He couldn’t say. It was as Martin Carter had said: Cheddi had had no literary culture, nothing that would have helped him to see and understand, and put things in their place. He had simply taken things as they had come.
He had had to work while he studied at Howard; after two years he had won a scholarship to Northwestern near Chicago. He had many stories of his American time; and Janet—in black slacks and a flowered blouse on this holiday afternoon, her hair thick and quite golden—prompted him in those stories. In Washington he had worked in a pawn shop used by blacks. He worked there as a tailor (a half-skill he had picked up in Guyana), earning twenty-five cents an hour for mending unredeemed clothes, which were then put up for sale. In Chicago he had run an elevator at night.
He said, “West Indians always did better than American blacks because of their better background, and they were looked upon with some resentment. But within that all were treated as blacks. Indians had a higher kind of social recognition. In Washington there were cinemas where blacks couldn’t go but I could. But I never went, because I didn’t feel different from the blacks. I had that same feeling of being hemmed in, that same feeling of inferiority. I used to go to the poorer cinema where there was literally a partition between white and black. On one side black, the other side white. I used to go and sit with the blacks.”
Near the end of his time, during a checkup at Northwestern, a spot was found on his lung, and he was sent to a sanitarium. “There were no drugs for tuberculosis in those days. The cure was just to sit in the cold air. The sanitarium was made up of small cottages, and two-thirds of the walls were of wire mesh. In the sanitarium you had to walk slowly, do everything in a measured way. I was nearly penniless at the time, and the sanitarium lady gave me a cut rate.” After six months the spot disappeared; and there was some question then whether there had been an infection at all. Perhaps, after the strain of six years of America, he had needed only to withdraw and rest and calm down.
Janet went and made the tea, and brought it out with biscuits, “cookies”—the word unusual in Guyana, and in this house like a remnant of a far-off culture.
In this tea interlude she talked of what I had written about her nearly thirty years before.
“People remembered two details mainly. You wouldn’t believe. The first was that I painted my toenails.”
I had forgotten that, forgotten the fact, forgotten that I had written it.
“I don’t know why that should have caused such interest,” she said. “Everybody wore painted toenails then.”
“Everybody,” Cheddi said.
She said, “I looked at the book just the other day. And the other thing you mentioned that people talked about—I checked that, too—was the book I was reading.”
I had forgotten that as well.
“It was Colette. The Vagabond.”
That would have made an impression: the boastfulness and shallow sensual vanities of Colette, in a setting so removed: muddy Guyanese rivers, old river steamers. And then, in a distant reach of my mind, the two details together did bring back an impression, rather than an idea, of a trip in the interior with Janet Jagan, when she was minister of health.
She said, “I looked for it among my books the other day. I don’t think I have it anymore.”
The house, with its books and family pictures, felt calm. Thinking of that, thinking of the Jagan children settled abroad, and thinking of the journey that had begun in 1936, I wondered whether it couldn’t be said that Cheddi Jagan, in an essential personal way, had been a success.
Janet made a sound of disbelief.
But Cheddi said, “I do, in the sense of what we have been able to achieve, and in the sense of recognition. Even my enemies recognize our integrity in politics.”
Janet said, “A lot of his satisfaction is his writing. He likes to write. He likes to lecture. Cheddi’s an optimist.” She told a story of a boating moment in Trinidad. Their outboard motor had failed; the current was driving their boat towards rocks and a cliff. She had seen no hope, but Cheddi had remained lucid, working at the engine, and had got it going.
He said, “Maybe it’s a virus in the blood, a political virus. And Janet has kept me on the moral path—politically.”
She said, “It’s nice to get a pat on the back.”
He said, “She belonged to the first generation of American rebels.” She made a questioning sound, and he explained: “The second generation came during Vietnam.”
She said she remembered that when she was at Wayne State University in Detroit she made an effort to be friendly to black people and Chinese. “There was some urge within me to reach out to those groups.”
Her own relationship with Cheddi caused trouble in her family.
She said, with something like sadness, “Cheddi never met my father.”
I asked her, “Did you feel you were being brave or principled?”
“I was just young.”
Her mother came out to Guyana once. She got to know Cheddi and one day she told Janet that she liked him. “Of course,” Janet said, speaking of her mother’s later attitude to Cheddi, “it helped being premier.” She pronounced the word in the American way, stressing the second syllable. Things were always easier with her brother. “But I’ll tell you this. The picture of me my brother has up is one where I am with Princess Margaret.” And she gave her nervous half-laugh.
I had up to then felt that worldly position hadn’t really mattered to her. Now I thought that she was possibly less stoical than Cheddi, that there was a melancholy in her that the long dedication and struggle, the enduring of a calamity in the country, had not ended with success, as old-fashioned morality and narrative might have dictated; that it had ended badly, in a general dissolution of the cause. But I didn’t feel the matter could be pressed.
IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY Cheddi Jagan gives two chapters, twenty-five pages, to the first twenty-five years of his life, up to his return to Guyana from the United States. The details are clear: everything is fairly laid out, without false stresses; the narrative is fast. But the narrative is also dense; the reader cannot keep it all in his head; he cannot (any more than the writer can) make all the connections. The early chapters are like the early chapters of Gandhi’s autobiography, especially those that deal with Gandhi’s time as a student in London; and the similarity has to do with the fact that both men, of Indian and Hindu background (and separated by only fifty years), are coming to terms, in their different ways, with an experience which, as it occurred, they were far from understanding. Both men write so transparently of their early days that their words can be studied again and again.
In Jagan’s book, for instance, there is a strange paragraph about his difficulties of “identification” when he went back to Guyana. “There was no political party … For a while I played cricket, and soon after became addicted to bridge playing. I spent hours and hours at bridge and read every publication on the subject. But this was in no way a satisfaction … I wanted to identify myself with the real hard world around me.”
I talked about this with Martin Carter. He knew the Jagan book, but the theme of bridge playing—strangely juxtaposed to a search for identification—was something he had missed. He said that bridge would have been useful to Cheddi Jagan at that time, filling up an evening and giving an illusion of a social life.
But when I next met Cheddi Jagan, at Freedom House, and put the point to him, he said that the identification he was looking for was political; and this was difficult for him in 1943, because he had become more complicated than the colony. To the plantation background he had added his knowledge of Gandhi and Nehru and the Indian freedom struggle; and there was also his American radicalization, his ideas about the War of Independence, and about Roosevelt (a supporter of Indian independence) and the New Deal. The games of bridge he had begun to play in Guyana were “recreation”; he played with dedication because that was his way. “Whatever I do, I do very intensely.” (And indeed, when I looked at the autobio
graphy later, I saw that once in Chicago he had tried seriously—like his father in Guyana—to make money by betting, and had even read books like How to Win the Races.)
He said, “There has always been a division between Janet and me. At the end of the day she can drop everything and read a novel. I take my work home.”
Although he had been radicalized in the United States, it wasn’t until he got back to Guyana that he read Marxist literature. “It was Janet who, when she came here in 1943, brought me Little Lenin Library books—little tracts, pamphlets. It was the first time I read Marxist literature. And then—as with the bridge books—I began reading Marxist books like mad. I read Das Kapital after the Little Lenin series. And that helped me to have a total understanding of the development of society. Until then, all the various struggles—Indians, blacks, the American people—had been disjointed experiences. To put it in a way that was totally related to a socioeconomic system came from the reading of Marxist literature. For instance, the woman question was dealt with in Engels’s book, The Origin of the Family. The Marxist theory of surplus value brought a totally new understanding of the struggle of the working class—not only that they were exploited, but how they were exploited.
“It was exciting to me, an intellectual excitement, because a whole new world opened to me, a total understanding of the world, which then made coherent all my previous experiences in America. Discrimination—if you don’t see the system as a whole, you see discrimination only.”
This new way of seeing also dealt with his Indian past. “The Indian culture practises which I was accustomed to as a boy—I was completely divorced from that in America. So I was then more like Nehru in terms of culture. As a student in America my life was patterned on Gandhi and Nehru. Gandhi was a fighter. Nehru too. These things moulded me.”
Perhaps he was also moulded, more than he knew or could acknowledge, by something in his Hindu caste background. It is there, in the autobiography. When he went to Georgetown as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, he lodged with various Hindu families. He couldn’t pay much. The first family treated him as a servant: they wanted him to go to the market, wash the car, and even—Queen’s College student though he was—to cut grass for the goats. The family he changed to was worse. They were of the kshatriya or warrior caste, just below the brahmin. One of the daughters had married a brahmin, and the family was anxious to live up to the high connection. They didn’t want Cheddi to sleep on a bed in their house; they required him to sleep on the floor, because the Jagans were of the kurmi caste, a caste of cultivators.
CHEDDI JAGAN says in his book that he had heard about caste problems only from his mother. But, in fact, as a caste, the kurmis are interesting. The gazetteers, or handbooks, that the British compiled for various Indian districts in the last century and this, speak not only of the agricultural skill and diligence of the kurmis, but also of their caste combativeness. The kurmis of some districts insist that they are not a low caste. They say they are of Rajput origin, and kshatriyas. Now, everything said about Cheddi Jagan’s father stresses his physical presence; and the photograph I saw of him that morning in Freedom House showed a man with a proud Rajput moustache—the moustache that had made such an impression on Martin Carter.
To be an Indian and a kurmi in Guyana was to be “hemmed in” in a double way, even before the challenges of the United States. All of this hemming-in the Marxist illumination abolished, made universal and abstract. And it might be said that Cheddi Jagan, as the son of his father, was ready for such an illumination.
Cheddi Jagan said, “This discovery of the class struggle, and society divided into classes—all came from my Marxist reading. My background gave me a class bias. To me the class issue was fundamental.”
