Memory and history in Guyana
Budhos, Marina
I MARCH 1997, when the body of Cheddi Jagan, former president of Guyana, lay in state near the tiny village where he was born, the crowds of villagers and sugar workers streaming past to catch a...
...Yet one of the harshest criticisms of the PPP/Civic government is exactly this—that it runs the country like a family...
...Beneath these obvious explanations, though, lurked another tension: that between insiders and outsiders...
...some like Buxton, dependent on public wages, will surely sink...
...The reasons given were low salaries and inefficiencies in the infrastructure...
...He was firm on one point: "Give us debt relief...
...Nine months later, on December 15, Janet Jagan was declared the winner in a presidential race, having pulled in 56 percent of the vote...
...THERE IS NO Guyana," Sam, a black engineer, told me bluntly as we sat in the hotel restaurant in Georgetown...
...In September 1996, a few months before Jagan's death, I went down to Guyana for the first time...
...Instead, most educated professionals settled in Toronto, New York, and London, making new lives as immigrants...
...its efforts to establish racial harmony...
...The oneroom schoolhouse where my father had gone to school was boarded up, goats ambling through the weeds...
...Jagan's government was destabilized, and Burnham was voted into power in 1964...
...At the time, Mrs...
...But after a while, I realized that underneath the speechmaking, there was a certain charming earnestness to Jagan...
...A man passed out photographs of a seawall reinforcement...
...And yet race is nowhere, since officially, under a unity government, it doesn't exist...
...He pointed vaguely ahead...
...Sensitive political problems, like government appointments and corruption investigations, are handled behind the scenes, like a family crisis discussed after the children have gone to bed...
...Even for those who are critical of the Jagans, her illness was disturbing...
...I could imagine the old Cheddi, campaigning in these coastal villages years before...
...As the evening sun slanted across the fields, rice farmers were still bringing their trucks, piled high with grain, into the mill compound to be weighed...
...Down the street, every night at the Palm Court Restaurant, groups of men mingled, flashing cellular phones, drinking, while the DJ spun the latest remixes of soca hits...
...The PNC plays a nasty game...
...Now that he's president he doesn't do anything like shopping...
...From the small plane, I could see all of Guyana, with its neat squares of rice fields, the wide brown rivers flowing into the Atlantic Ocean, dense green forest behind, rolling all the way to Brazil...
...I had somehow pictured the village to be a quaint grouping of houses, a central square with a church and schoolhouse...
...A sense of vengeance crackled in the air, like static electricity, and an anniversary celebration quickly slid into PPP boosterism...
...For the first time, I realized, I was happy here...
...But the quality of the roads is the same...
...I was driven out to Buxton by an Indian taxi driver I had befriended during my stay...
...He insisted it was, though change was taking too much time...
...Even though Cheddi incarnated another era, his personal integrity gave the country time to heal, and may have laid the foundation for the country's reconstruction...
...Almost a hundred thousand people crowded into the Albion Sports Center, in a country of less than eight hundred thousand...
...Even his enemies, who despise the PPP, had to admit there was something genial and good natured about Cheddi Jagan that touched people...
...There was an endearing down-to-earth simplicity to the Jagans...
...The whole country was waiting to leave," Bernadette Persaud, a Guyanese painter, told me...
...The men who had gathered around a rough-hewn table were discussing a broken sea-wall reinforcement, inadequate water pumps for the village...
...This," he said dramatically, "this is what is being used to protect us from the pounding, pounding sea...
...Yet the PNC refused to accept her victory, denouncing the elections as rigged...
...In the heat, the utter stillness of the gardens, the limp tropic glades, my senses had grown dulled...
...Rain was falling heavily as I got out of the car to talk to a gas-station owner...
...While others might see Guyana as a scruffy, obscure country, Jagan viewed it as a beacon for the rest of the world, and a humane example for all third world countries trying to control their destinies...
...I expected a severe, tightlipped party ideologue...
...I felt unprepared for Sam's bitterness as he argued that "the owners of capital are East Indians...
...The people are living here, but they're not living here...
...Now there were no soldiers, but the sense of menace remained...
...Whereas Burnham appealed to the Afro-Guyanese fears as an endangered family, the Jagans appealed to the Indian sense of clannishness and selfpreservation...
