The Poetics of Traumatic Remembering: Fred D’Aguiar’s 'Bill of Rights'

This essay focuses on how Fred D’Aguiar’s long narrative poem Bill of Rights (1998) engages with the Jonestown massacre in terms of a transcultural crisis of memorialisation. Bill of Rights explores Aby Warburg’s idea of a cultural subconscious – a form of latent cultural memory repository in which collective traumas become part of a collective, psychic substratum, and lay dormant below the threshold of consciousness. The poetic account of the lyric I – a survivor of the murder-suicide of over 900 followers of cultleader Jim Jones, which took place in the jungle enclave of Jonestown on 18th November 1978 – follows the complex dialectics of transcultural remembrance and oblivion and casts light on how a personal, individual trauma connects with a multi tude of other traumas related to a global history of slavery, colonialism, and oppression.