Anyone who sees Janet Jagan as only a politician and founder of a socialist oriented political party would have to ignore ,or have a lack of interest in her various cultural interests, such as critical journalism, creative literature, and classic films.

Mrs Jagan was well aware that there was a tendency among many Guyanese to define and hero-worship public figures because of the political position they held and power they wielded, rather than for the humanitarian and civilized example they can set by publicly discussing the literature they admired and read, the visual art they supported and collected, the music they listened to, the films they attended and encouraged everyone to see.

The proof of Cheddi and Janet Jagan’s intellectual interests and skills beyond the strategies and policies of party politics is demonstrated mostly in their approach to historical prose writing, autobiographical style, and journalistic argument. No other Guyanese politician to date has written internationally famous books like Cheddi Jagan’s ‘The West On Trial’ and ‘My Fight For Guyana’s Freedom’. The key to their success was not verbosity and sophistry in the English language, but a simple earnest fast-paced prose laced with inserted quotations from other books and researched sources. Cheddi Jagan was a master of the well-researched document, combined with his down-to-earth first person tone of voice. This made his views convincing to literate working class readers and intellectuals who did not define intellectuality as a rigid academic standard, or manner of behaviour, but a flexible humane attitude.

Beneath Cheddi and Janet’s literary style and attitude was evidence of classic cinematic influence , originating in the tone of voice of great modern American writers like John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway ,John Dos Passos, Robert Penn Warren, Dashiel Hammett, whose books often became films. This evidence is borne out by popular classic films adapted from some of these writers’ great books, such as ‘The Grapes Of Wrath’, 1940, directed by John Ford, ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’, 1943, directed by Sam Wood, ‘All The King’s Men’,1949, directed by Robert Rossen, and many others, Not surprisingly, many of these film directors were also liberal/socialist in their viewpoints, had an interest in exposing injustice and unfairness, and focused on the victimized and the unconventional individual. Taking a similar social position of course did not endear Cheddi or Janet Jagan to the Imperial powers, colonial estate officials, or local petit bourgeois families in 1950’s and 60’s British Guiana, who seemed quite content to ignore or belittle the central importance of cane-cutters, estate workers, rice planters, public works employees, etc. , to the colony’s economy, or felt that their defence and social welfare was already better served since the 1930’s by trade unionists like Nathaniel Critchlow, so it was unnecessary to formulate a worker-intellectual political party under the guidance of liberal left-leaning intellectuals like Janet and Cheddi Jagan, Forbes Burnham, Martin Carter, Winifred Gaskin, Ashton Chase, Brindley Benn, Rory Westmas, Fred Wills, and others.

Of all these Guyanese intellectuals, it was Martin Carter and Janet Jagan who would sustain the most publicly committed role of trying to raise the intellectual and cultural standards of Guyanese citizens. This commitment was related not just to Janet’s personal interests, but obviously to her sensitive reaction both as a woman and a foreigner to the devastating political and social effect of the mid- 1950’s split within her party, the PPP, with Forbes Burnham who formed his own British and American backed party, the PNC, which led to antagonistic ethnic divisions in British Guiana/Guyana, because the majority of Afro and Indo masses separately followed the leaders of these two major political parties primarily because they were of their race. The devastating national result and culmination of this zealous simple-minded ethnic pride combined with political partisanship, as everyone should know by now, is what led to the loss of many lives, destruction by arson of many public and private commercial enterprises, the decline of the Capital’s reputation as the beautiful ‘garden city’, and perhaps the most chronically damaging of all, the continual exodus of skilled intellectual Guyanese professionals and peace-loving citizens for other shores since the 1960’s.

So what sort of personal and social activities could repair and restore common civilized human values among Guyanese of every race, religion, and political persuasion? By taking a back seat to parliamentary and public political affairs for almost three decades, from the mid-60s to the early 1990s, Janet Jagan had a lot of time to ponder this question, while endlessly reading and seeing films. Any deep enduring answer lay not simply in prescribing multi-party coalition governments if their various followers still regarded political governmental representation as something based on a solidarity rooted in the racial hero-worship of leaders. Local history has shown it was the racial preferences of most Guyanese voters themselves which jeopardized the social justice of the democratic voting system. Parties may benefit from it politically, but it could never be supported in principle by any truly civilized non-racial Guyanese political party. How then would this socially retarded and racial attitude, within Guyanese themselves, change?

By a massive emphasis on cultural values transmitted via creative and critical literature, and films in particular, that were rooted in intellectual reasoning, human sentiment, fairness, and social commitment, rather than exclusive self-centered values of ethnic kinship. Janet Jagan understood and supported this educational position in many of her literary and cinematic writings in ‘Thunder’ and ‘Mirror’, the political part newspaper she edited, and later the literary and cinematic programmes she supported at Castellani House. But long before it was even a necessity to have such literary and cinematic programmes, back when Guyanese cinemas showed classic films daily and audiences comprised of a mixture of all races and classes, even during the racially hateful early 1960s, Janet Jagan, along with other intellectuals in her party, set an outstanding social and intellectual example by stacking their Freedom House bookstore with paperbacks which conveyed their commitment to raising the literacy, intellectual and free-thinking standards of all Guyanese, exposing them to intellectual reasoning, human sentiment, fairness and social commitment The crucial necessity of informing an appallingly uneducated Guyanese public about the intellectual development and practical benefits of learning and seeing what is classic cinematic culture is justified because of the shocking ignorance and opinions expressed by many individuals in the Guyanese press and TV today. In many ways, such Classic literature is related to Classic cinematic culture, and much of this original literature was publicly available at the Freedom House bookstore. Vital Novels such as ‘Fathers And Sons’ by Ivan Turgenev, ‘Dead Souls’ by Gogol, ‘The Queen Of Spades’ by Pushkin, ‘The Lady With The Lapdog & Other Stories’ by Chekov, ‘Memoirs’ by Chateaubriand, ‘Confessions’ by Rousseau, ‘Notes From Undergound’ and the Short Stories of Dostoyevsky, ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and ‘The Last Summer’ by Boris Pasternak, ‘Flight To Arras’ by Antoine de St Exupery, ‘The Outsider’, ‘The Plague’, and ‘The Rebel’ by Albert Camus, ‘1984’ and ‘Down and out in Paris and London’ by George Orwell, many novels by Colette, a French lady writer admired by Janet Jagan, ‘The Quiet American’, ‘The Comedians’, Our Man In Havana’, ‘Loser takes All’, by Graham Greene, ‘Germinal’ by Emile Zola, ‘Three Tales’ and Madame Bovary’ by Flaubert, ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’, ‘Soul On Ice’ by Eldridge Cleaver, ‘A Morning At The Office’ by Edgar Mittelholzer, ‘The Mystic Masseur’ by V.S. Naipaul, ‘To Sir With love’ by E.R. Braithwaithe, the list goes on. Today’s readers should ask themselves if they have read any, or all of these works?