...The die-hard, loyal "comrades" who stuck out the really bad years with no flour on their shelves, who lost their jobs or were jailed for belonging to the wrong party or race, resent the expatriates who made their way back home...
...THE GUYANA of my imagination was frozen in time—forty years ago, in the grainy black-and-white photographs my mother brought back from her stay in my father's village...
...Had the Guyanese people followed him in this shift...
...In 1955, the black leader Forbes Burnham split from the PPP and started his own party, the People's National Congress (PNC...
...No one doubted Cheddi Jagan's own integrity...
...These were the same problems the Buxton villagers struggled with a century before when they were trying to free themselves from the grip of the large-plantation owners...
...government's weight behind Burnham...
...reclaimed again by the descendants of slaves and coolies, once more from a ruinous dictatorship by the immigrants who are coming back, the multinationals who see the natural worth of this country...
...Today he was all dry business, giving me a rote rundown of his policies, emphasizing that he was procapital, pro-foreign investment, but not at the cost of the social state...
...But there are signs of hope...
...We were filled with self-contempt, and that became our justification for leaving...
...I decided to take a walk through the Botanic Gardens...
...A man whizzed by on a bicycle and shouted, "What are you doing here alone...
...And what happens when there isn't a leader...
...During the Burnham years, Bernadette Persaud painted a series of paintings of the gardens: eerie, ghostlike silhouettes of soldiers with bayonets embedded in the lush foliage...
...and one of my aunts was the haughty local Sunday school teacher...
...Yet as we neared Buxton and turned down the rutted roads, I sensed his nervousness...
...Long live the RPA...
...Education hasn't improved...
...At our dinner table in Queens, New York, my father would offer misty recollections of what it was like to grow up under colonialism: "Indians and blacks, we were all in it together, fighting the British...
...When I asked about some current political struggles, she waved her hand, dismissing them as "momentary...
...And they must respect the environment...
...The men working on jacked up cars watched, curious and nervous, as I picked my way through the rubble, looking for some artifact of my family...
...As young, ambitious men, both made their way to the United States, which transformed them...
...She fussed about the cat, brought me a glass of soda, chatted about her family...
...Business people also came...
...But that ideal foundered on the shoals of international coldwar conflict and deep-seated local racial divisions...
...Our house was a symbol of my family's proud rise: we were the first in the village to convert to Christianity...
...Globalization of culture was well underway...
...I felt that I had walked in on a place swimming in its own murky waters, still caught in its squabbles, unable to see to the outside...
...They immediately started to crumble, trickling a white powder...
...the selling of new house lots to the poor...
...On my second evening I attended a party on the lawn of State House, the presidential home...
...Now the message was efficiency and high-quality crops so Guyana could compete with other rice producers on the world market...
...Those were the days when Jagan helped found the country's independence movement, joining a glowing pantheon of elegant intellectual statesmen and socialist freedom fighters from the West Indies, like Eric Williams, C.L.R...
...This was the Guyana that people, through all the political troubles, hold dear: a rustic, simple warmth, a country that should not be in debt, that is ample and rich enough to feed its own people...
...Members of the rural audience seemed frozen in another era: riveted on their children's benches, passive, listening to their leader as he wove a story that connected them to the larger world...
...They grew up in neighboring villages in the easternmost region of Guyana, a muddy flatland where their grandparents toiled as indentured workers in the sugar plantations...
...He commented that he'd started to see black families buying housing lots in predominantly Indian villages...
...On this last, she blamed the PNC for igniting the race issue all over again, complaining, "When we expose corruption, it gets switched into race...
...Outside my hotel, Main Street was being repavedpart of the government's commitment to restore Georgetown's roads by the end of the year...
...These villagers must now again prepare for the next assault of capital, rumbling on a not-so-distant horizon...
...Raymond, a recent college graduate who returned to run a food relief program, told me, "There's still an ideological taint, coming from a capitalist country like the States...
...The British had built a Garden City from which they meant to rule...
...Calmly she ran over the accomplishments of the PPP/Civic government: the restoration of democracy—"Parliament was a farce before that...
...One could quickly see the shoddy workmanship, the seams so crooked they didn't match up...
...New tractors and combines sat in a rutted, muddy field, while farmers packed the cramped benches inside a freshly painted schoolhouse festooned with crepe-paper banners...
...Burnham, by all accounts, was a brilliant orator, a man who tried on ideologies like suits...