He met Janet in 1942 or early in 1943. “Just after I came out of the sanitarium. I met her at a party of a mutual friend. Her family had fallen into poverty during the Depression, and then they quickly came out of that to have a middle-class status. At Wayne University she identified with minorities. Not only was she strikingly beautiful, we had the same interests, interests in the underdog. We got on immediately. She gave up her undergrad work and began to study as a nurse because she wanted to serve in the war. And that was when we met—she was a student nurse.”
Janet took up the story a little while later, after Cheddi had left his office for a meeting. We sat in the small outer room of Cheddi’s office, with the low easy chairs. She spoke slowly, contemplatively.
“My best friend—a girl I grew up with in Chicago, Helen—had a farewell party, and Cheddi was there. He was dating one of Helen’s sisters. He was very handsome, of course. There wasn’t anything political. It was just a boy-girl story.”
I asked her about her first impressions of Guyana.
“It was a bit of a culture shock. It was during the war. I came on a seaplane. We landed on the Demerara River, and we went straight to Port Mourant. It was a shock. They didn’t know what the hell to do with me. I should have been with the women, but they put me in a chair in the living room with the men. The women sat on the floor in the kitchen. I thought they would be resentful. I thought they would have liked Cheddi to marry an Indian girl of high status. I thought they missed the fuss of the wedding and so on.
“I’ll tell you a funny thing. We wanted to give Indrani, Cheddi’s eldest sister, a good education. So I went to Bishop’s”—the leading girls’ school in Georgetown—“and spoke to the headmistress—she was English, white—and I told her I wanted to bring my sister-in-law from Berbice. And she said okay—if she had the qualifications. And when I took Indrani there, the headmistress was shocked. She was expecting my sister-in-law to be white, and she said no. So Indrani didn’t get in. She got into Central High School, and eventually she went to England and studied nursing. There are now about six dentists in the Jagan family, and three optometrists. That’s a good profession for women; that’s one they can handle.”
I asked her, thinking of the life that had begun for her in 1943, “Have you enjoyed it all?”
“Not all of it.” She gave her nervous, young-sounding laugh. “Some of it has been very painful. So many awful things happened that I find forgetfulness one of the ways of survival. In the 1960s it was terrible. There was a period when I couldn’t go out, couldn’t go to a cinema, restaurant, couldn’t do anything in public. I was the scapegoat. I don’t have Cheddi’s temperament. I tend to be a bit gloomy.
“But I think it’s been an exciting life. It was interesting. Living in a different culture. They used to make up a lot of silly stories about me—aping Indians, wearing saris, a whole lot of stupidness. I haven’t tried to be what I am not. A lot of people tried to say that my political life depended on my being an Indian. I suppose a stranger in a land would be subject to all sorts of myths and caricatures.
“I get my best enjoyment working in newspapers. I don’t like the public-appearance part of politics. I evolved into a journalist. Being a woman in politics isn’t that easy.”
I wanted to know more about her background in the United States.
“Recently, my brother and I took a tour in Missouri. On my father’s side we’ve been in the US for most of the last century. We went and saw those graves in Moberly, Missouri. There was hardly any Jewish community there, and in the cemetery there was a teeny little section with stones that marked the Jewish graves there—mostly my family. On my mother’s side my grandparents migrated from Hungary and Romania in this century. So the world is made up of people who have migrated.”
And it was as though she was talking not only of the migrations of her ancestors to the United States, but also of the migration of the Indians to Guyana; of Cheddi’s grandmothers coming over with their small children from India on the sailing ship Elbe in 1901; of Cheddi’s journey to the United States in 1936; and of his journey back with her in 1943; the settling—half a resettling—of their children in the United States and Canada; and the migration, since the 1970s, of all those people of Guyana they
had hoped to bring the revolution to, people who had now taken their destinies in their own hands.
1991
A NOTE IN 2002. In 1992 the United States, which had encouraged the rigging of elections in Guyana since 1964, felt it could relent. Cheddi Jagan won the—unrigged—elections in October 199z and was president until his death in March 1997; he was seventy-eight. He was succeeded as president, after new elections, by Janet Jagan. She retired because of ill-health twenty months later, in August 1999.
Postscript: Our Universal
Civilization
The following address was given at the Manhattan Institute of New York.
I’VE GIVEN THIS TALK the title of Our Universal Civilization. It is a rather big title, and I am a little embarrassed by it. I feel I should explain how it came about. I have no unifying theory of things. To me situations and people are always specific, always of themselves. That is why one travels and writes: to find out. To work in the other way would be to know the answers before one knew the problems. That is a recognized way of working, I know, especially if one is a political or religious or racial missionary. But I would have found it hard.
That was why I thought, when this invitation to talk came, that it would be better for me to find out what kind of issues members of the Institute were interested in. Myron Magnet, a senior fellow of the Institute, was in England at the time. We talked on the telephone; and then, some days later, he sent me a handwritten list of questions. They were very serious questions, very important.
Are we—are communities—as strong only as our beliefs? Is it enough for beliefs or an ethical view to be passionately held? Does the passion give validity to the ethics? Are beliefs or ethical views arbitrary, or do they represent something essential in the cultures where they flourish?