Articles by Janet Jagan
by Janet Jagan Feb 10, 2007
There are fairly good arguments and some not so good at all the various levels. Stabroek News claims that the government has shut out all advertisements and is thus infringing freedom of the press. That charge seems a bit preposterous as it has not had to shut down, stop printing anything at all, like some of its nasty and unfair attacks on the PPP/C government, there is no censorship, it hasn’t had to reduce staff or reduce its pages. It may have lost some profits, but I can guarantee it won’t go out of business.
Besides, Stabroek News still gets a lot of government ads. Look at the last Sunday issue. It contained two Bank of Guyana ads, two Guyana Revenue Authority ads, one Guyana Energy Agency, one from the University of Guyana, one from the Guyana Lands and Survey Commission, one from Queen’s College and some other ads that could be termed related to the government – two from the Ethnic Relations Committee and two from the Lottery – but if there are objections to these being included, it doesn’t matter because Stabroek News had eight government ads – or to use the Stabroek News daily banner, from “taxpayers’ funds.” So what are they speaking about? On occasional checks I do on the daily S/N, government ads average about five a day.
The government claims that S/N is losing its circulation and thus the decision to close down advertisements to S/N is purely a commercial decision. On that, I don’t agree. Government advertisements should be spread through the media on a fair basis, despite circulation and content.
Kaiteur News has come up with some interesting points, the strongest being that in its first 10 years of existence it did not get any government ads and now it has the highest circulation in the print media. Good argument except for the fact that, and this is my personal opinion, it’s a lousy newspaper, filled with nonsense I don’t wish to read. In fact, I stopped reading Kaieteur News long ago because of its sensationalism.
Although I personally do not agree with the alleged stopping of advertisements to Stabroek News, and would urge a reversal of that decision, in no way does it mean that my views of the paper have changed. In this column, I have several times had to refer to the perverse and mean-thinking that is expressed in the notorious letter pages, the sometimes nasty and unreasonable editorials and the misuse of the news columns to attack the party in government. In fact, Stabroek News seems dedicated to the demise of the PPP/C. Fortunately for the PPP, that newspaper’s 2006 campaign didn’t bring the desired outcome at the general elections.
The basic question Stabroek News must answer is: how has freedom of the press been attacked? There is no such thing as censorship in Guyana, forced or self inflicted. They know perfectly well that the PPP restored freedom, press freedom and all civil rights and has never, ever, endangered these rights. Is Stabroek News trying to be more “sensational” than Kaieteur News?
© Nadira Jagan-Brancier 2009
By Janet Jagan (March 2007)
We are here again to honour a great man, a man of the people, a man who opened the minds and hearts of the people of this nation to struggle for a better life and to bring justice, not only to the people of Guyana, but to all people everywhere.
Sixty years ago, Cheddi Jagan entered Parliament, the youngest member at 29, and served for the rest of his life, the longest serving Parliamentarian in the history of our country.
It was in those early days that many of the ideas and ideals that would direct his life were formulated. From the very beginning of his public life, certain characteristics became clear and unchanging. He was first of all, an honest man, a man of genuine integrity, a man whose hands were clean throughout his whole life. I emphasise this quality because his unabashed honesty was the quality that let to trust, and trust is a very important aspect of life, particularly political life.
He was trusted by all, even those who disliked his policies and his beliefs! In his whole lifetime there was never a shadow cast by any doubt of his integrity. And of course, trust leads to many things, willingness to fight for and sacrifice, when necessary, for the goals set. And Cheddi with his comrades, set difficult goals. First was the struggle to end colonial rule and become an independent nation. That is why he is called the Father of the Nation.
Second was his determination and his tough and relentless leadership later, to remove the chains of the PNC dictatorship and restore democracy.
He achieved both of these goals before his death ten years ago. He set Guyana on the path of rebuilding an almost completely destroyed country and in his 4½ years as President, set the guidelines for a strong and united Guyana.
The Cheddi we all know and respected and loved, and this is as evident today as it was decades ago, was a man of the people. His ideas and his attributes and his goals were derived from his frequent and genuine contact with Guyanese of all ranks of life. They were part of his decision making process. The views of the man-in-the-street, the farmers, the workers, the vendors, the merchants, the women, the children were important to him and he absorbed these contacts into his ideas and plans. For these and many other reasons, we can be proud that a man of his stature and unique character lived and led us.
