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 Jonestownmassacre in terms of a transcultural crisis of memorialisation. Bill of Rights explores Aby Warburg’s idea of a culturalsubconscious – 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 – asurvivor of the murder-suicide of over 900 followers of cultleader Jim Jones, which took place in the jungle enclave ofJonestown on 18th November 1978 – follows the complex dialectics of transcultural remembrance and oblivion andcasts light on how a personal, individual trauma connects with a multi tude of other traumas related to a global historyof slavery, colonialism, and oppression.