...What Jagan gave people was hope...
...he made some remark about how the people here don't even bother to clean their own yards, what can you expect from them...
...I found a place still living on old myths of political heroism and betrayal, having trouble finding its way into the future...
...Hearing that I was a writer, Jagan's eyes had lit up as he told me that he too wrote...
...how, in the wake of a small disaster, they had taken it upon themselves to get to the bottom of a problem, taking photographs, writing letters to the authorities...
...If my past is gone, perhaps a new Guyana is being born...
...The workers' rights to have trade unions and to bargain collectively...
...Her victory was as much an homage to a political legacy as it is an expression of nervous uncertainty about who will shape the country's destiny...
...It won't work...
...for my father, it was a journey of immigration, with all its possibilities of identity and mobility...
...But the Georgetown I encountered was also a capital ravaged by war—a war of politics and neglect...
...its commitment to education...
...The stairs fell off the stilted house until my aunts were marooned in one room, dependent on the kindness of good neighbors who would climb the ladder, bring food, chase away the intruders...
...Sam registered my discomfort, abruptly said his goodbye, and walked out of the restaurant...
...Jagan had just recovered from a heart attack...
...Yet there were stirrings of change...
...Race is everywhere in Guyana—it shades every perception of the past, the present, and the future...
...He had slowly privatized certain industries yet resisted the World Bank's recommendation that Guyana raise interest rates to spur the economy...
...Next door was a persistent banging, as workers renovated the lemon-colored National Library...
...For fifty years, Guyana has lived under the spell of charismatic leaders, hanging onto a past it needs to let go of...
...More and more I became aware of the limitations of my own identity, such that my connections kept leading me back to the Indian side of this country...
...I admired these men, dealing with the pragmatics of poverty...
...A week before, when we'd met on the State House lawn, he had laughed, patted people on the arms, made jokes...
...I MARCH 1997, when the body of Cheddi Jagan, former president of Guyana, lay in state near the tiny village where he was born, the crowds of villagers and sugar workers streaming past to catch a last glimpse of their leader were so enormous that the cremation ceremony had to be postponed...
...It's time to let him go and continue on...
...They took the beautiful, hand-sewn dresses, the embroidered pillows, the diamond ring and gold bangles...
...The picture Jagan painted was one of a feisty, independent country talking back to the might of capital...
...At the party, I asked a man who was temporarily serving as attorney general how Jagan had managed to remake himself from a Marxist to a moderate liberal who courted foreign investors...
...Warmed up, he added, with a flourish of rhetoric: "We must walk very skillfully, with facts and figures, between conformism and transformation...
...The mood was not to last long...
...Ideas are for the metropolis...
...There was an inaccessibility, an insularity, that took its toll...
...His enthusiasm, his lively energy, was infectious...
...my father and uncles were the first to pass the Cambridge overseas exam...
...Here is what I had wanted so badly, what I had hoped to find in Letter Kenny village...
...When I finally located the family lot, I found that our house no longer stood...
...Within months, many got disgusted and left again...
...THERE IS, essentially, one road in Guyana—the highway that runs roughly parallel to the sea wall...
...AnDISSENT / Summer 1998 19 other man, a consultant in his thirties (there are many "consultants" running around Guyana these days, though it was hard to pin down what they do) talked about how he had to pay respect to the old-timers for their sacrifices in order to get anything done...
...Companies like Reynolds Aluminum, driven out during the heyday of third-world nationalization, came back to Guyana to do business...
...In the early 1960s, with independence imminent, President John F. Kennedy threw the U.S...
...For Jagan, it was a journey of political awakening —into Marxism, which he brought back to Guyana...
...To me, Cheddi Jagan always loomed as an eerie, romantic alternative to my own father...
...That night, however, the time warp broke and forty years of cultural influences poured in...
...Eyes sparkling, he boasted that when it came to increases in public wages, Guyana was far more advanced than Israel and all of Latin America...
...I tried to reach several names I'd been given—women activists, members of the PNC opposition, ministers, but it never worked out, with different schedules and bad phone connections...
...After all these years, I discovered, Jagan had lost none of the glow of idealism...
...But perhaps this is what it's all about: these cycles of loss and reclamation, the condition of migration and memory, an old leadership giving way to the new...
...he was a man who lived for abstractions...
