PART 2: Comrade Janet – The other President Jagan

Janet and Cheddi Jagan worked together like clockwork.

WHEN the couple arrived in Guyana in 1944, a year after marrying in the US, World War II was still on, but after it ended in 1945, their political activity helped give birth to a string of events that started the struggle for decolonisation and independence.

In 1946, the Jagans joined Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham and Ashton Chase to form the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) that gave birth to the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) four years later, on January 1, 1950.

All their lives they played leading roles in the PPP’s leadership, him as General Secretary and she a member of the Central Committee and Political Bureau and serving in ministerial positions in all PPP governments.

But just like her husband, Janet was as humble as could be in their common respective circumstances.

Like Cheddi, Janet was also elected handsomely at every national election they contested, both serving over five decades in Parliament while crisscrossing Guyana’s three counties and 10 regions to organise people to struggle for better, be they dockworkers in Georgetown, sugar workers at Enmore, Amerindians in the North West District or the Rupununi Savannah or islanders in Essequibo.

The two comrades lived more like a pair of political partners than the traditional married couple, both preferring to be jailed alongside supporters than opt for status privileges and satisfied to live in humility at their Bel Air, Georgetown home.

And they took the same humility to State House after 1992, when she insisted, as First Lady (and even as Prime Minister) to continue driving her age-old blue Honda Civic — by herself.

Janet spent most of her latter years as Editor-in-Chief of the Mirror and Thunder, the party’s newspaper and theoretical organ, respectively; she was President of the Union of Guyanese Journalists (UGJ) and the Women’s Progressive Organisation (WPO), while also writing children’s story books.

And she simply loved providing practical answers to questions in a popular women’s column in The Mirror called ‘Dear Portia’, featuring complaints of spousal abuse and other family and home problems faced or understood by many (if not most) women nation-wide.

Janet and Cheddi also had their peculiar characteristics, like recycling used envelopes; and even as President, Dr. Jagan was also his own tailor.

As if tailored in Chicago for the additional pressures she would face during her first 10 years in Guyana as a dental nurse and Cheddi’s white American wife, Janet let racial slurs slide off her back like water off a lotus leaf.

And after successive US administrations subjected her to post-war anti-communist persecution and prosecution, she renounced her US citizenship.

Before and after being elected in December 1997, Janet was politically pilloried by some hostile local media houses and partisan politicians for throwing an opposition-inspired legal document over her shoulder after being served during an orchestrated public event.

But she’d be eventually forced by age and attendant health pressures to give-up the presidency prematurely and return to her lifelong mode of dedicating her every minute to everything she could do to be her usual self, even though aging gracefully.

Imbedded racism and potent overdoses of ethnic nationalism colluded over decades to paint her as someone else, but everyone who met Janet left with positive impressions of a well-read and widely-experienced lady ready and willing to discuss any aspect of life, history, politics, culture, literature – or basically anything about anywhere.

While Cheddi more-often had to publicly address the difficult issues of race and politics at home and abroad and explain the party’s position, Janet would write Mirror editorials and analyses in Thunder, as well as children’s stories and books that sought to teach new thinking about unity and co-operation to overcome common obstacles, like her book entitled ‘The Alligator Ferry’ that transported usually-hostile species that it could also eat, safely across the Berbice River.

Janet also served at all levels of government – central and local – and was a loving ‘Auntie’ or ‘Granny’ to all her friends and comrades’ children, but always simply ‘Comrade Janet’ to everyone else.

Historical gender biases and resulting traditional inequalities in appreciation of the equality of the sexes helped contribute, in their case, to the usual imbalance between popularity of husbands and wives running the same enterprise.

But not so with Janet and Cheddi, who were equally well-known as trade unionist Ashton Chase, among the longest-lasting original founding members of the PAC and PPP in the 21st Century.

Janet’s full contribution to Guyana can easily equal that of her husband and lifelong comrade in-arms and at-arms, even though he became Premier and President long before she succeeded him in the state’s hierarchy as Prime Minister and President.

Guyana’s best-known First Lady presided over the Last Post for her husband in 1997, sprinkling his ashes over the Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo Rivers at the end of a week-long mourning period after his bodily return from the Walter Reid Army Memorial hospital in the US, where he died after unsuccessful heart surgery on March 7.

I followed the official nationwide vigils as much as possible, but all-along avoiding allowing my eyes to set on my departed friend, brother and comrade in his coffin before cremation, lest my eternal memory of him be lying in a box.

I didn’t see Janet set out on that unavoidable trip to nowhere that anyone has ever returned from, but, like Cheddi, I bade her less of a goodbye than a farewell, “until we meet again…”

Until then, like us all, I’ll remain in life’s transit lounge until that unwelcome ticket arrives, yet ever-happy that when that final boarding call comes, like Cheddi, Janet and all comrades who’ve preceded me, I won’t be the one presenting the boarding pass.

Meanwhile, Cheddi and Janet remain precious memories stored in my mental hard drive that simply won’t wither — never ever.