The Writer and the World: Essays

  Georgetown, the capital, once one of the most beautiful wood-built cities of the world (with the great hardwood forests just a few miles inland), weathered and decayed. Over the run-down city there now rises, at the end of one of the principal avenues, an extraordinary, mocking monument of the Cooperative Republic: a giant African-like figure, long-armed and apparently dancing, with what looks like cabalistic emblems on its limbs. This figure of African re-awakening is said to honor Cuffy, the leader of a slave revolt in Guyana in 1763; but there are black people who believe that—whatever the sculptor intended—the figure was also connected with some kind of obeah working on behalf of Forbes Burnham, the Guyanese African leader. Mr. Burnham is believed to have, in the end, mixed his Marxism with obeah, and to have had an obeah consultant.

  IN THE GEORGETOWN Botanical Gardens—one of the many such gardens, of experiment and scholarship, established by the British in various parts of the empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—there is another, complementary monument of Mr. Burnham’s rule. It is the mausoleum that was put up for Mr. Burnham after his death in 1984. It is a spiderlike structure, with a low central pavilion with an outer colonnade of concrete brackets that look like spider’s legs. The intention was that the founder of the Cooperative Republic should be embalmed and displayed for ever, like Lenin; but something went wrong and the body decomposed before it could be treated.

  Through all of this—Marxism and racial tyranny, and economic death, and obeah—Cheddi Jagan has sat at his post, the leader of his party, always there, the possessor of a purer Marxist way, waiting to be called. His support has always come from the Indians, but he has never accepted that he is just a racial leader. In the hardest times of African oppression he has supported whatever legislation came up that could be seen as socialist or Marxist. So, to some, out of the very purity of his Marxist vision, he has conspired against both the interests of his supporters and his own political success.

  He is seventy-two now. With the disappearance of communism in Europe, and now that it no longer matters to the United States or Russia what happens in Guyana, the elections coming up may be free: and Cheddi Jagan may at last win. But times are now very hard indeed, with interest rates of 34 per cent, with the Guyana dollar worth an American cent, and with worthwhile foreign money staying away. All that a rational government could do is to reverse the nationalizations of the last twenty-five years. So that power, if it does come to Jagan, seems likely to end in failure, or the undoing of his legend.

  Cheddi Jagan’s party headquarters, Freedom House, is an old white wooden building in a bazaar-like street. I went to meet him there. He was grey, with glasses, but brisk. He was in a short-sleeved slate-blue safari suit. It revealed a certain fleshiness about his waist, but for a man of seventy-two he was in remarkable shape; and I felt that this was important to him as a politician.

  He said he had no illness: every year since 1966 he had had a check-up in one of the “socialist countries.” He spoke the now old-fashioned words without hesitation, so that in the little upstairs room of Freedom House, with the easy chairs and the coffee cups and all the papers, and with a view, through the open door, of the inner office with a framed black-and-white print of a drawing of Marx and Engels and Lenin, it was as though, whatever had happened outside, nothing had changed here.

  I wanted to know how he had endured since 1964, what internal resources he had drawn on, why he hadn’t given up, like many of his followers. He appeared not to understand the question. He spoke instead of the past, of the beginnings of his movement, and the great years from 1948 to 1964. He spoke with his old vigour, and in his academic, public-meeting way, ticking off points on his long fingers, and managing complete sentences that were full of facts and names and references.

  He telescoped the twenty-six years since 1964. Then, answering a question of his own, rather than one I had asked, he said that people had often asked him why he hadn’t gone in for “armed struggle.” He called to someone in the outer office to bring him some papers. When they were brought, he took one which dealt with the Guyanese deficit. This sheet, smudged and printed on both sides, had been rolled off an antiquated “duplicator,” and it had the acrid, oily smell of the duplicator ink. The graphs, not easy to read, showed that the Guyanese deficit had grown from 4.2 million Guyana dollars in 1965 to 1,309 million in 1988. The point he was making—and it was almost as though it was part of an old political strategy—was that it was better for the government to be undermined by its own stupendous deficit rather than by armed struggle, “which you were bound to lose.”

