Dr Jagan’s ‘The West On Trial’ was written in exciting first person prose

– reminiscent of certain books by writers like Robert Penn Warren, Ernest Hemingway or John Dos Passos

DID writings and publications on Guyana after Independence mostly emphasise its religions? Hardly. Though there was a popular tendency encouraged after Independence in 1966, to make ‘Culture’ a private value based on one’s original ethnicity and even religious beliefs.

This would become propagated by some, in contrast to an emphasis on ‘culture’ created by the broadest possible education.

In actuality, the diverse religions of Guyanese are a private, or personal matter, which have almost nothing to do with Guyanese Culture as a whole; though each religion can contribute humane values to such a culture.

THE WEST ON TRIAL

It is significant that in 1966, the year of Independence, a book appeared by one of the leading politicians of Guyana who was interested in establishing both a national economy (based on equitable trade, commerce) and culture based on broad educational and intellectual values. ‘The West On Trial’ by Dr Cheddi Jagan was written in exciting first person prose reminiscent of certain books by writers like Robert Penn Warren, Ernest Hemingway, or John Dos Passos.

And though its main interest was Guyana’s exploitive history, and the sad ideological (and subsequently racial) split from his political party the PPP, by his early Afro-Guyanese partner Forbes Burnham, there are other very important points in Dr Jagan’s book about his real life experiences, which prove that he was neither racially or religiously oriented towards
the concept of Guyanese Culture as a whole; even though politically it was impossible for his party to achieve political power without the votes of his own East Indian ethnicity, who were the population’s majority. Emphasising his partisan and patriotic intellectual interests above those of religion or race, Dr Jagan in his book wrote: “Because the PPP was the most advanced ideologically, it began, after the 1957 election, to attract the more politically conscious, particularly youths, students, and intellectuals of all races.” In fact, Jagan’s ideas, especially as explained in his books, were accepted and shared by numerous European, North American, Canadian, and so called ‘Third World’ intellectuals and writers.

THE CHEDDI & JANET JAGAN LEGACY

One of Dr Jagan’s merits, in personal character, public, and literary affairs, was the exposure of his personal life and ideas to public scrutiny. In Canada during the 1960s and 70s he appeared more than once on one of the best Canadian TV programmes of the era: ‘Under Attack’, in which ‘controversial’ artists, writers, thinkers, etc, faced from an auditorium’s podium, critical University students on various campuses. Dr Jagan’s intellectual, literary, political and cosmopolitan cultural interests were shared by his wife, Janet Rosenberg, a North American who left her native Chicago in the late 1940s (he was a student Dentist there, she a nurse) and settled in British Guiana/Guyana for the rest of her life, throughout the country’s turbulent periods. Their interests were by no means ethnic oriented, or insular (it is said that Janet once refused to wear an Indian Sari offered by avid followers), but peasant workers, once the backbone of the economy, were central to their focus. They were known as Classic Hollywood film buffs, and there are newspaper photos of the couple leaving Georgetown cinemas in good humor, obviously glad to mingle with the cinema-going public.

LITERATURE AND NATIONAL EDUCATION

The PPP headquarters, called ‘Freedom House’, had one of the best high-quality eclectic, bookstores in the capital of Georgetown, where British and American paperback editions of vitally important writers like Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Stendhal, Cocteau, Gide, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Sagan, Sartre, Camus, Malraux, St. Exupery, Montreland, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Chekov, Gorky, Pasternak, Voznesensky, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, G.B. Shaw, Allan Sillitoe, John Braine, Somerset Maughm, Grahame Greene, Thomas Mann, Tagore, Gibran, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Capote, Erskine Caldwell, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Leroi Jones, etc, were all available. To offer such mental or intellectual values cheaply to citizens, speaks on an outstanding emphasis on cultivating a broad cultured and educated public by a political party.
During the late 1950s, early 60s period of Jagan’s government, they hosted Princess Margaret, and though long banned in Anglo Caribbean islands and the USA, after the Cold War the American State saw their ideas with less paranoia. Dr Cheddi Jagan died in an American hospital, his wife Janet, after a brief period as President of Guyana in the 1990’s, died in Georgetown in the next decade.

DALY’S GUYANESE HISTORY

Writings and publications on Guyana demonstrate literature’s ability to reveal or conceal, to choose or deny. After Independence, re-writing Guyana’s history from a nationalist viewpoint often became an opportunity for biased reactions, rather than progressive thought. Vere. T. Daly’s version of Guyana’s history begins with an account of the ancestral roots of the population’s races ( local racial mixtures do not seem to be a bona fide subject), since such origins can be used to determine, emphasise, and define a backward looking local direction in aspects of one’s ‘true’ culture, which each ethnicity may regard as paramount to perpetuate. Daly’s book: ‘A Short History of the Guyanese People’, was first published locally in 1966 as well, then re-published in 1975 by the British-Caribbean branch of MacMillan publishers. The book was encouraged and praised by L.F.S. Burnham, whose government was in power between 66 and 75. It is not a bigoted book, but quite broad-minded in trying to grapple with as much historical data as possible, and its cover is a correct choice of the Aubrey Williams abstract airport mural. Its weakness lies in stressing the dominant will of various races and individuals, imposed on Guyana; rather than exploring the more original local value of Guyana’s distinct geographical and social identity, which can mold all its diverse inhabitants in a recognised and accepted collective direction, contrary to their divisive and antagonistic history. But this is a conceptual cultural direction that the mere reciting of historical facts, would probably never lead to.

One of Dr Jagan’s merits, in personal character, public, and literary affairs, was the exposure of his personal life and ideas to public scrutiny. In Canada during the 1960s and 70s he appeared more than once on one of the best Canadian TV programmes of the era: ‘Under Attack’, in which ‘controversial’ artists, writers, thinkers, etc, faced from an auditorium’s podium, critical University students on various campuses.

By Terence Roberts