Two Guyanese writers, Wilson Harris, in a poetic narrative in 1996, and Fred D’Aguiar, in a narrative poem in 1998, approach the tragedy that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, when Jim Jones and his followers of the People’s Temple committed mass suicide. Both express their concerns for the victims of history, taking Jonestown as a wider allegory, and yet both, in their very allusiveness, lay themselves open to the charge that the rights to participation in a work of fiction are only open to a particular type of elite. The paper will consider whether, on the evidence of these two works, the charges for giving the voiceless a voice might be too high.