The Writer and the World (81 page)

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.

C
HEDDI
J
AGAN’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.”

I
T 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?

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.

I
N 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.