Today, at the site of his cremation ten years ago, we again pay honour to a man of the people, our own Cheddi Jagan!
© Nadira Jagan-Brancier 2009
JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY
Film Review
Thunder in Guyana, 2003. A film by Suzanne Wasserman. 50 min. Colour. Distributed by Women Make Movies, 462 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY10013; phone (212) 925-0606, e-mail cinema@wmm.com,http://www.wmm.com.
Percy C. Hintzen, University of California, Berkeley
In December 1997, an American-born Jewish woman was elected President of the Republic of Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America. She was the first American-born woman to be elected President of any country in the region. For members of her Jewish family in the United States, the event was a time of reflection on her life and their attitudes to it. She left them in 1943 when she was just 23 years old to accompany her Guyanese, East Indian, Hindu husband, Cheddi Jagan on his return to his country of birth. Suzanne Wasserman spent 10 days with her during her Presidential campaign in Guyana. It was the first time in the 53 years since Janet Jagan had moved to her adopted homeland that any member of her family in the United States had visited her. The result is a documentary that is partly an historical and somewhat sympathetic account of the nationalist movement of Guyana and partly a quest for understanding a member of the family who elicited profound and concern, even though clearly disapproving but adoring attention.
Janet Rosenberg was a product of the conflict between the promise of the United States and its harsh reality. She was Jewish and a woman born in 1920. Her Jewish parents were conservative Republicans who held tightly to the racial binaries, cultural exclusivity, and gender typifications that still continue to trouble the country even today. Her father, in an effort to escape the implications of his Jewishness, changed his name from Rosenberg to Roberts in order to secure work. His daughter, Janet, possessed all of the qualities that defined white American (and male) superiority. She was a world-class swimmer who took flying lessons and rode horses. She was the ideal American beauty. And she was an intellectual. She met Cheddi Jagan while enrolled as a student at WayneStateUniversity in the early nineteen forties. Clearly, she was aware that the promise of America was not available to her, something that she was unwilling to accept. Her Jewishness, she believed, came with the perpetual condition of being the underdog. Rather than accept the limitations of American society, she chose to leave and to create the conditions of her own dignity and the dignity of humanity elsewhere.
While campaigning for the Presidency of Guyana in 1997 Janet Jagan was asked to described herself. After hesitating out of embarrassed modesty, she declared herself to be a “freedom fighter.” This is the most profound insight captured by the documentary. Her response serves as a trope for the dangerous and vicious misunderstandings and misrepresentations that are attached to her life. It describes her profound commitment to freedom and to its pursuit whatever the personal costs. But to American and Western ears, her self-description evokes the spectre of freedom’s diametrical opposite.
The sympathetic airing of Janet Jagan’s story by Wasserman, the daughter of a first cousin who was clearly enthralled with her life, is rooted in the personal and the familial. It has the quality of a journey of redemption for a family who rejected most of what Janet Jagan did and stood for. And there was much to reject. She openly challenged the capitalist status quo in the 1940s. She dated and eventually married an equally radical Asian Indian from Guyana who was studying dentistry at NorthwesternUniversity. Their relationship was transgressive in every way. He was Hindu and he was foreign. Her father refused to meet him because, in his racially jaundiced eyes, he was “Black.” He threatened to “shoot him on sight.” Her grandmother had a stroke when they married.
Despite the sympathetic treatment of her great aunt, Suzanne Wasserman cannot escape the American lens through which her interpretation of Janet Jangan’s radicalism is filtered. She succumbs to the use of the “Marxist” and “Communist” labels in describing the ideology of the Jagans and the government that they formed in the fifties despite their own rejection of these labels. These were the very justifications used by the United States and Britain to oust them from power on two occasions, in 1953 and 1964, the latter in a campaign that Janet Jagan predicted, correctly, would lead to a future of endemic violence and turmoil for the country.