  Here his wife put her head through the door. Thirty years had passed since I had last seen her. I had remembered a woman of a great attractiveness. Thirty years, applied, as it were, all at once, had made her scarcely recognizable. At first I saw only the pale colour of her abundant hair, and the colours of her clothes, tan and black, foreign colors in the setting, not Guyanese or Caribbean colors. She was thinner in face, plumper and looser lower down, and she wore slacks; and her skin was looser. But then her eyes, her light voice (still American after nearly fifty years in Guyana), and her nervous laugh began to fit the younger person I had remembered.

  Her talk was of her two children and her five grandchildren. Her son, now forty, lived in Chicago, where his father had studied. Her daughter lived in Canada.

  In 1961 Janet Jagan’s reputation in Guyana was that of the foreign white woman revolutionary, an American Jewish radical. Now it was said that she had withdrawn. An old political enemy said, “She’s matronly, but don’t tell her I said so.”

  GUYANA was the first place I travelled to as a writer. It was part of a project on European colonies in the Caribbean and South America. I was twenty-eight. I was an artless traveller, and was soon to discover that, whatever the excitements of new landscapes and of being on the move, a journey didn’t necessarily result in a narrative on the page.

  As a political observer I was uncertain and diffident. I thought that in this kind of writing I had to take people on trust. I cast aside—as belonging to another form—my novelist’s doubts. So in my book I wrote more romantically than I actually felt about the African or black racial movement of the late 1950s. I allowed myself to see it as it was presented to me, as a kind of redemption. I suppressed my fears about its glibness and sentimentality, and its element of viciousness.

  And although I spent some time with the Jagans, formally and informally, in Georgetown and in various places in the country, when Cheddi Jagan was premier of the colony and Janet Jagan the minister of health, I never allowed myself to believe that their Marxism was more than a British Labour party kind of socialism.

  Forbes Burnham in 1961 was leader of the opposition. He was witty and mischievous, very black and smooth-skinned, already heavy, though still with the manner of the bright scholarship boy. He carried his character on his face and in his physique: but I never allowed myself to make anything of my feeling that Burnham was a sensualist and dangerous, someone at once wounded and spoilt, full of vengefulness.

  And I never thought—since I shared to some extent the background of both Burnham and Jagan—that these two Marxists between them would actually overturn the society. I saw what I thought I should see, what I was more comfortable seeing. In this I was like the people of Guyana.

  BARTIN CARTER was one of the poets of the Guyana awakening of the early 1950s. To him much of the confusion in Guyana came from a misuse or misunderstanding of language. A word like “socialism” came to Guyana without its history, without the varied meanings given it by people like Robert Owen and Bernard Shaw and William Morris. Everyone in Guyana had his own ideas of socialism, according to the books he had read; in this matter people did not always understand one another. Not everyone would think of socialism as an economic system. “A socialist would become simply a good man, a nice man. And that remained the idea about socialism for a long time among the general population here. Today that is different, because everything that has g
one wrong is associated with socialism.”

  And Martin Carter told this story: “Pandit Misir, a brahmin from the west bank of the Demerara River, was a member of Cheddi’s party. This was at a place called Vreed-en-Hoop—which, incidentally, had been owned by John Gladstone, father of William Ewart Gladstone, the British prime minister. Cheddi had been distributing booklets sent out by the British Communist party to its friends not only in Georgetown but in the Third World. Among the booklets was one called Capitalist Society. This would be before the elections in ’53.

  “There was a public meeting called by Cheddi on the west bank at which Pandit Misir functioned as the chairman. It was a huge crowd. And the pandit—he would have been between thirty-five and forty-five, but he looked much older—was in his top form because of the crowd and the presence of Cheddi Jagan.