...He talked about what lies behind the veneer of shiny new automobiles, concrete houses with carved balconies and high gates: cocaine money, gangster money, narco money...
...GEORGETOWN WAS exactly as I had envisioned it: long, broad avenues, white wood houses with exquisite lace lattice work and jalousie windows...
...When his 18 n DISSENT / Summer 1998 successor, Desmond Hoyte, took over as president, he began slashing the country's bloated, centralized bureacracy and selling off governmentowned companies...
...Most of Guyana lives on a slender strip of reclaimed coastland, made possible by an ingenious system of canals and dams built by the Dutch in the seventeenth century...
...The land is flat as far as the eye can see, with huge gold-stippled fields of cane and rice...
...The only black people in the room were the steel-drum players of the Guyana Police Force Band...
...I was struck by this when I finally arranged for a car and driver and set out for Letter Kenny village to find out what happened to my aunts...
...The event was an odd mix of 4-H country fair and political rally...
...Down the road, I could see the mandir of a freshly DISSENT / Summer 1998 21 painted Hindu temple, a huge green cricket field...
...In choosing Janet Jagan, once again, the country is relying on a figure from the past to buy them time in defining the future...
...The 1992 elections were a historical watershed: for those in the PPP, this was their moment of historical justice, with their wronged leader rising from the ashes...
...From his pocket he brought out two small chunks of concrete which he rubbed together...
...MARINA BUDHOS is the author of House of Waiting and the forthcoming novel The Professor of Light...
...tears pricked my eyes...
...Yet I cannot stop thinking of those men, huddled around their rough wood table, scraping two DISSENT / Summer 1998 23 lumps of concrete together as they brace against the massive changes they know lie waiting on the other side...
...Jagan stayed on as leader of the PPP all those years, pounding the opposition pulpit, surviving the worst of times...
...Guyanese follow a leader...
...Now, with Jagan's death, Guyana— however reluctantly—must usher in a new era...
...The impulse to mythologize them was in me too, for they were like reassuring, modest parents...
...Jagan reminded me of a bright, elderly professor, eager to assimilate new concepts like "diversification," "global economy," and "downsizing" into his well-worn lectures...
...The question of leadership was a thorn that pricked every conversation...
...But we nearly whizzed right by Letter Kenny, for the entire village was lined up along the highway---everything from the Justice of the Peace's office to the gas station to the rice mill...
...Since 1961, Sam has lived the quintessential postcolonial, transnational life, working in various places in the Caribbean as a consultant...
...This moment—so quaintly domestic, making the president seem like a sweet, preoccupied husband—was telling...
...It was with this vision of shared struggle that Cheddi and his American wife, Janet, launched the People's Progressive Party (PPP), a multiracial coalition, in 1950...
...In 1992, when Jagan was elected, another change arrived: television, and with it, all the new fashions and music...
...On top of the rotten boards, something new has been built: a welding shop, signs of a new energy and wealth...
...Standing in a muddy cemetery, where all my aunts and uncles and grandparents were buried, I listened to a neighbor pour out the tale of my family's demise...
...But the other part of my identity, less obvious—Jewish—suddenly rose to the surface...
...20 DISSENT / Summer 1998 While we were talking, President Jagan returned with one of his aides from a PPP fund-raising event at the races...
...One could see how easy it was to accept their version of things...
...Months later, it is the image of those men I keep returning to...
...Though my hotel was only three blocks away, I was warned to take a taxi, since the streets of Georgetown are still dangerous...
...One could stroll along a busy boulevard and a moment later disappear into a dangerous, burntout pocket...
...We didn't care about the country, we let it go, the roads deteriorated, we put out garbage right out on the streets...
...The Cambridge-educated colonial of the fifties became a militant black leader and then a demented third-world socialist, performing voodoo ceremonies in his presidential palace...
...The money we sent them somehow never made it to their hands...
...It was the only way she knew to express her outrage at the dictatorship...
...Guyana lost an entire generation—those in their thirties and forties, who would have moved up in the ranks, challenged their elders...
...You see more fancy motor cars," Sam told me bitterly...
...When I heard news of Cheddi Jagan's death, I felt an eerie disconnection, as a chunk of the world, that small muddy country I'd heard about my whole life, had disappeared beneath the edge of my knowledge...
...As my aunts grew more dotty with age, villagers would slip inside the house and steal from them...
