning when I entered the word Guyana in the library database. I remembered the date – November 18, 1978 – and the days that followed, when we saw images of all the bodies lying next to one another, arms interlaced, most of them facing the ground. It was fourteen years ago; I was seventeen at the time, and it was a tragedy that marked me. And yet, up till now, I had chosen to ignore the fact that the country Kimi came from was also the country where Jim Jones had chosen to build his village in the jungle, where he later ordered the suicide of the members of his cult. That said, at the time, people talked about Jonestown and the commune, not Guyana. The words mass suicide were big and bold on the front pages of all the papers, words that wiped out all the rest. But the bodies lying face down did not suggest suicide. No one wants to die face-down in the mud. You would want to be looking up at the sky, wouldn’t you? You would want to feel completely free, letting your soul float up to the heavens as the poison starts to numb your limbs. I clearly remember a journalist pointing out a table where you could see vials of tranquilizers, potassium cyanide and cups of grape juice. I remembered the women’s clothes, the leader’s voice. I have always been sensitive to details: the numbers, the rhythm, the vibration of things. We learned later that 913 cult members were dead; apparently many of them had received an injection between the shoulders or on the back of the arm, and others were killed by bullets and arrows. We learned that they had found preparations for birthday celebrations in some of the houses, that dissident members were brutally assassinated when they tried to escape into the jungle, and so it was almost certain that this had been a mass murder, not a mass suicide. The line between the two is sometimes thin. Regardless, that night, I saw that the two events, Kimi’s death and the Jonestown tragedy, belonged to the same slice of reality, a slice where in just a few minutes, years of confusion and lies can rush headlong into the void. This was also intermingled with the death wish that had marred my own entry into adulthood. So Kimi’s death may have brought me back to the start of everything. But I wasn’t ready to look that far yet.

      Hundreds of bodies lying on their stomachs: at that point the image was strong enough for me to taste earth in my mouth again. Young Kimi had no doubt seen the news on television too. She could imagine the lives of all those people held prisoner in the thick, hostile equatorial forest. The rainforest: was that why Jim Jones had chosen her country? An infernal forest, but virgin, perfect for recreating utopia and indoctrinating followers. Forbes Burnham’s authoritarian regime had given Jim Jones permission to settle in the jungle and found a commune there, and not for no reason. Jim Jones was connected to a number of American political figures. Both led a sort of dictatorship of chaos with an iron hand. Lies, weakness and misery were what gave them their hold over people’s lives.

      Had Kimi, like me, been caught up in the news?

      I wanted to think so.

      The Guyanese army discovered the bodies that had been rotting in the jungle for three days. Guyanese police officers and soldiers had taken part in searches through the jungle to find the fugitives: perhaps one of her uncles, a cousin, a friend of her father’s?

      Rumours must have made the rounds of the towns and villages.

      No doubt the smell of death hovered for a long time over the dusty earth and near the muddy rivers.

      No doubt Kimi had smelled it.

      No doubt the cries of the murdered children echoed as far as Georgetown before coming back to disappear completely through the grey roots of the mangrove trees on the coast.

      It was almost morning. In a day and a half, Kimi, now dead, was closer to me than she had ever been in life. I knew she wouldn’t leave me for a while. If I stayed rooted in the world of facts, they told me that there were over nine hundred victims, and then a single woman hanging from the end of a rope. If I lifted off from reality, I could see Kimi in the schoolyard with the other girls. I could see the unbelieving looks on their faces. And then holding hands to brave the oncoming current, and then something else, and something worse still, and then leaving for the cold country where a better life stamped its feet in the blackened snow. I’ve always thought you can connect the most disparate of events if you try hard enough, if you find the silver link that joins one motive to another. A chain of events, or of accidents: that’s what life is. A charm bracelet that we piece together, sometimes at the end, just when everything has stopped shining.

      I heard Philippe moving in his sleep.

      He had made such an effort yesterday. His powers of concentration far surpassed those of the other children. It was almost disturbing. It was as if his thoughts alone were moving the pieces on the chessboard. The walls turned into flaming curtains, and the other children simply disappeared. And then they returned. Philippe finally raised his head and smiled at me.

      I pushed his bedroom door open to look at him. I couldn’t go in; I wasn’t allowed. If I could have, I would have lain down next to him. I would have recalled his early childhood, when Rudi was still with us. But I couldn’t do that to him, and I closed the door carefully so as not to make a sound, so as not to leave any evidence of my transgression, knowing that he would find evidence, a millimetre opening of the door that would be a topic of discussion tomorrow. I smiled, thinking he was capable of making a mark on the floor, that he would be right at any rate, and that the strongest evidence, as he said, was within me, and then I went back to Kimi.