  “He told the crowd that before he introduced Cheddi he would like to tell them something himself. Upon which he declared: ‘Dey got a t’ing called capitalist society. Um [it, in the local pidgin] like bird-vine. When um put hand ’pon you, um don’t let go.’ Bird-vine is a result of birds cleaning their beaks on trees after having eaten a certain type of fruit, the fruit of course of the bird-vine—it’s a well-known plant to people who live on the coast.

  “And that’s all that Pandit Misir said, and the crowd roared, because they understood that the pandit intended to convey to them that capitalist society was something oppressive. Which means that all the plantation experience had been summed up in the two words, ‘capitalist society.’ Pandit Misir himself didn’t know better. He was a slim, tall man. A passionate man, and what he said about bird-vine would convey much more than Cheddi’s disquisition on the theory of surplus value of Karl Marx.”

  So that—in this analysis—somewhere between the pidgin of Pandit Misir and the vague set phrases of Marxist lore, the realities of Guyana would have been distorted or lost. And one side of the terrible farce of the Cooperative Republic would have begun to be prepared.

  AN ASSOCIATE of Cheddi Jagan’s in the late 1940s was Sydney King, an African village schoolteacher. He broke away from the Jagan party in the mid-1950s. At some later stage he had an African transformation. “With the Indians glorying in their civilization, Africans here had a sense of self-pity.” And, as part of an “African naming movement” that he tried to get started, Sydney King gave himself the name of Eusi Kwayana.

  He said of Cheddi Jagan, “I think he had a cultural problem. If he had been a devout Hindu, even in his youth, he would have had a more workable, a more human, frame of reference. But, having rejected imperialism and all its works along with its culture, he got attached to another metropolis, which was the Soviet Union. He understood it as it presented itself. So everything he did had to be explained, in his own mind, in the culture of that other metropolis. Once he could do that he felt vindicated.

  “When Burnham began to introduce socialism from 1971 onwards, people in both races began to express dismay and said they wanted to hear nothing of it. This didn’t matter to Jagan. He made a statement at this time that the whole of Guyana had voted for socialism—part for him, part for Burnham. Though politics here were always racial.”

  At the time of the racial disturbances in 1964 Eusi Kwayana allied himself with Burnham. But then he broke away from Burnham as well.

  “Burnham actually introduced slave labour. He introduced compulsory labour at Plantation Hope, a coconut plantation on the east coast. And all you got was the right to buy scarce commodities. It wasn’t even given in lieu of labour as in the days of slavery; you had to buy the goods. You slaved for nothing on your day of leisure. At Plantation Hope he lorded it over the people. Riding on horseback, drinking, and entertaining his personal friends. He sent typists, office workers, professionals into the cane field in 1977, to break a sugar strike. They did not succeed. They messed up the cultivation. They knew nothing about it.”

  I said, “And yet the black people loved him.”

  “Loved him? That ended in the middle Seventies. He was well admired by the Guyanese when he got back from England in 1950, on account of his supposed scholarship, and oratory—which I found empty. I even knew Indo-Guyanese who liked to hear him talk. He was mostly the hero of the middle-class Africans. It was a long time before he was accepted by the rural Africans—they didn’t like lawyers.

  “His government became known to be corrupt in 1971. Everybody knew that the socialism of the government was a fraud. Some people feel that Burnham has proved that socialism meant leaders dominating people and filling their own pockets. And this has been coming out of Eastern Europe.

  “When Burnham died his estate was declared to be a million Guyana dollars. The Guyana dollar was then 4:30 to the US dollar. This left the population in stitches. People said that that million dollars was the money Burnham had in his pocket when he died. His death was a matter of relief, comedy in the streets. In Brooklyn they held parties. And there were two days’ holiday here, during which drinking places were not allowed to be open because the festivity would be too clear.

  “The day after the funeral I was walking in Georgetown, and everybody knew that the body had been removed by soldiers the night before. They had brought in embalmers and were working on his body in a funeral parlour in the city. I believe the embalmers had come from Moscow—the press said so. The population spat on this whole idea of embalming Burnham’s body. An African lady told me: ‘He dead. He must go dong.’ And they published in the press that they wanted to embalm him to preserve him indefinitely, and in the mausoleum he would be on permanent display. The body then stayed away for a year—a year of rumours, rumours about the body. Some people swear it was never embalmed, that it was too far gone to be embalmed, and that it was a wax image that was returned. From England, a famous studio—what’s it called?”

