Between the plot and plantation: Parahuman ecologies in Fred D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise

Abstract

In this article I argue that Children of Paradise (2014), Fred D’Aguiar’s novelization of the final months of Jonestown, draws different spatializations of political oppression together and situates critique and resistance to that oppression in a parahuman ecology, a concept that develops out of a combination of vital materialist discourse and the writings of Wilson Harris and Édouard Glissant. Jonestown is the name popularly given to the Peoples Temple, an American cult led by Jim Jones that ended in a horrific mass suicide event in the Guyanese rainforest in 1978. Unlike previous narratives and studies on the group, the Jonestown of Children of Paradise takes on the contours of the Caribbean plantation and plot in its obsessive and oppressive control over the lives and labours of its population and its narrative of liberation from and resistance to external forces. Critique and resistance to these power structures emerge at the intersection of politics and ecology to produce an ecologically-inflected parahuman community. This community is represented in particular by the unusually compassionate relationship that develops between Adam, a silverback gorilla caged at the centre of Jonestown’s commune space, and Trina, a young girl who lives in the commune with her mother. As Adam and Trina engage each other and their relationship with the rainforest more intensely, they create a potentially alternative mode of living for those wishing to escape the confines of the commune and, symbolically, the horrors of the plantation.