Annie Dawid recently wrote about White Nights, Black Paradise. Check it out here:
In answer to Jim Jones’ resonating question, Sikivu Hutchinson has written a novel that defiantly shouts Yes! White Nights, Black Paradise frames Peoples Temple and Jonestown within an African-American perspective, something which no published novel has yet managed. Of the handful of literary novels on the subject, the two works closest to it – Jonestown (1996) by Wilson Harris and Children of Paradise by Fred d’Aguiar (2015) – were written by Guyanese men. “Coming from the vantage point of a Black woman writer, in a field – Jonestown scholarship and fiction – where African American feminist analyses are few, I have sought to creatively illuminate (and problematize) what is still a turbulent and evolving historical record and signal event in the ‘psychic space’ of African American migrations,” writes Hutchinson in her author’s note to the 354-page fiction.