  “Madame Tussaud’s?”

  “People are saying it was Madame Tussaud’s work. Not Burnham’s body. They refer to him as the man who was buried twice.”

  Physically, Eusi Kwayana was not the kind of man I had imagined from his African name and restless political history. He had been a vegetarian for more than forty years, and he was thin, ascetic-looking, delicate. His long fingers made elegant gestures. In appearance he was like a religious figure from Byzantine art: long-faced, a high, arching forehead between two high side tufts of greyish-brown hair, sharp-nosed, with deep lines running from nose to chin and defining the chin. His neck was long and wrinkled, with thin fold upon thin fold.

  I asked him whether he now took his African transformation for granted, or whether he still thought about it. He laughed, then giggled. “I still think about it.” And, shyly, he raised an arm to show that his short-sleeved “African” tunic, of the sort he now habitually wore, had its practical side: it had a neatly hemmed vent under the arms.

  CHEDDI JAGAN’S father and mother both came from India to Guyana as very young children in 1901, on the same sailing ship, the Elbe. Both started work on the plantations at a very early age. Cheddi Jagan’s father started before he was ten; he was a full cane cutter at fourteen; when he was thirty he became a “driver” or gang foreman, earning ten shillings a week, about $2.50.

  Cheddi was then eleven. Three years later his father sent him to the capital, Georgetown, to Queen’s College; and three years after that sent him to the United States to study, with five hundred dollars. The money had been won at gambling. As a gang foreman Cheddi’s father mixed with the plantation overseers. They were mainly Scottish; and they were drinking and gambling men.

  Cheddi was the eldest of eleven children. One of the extra-political things he did when he came back to Guyana in 1943 was to take over responsibility for his brothers and sisters. He educated them all. Of the eleven Jagan children, three became professional people, two became nurses, and one became a hairdresser.

  Martin Carter remembered Cheddi Jagan’s father as “a tall man with a black bristling moustache. I remember the moustache vividly. And his height—he was a
very tall man, by any standards. His mother was gentle, almost wraith-like, very thin. The impression I had of her, when I met her in the very late forties, was that she had spent a whole life keeping children alive—literally alive. Their house, on the Corentyne coast, was very simple, with a kitchen at the back with a mud cooking arrangement—we call it a ‘cow-mouth.’ It was detached from the main house.”

  Of Cheddi Jagan’s beginnings, Martin Carter said, “Coming from the plantation coast, known in the old days as the Wild Coast, the sheer area of experience was too much for a young man from a plantation background to deal with comfortably, especially in those days. We were even more remote than we are today from so-called metropolitan centers. You could imagine”—Martin Carter looked for a word—“the fastness of a young man in those days coming out of a background without a literary culture. It froze him into attitudes which have lasted. This freezing affected him personally. At the same time it brought home to him in a very powerful way the kind of society and community he had came from.”

  IT WAS OF HIS EARLY days, and especially of his time in America, that I wanted to hear when I next met Cheddi Jagan. He came for me at the hotel one Sunday afternoon, and we drove to his house. It was the house he had built after he had left the premiership in 1964. It was a plain, new-style, two-storey Georgetown house, well-fenced, with a watchdog.

  We sat upstairs. The afternoon breeze blew through the open doors on both sides. Beyond the wrought-iron rails of the balcony the garden was all green, with mango trees and coconut trees and banana trees.

  Nineteen thirty-six seemed very far away. What would have been the world picture of his parents then, with their plantation background and the half-erased India of their ways? What would have been the expectations of Cheddi himself, travelling to the United States and Washington, to study at a black university, Howard, at a time of depression and intolerance? The ship was going to dock at Boston. Did the name of the famous city excite him?