Wasserman’s concern with the familial and personal leaves gaps in her understanding of the relationship between Cheddi and Janet. They were extraordinary in their similarities, a point that can be missed when viewed through obscurantist racial, national, cultural and religious lenses. They were both extraordinarily attractive physically. Both were born into societies from which they were excluded on religious and cultural grounds. They both possessed profound and critical intellects. And both managed to overcome the strictures and limitations that their respective societies placed on them. One could sense the profound chemistry in their relationship and the reason for their singular pursuit of freedom and human dignity for everyone. They returned to the English colony of British Guiana soon after they met and married. Immediately, they mounted challenges to the colonial status quo by organising the most dispossessed: the sugarcane workers and she the domestic workers. This catapulted them to the leadership of the nationalist movement.
Their challenge was not merely to colonialism but to capitalism itself. In 1953 the People’s Progressive Party, which they founded won office in the first elections held under universal suffrage. Cheddi became the colony’s first Premier and Janet its first woman member of the cabinet. She also became the Deputy Speaker of the colony’s parliament. Quickly, the Jagans became lightening rods in the cold war anti-communist crusade by North America and Western Europe. And Janet Jagan, as the white American woman who had stepped out of line, became cast as the evil genius behind a gullible husband. The British ousted their Party from power in 1953. The Jagans were both imprisoned. They survived, unbowed, to be elected to national office once again in 1957. Cheddi Jagan became Chief Minister with Janet holding the important cabinet post of Minister of Labour, Health, and Housing. They Party remained in office until 1964 during a period when the country saw its greatest achievement in education, agriculture, health, welfare, and economic development. But they could not survive the U.S. interventionism that intensified after the Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1961. The United States collaborated with Great Britain to change the constitution. Despite receiving the largest percentage of the vote, the Party suffered an electoral defeat orchestrated by the machinations of Great Britain (the documentary incorrectly states that the Party received a majority of the votes, which it did not). Janet and Cheddi Jagan had become poster children in the international campaign against communism. But the ire of the anti-communists was directed particularly at Janet. She was labelled as one of the most dangerous communists in the hemisphere and was compared to Eva Peron by the New York Times. Both Jagans got special attention from Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy for whom they had become objects of derision. In the propaganda campaign Janet was identified, erroneously, as related to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Cheated out of office, Janet and Cheddi continued their campaign for freedom and civil rights until, in 1992, their Party, the People’s Progressive Party, won the first free and fair elections held in the country since they were ousted in 1964. With Cheddi Jagan as President, they picked up from where they left off, turning the country’s economy around and restoring stability. When Cheddi Jagan died in office in March 1997, Janet was persuaded to run for the Presidency. She won and spent 20 months in office until a heart attack forced her resignation. In 2003 when the documentary was released, she was still working at the Party’s Headquarters. She was 83 years old.
Janet Jagan’s life is defined by its struggle for freedom against all barriers to human dignity: those of coloniality, race, class, culture, gender, etc. She sacrificed much in her quest, relinquishing her American Citizenship in 1947 and being declared persona non grata by the United States Government in the fifties and sixties. Her successes have much to do with her fearlessness. She declares in the documentary that “nothing much frightens” her. She is not bound by orthodoxy or convention. When asked, for example, about the possible reaction to her whiteness by the electorate of Guyana, a country in which 95 percent of the population is either East Indian, black, or mixed, she expressed surprise: “People do not see white when they look at me.” It represents her successful transcendence of racial boundaries in a country that is driven by racial conflict. It is erroneous, therefore, to characterise her as a white Jewish American, as does the documentary. She has transcended normalised and fixed labels of identity to become truly the “Mother of the Country” in her homeland: the Republic of Guyana.
Throughout her life, her family ties remained strong. She reconciled with her father who died during the period when she was restricted from travelling by the British. Tellingly, the only regret she uttered in the entire documentary was that her father and husband never met. Today, Janet Jagan is no longer an anachronism. While in office, the relationship between the government she headed and the United States was friendly and cooperative. And while she was reluctant to label herself, her daughter in law, Nadia, made the observation that she was “more Guyanese than most.” Perhaps she has become the epitome of what all Guyanese should be. And certainly a beacon of hope for the United States. She is a woman who not afraid to think the unthinkable.