...We have told all the businesspeople who are coming here they have to respect two things," he explained...
...The country had gone from 82 percent inflation in 1991 to 4.5 percent and experienced the highest growth rate in the region...
...Some did—including several who became ministers in his cabinet...
...The houses were crumbling wrecks, the roads rutted and impassable...
...In the old days the rhetoric was about class struggle...
...using their own wits to make the authorities accountable to them...
...Some will prosper...
...There's just the plot of land...
...There was a spartan idealism to both him and Janet that was a welcome relief after Burnham...
...Nothing better characterizes the problems facing Guyana, a lush country sitting on the eastern tip of South America...
...WHEN I finally sat down to talk to Cheddi Jagan in his office, I was disappointed...
...I couldn't bet," he admitted sheepishly, "because I didn't bring any money...
...Donkey carts trundled side by side with new Lexus cars...
...This was why thousands lined the coastal road as his coffin was brought to rest...
...But the woman who greeted me in an empty sitting room was plump and grandmotherly, dressed in purple stretch pants and a polyester print blouse...
...As I left the president's office, I knew that 22 DISSENT / Summer 1998 the real legacy of Cheddi Jagan was not his specific policies...
...When I mentioned my family name, his eyes clouded over and he muttered, "Everyone's dead...
...The people of Guyana are not ideological," the man replied...
...We were met by two young men who took me down a narrow path to the rear house of a local herbalist, to the bottomhouse—the space underneath the stilts...
...A Caribbean fusion band took the stage, strumming out a mix of hip-hop and chutneycalypso...
...it is well known that the Central Intelligence Agency was behind much of the labor unrest and the civil strife that nearly tore the country apart at that time...
...Throughout my childhood I was haunted by the photographs of our family home in this part of Guyana: the large white house on tall stilts, the carved shutters and imported European furniture...
...Though the PPP/Civic advertises itself as an inclusive party, and there have been no violent reprisals against blacks, the party draws from a largely Indian vote, and the government appointed largely Indian boards and ministers...
...Eventually, Burnham ran up the worst foreign debt in the Western hemisphere, sealed off the economy, and turned Guyana into a paramilitary state...
...Behind Janet Jagan's softness, though, I detected an unswerving and willful intelligence, able to guide the conversation in the direction she wanted...
...he asked...
...0 N MY first morning in Guyana, I was hustled into a minivan to accompany a group of visiting delegates who were there for the fiftieth-year celebration of the Rice Producers' Association (RPA...
...Guyana was renamed a cooperative republic, as Burnham grew infatuated with the idea of large-scale cooperative farms in the virtually uninhabitable interior...
...The hemorrhaging of young, educated Guyanese means the two major parties ossified, leaving little room for change or fresh ideas...
...To him, the botched road projects, the appointment of largely Indian boards, were part of a larger scheme to keep the black side of the country down...
...Others may talk vaguely about the need for a "culture of accountability," but these men were simply trying to make their village function —getting decent drinking water that comes out of the pump at the same hour every day...
...The Sankar family owns thousands...
...I dragged my feet back to the hotel and braced myself for another day of frustating phone calls...
...I returned to Georgetown, started phoning around and was soon exhausted...
...Guyana, a lush patch of land sitting under sea level, was reclaimed by the Dutch and their ingenious canals...
...It's this division, this history, that prevents Guyana from developing a democratic culture and trust in political institutions...
...I asked...
...But surrounding them were the murkier waters of the party...
...The 1992 elections were monitored by the Carter Center, and the People's Progressive/Civic party was declared victorious, having garnered roughly 54 percent of the vote—almost all Indian...
...His writings are sold everywhere in Guyana: his autobiography, The West on Trial, his defense of his political record, Forbidden Freedom, his pamphlets and stapled Xeroxes of his speeches...
...By the mid-seventies, Guyana had become a place of crime, shady dealings, and "choke-and-rob" gangsters stalking people on the streets of Georgetown...
...Cheddi Jagan ascended the podium and was lavished with garlands from three young girls before launching into his speech...
...One rasta dies and another springs up...
...I couldn't tell if this was an expression of concern or a threat...
...He was less engaging and personal than I'd hoped...
...Janet Jagan giggled, remarking that Cheddi had never been the one in the family to take care of the money...
...He summarized the achievements of his administration...
...James, and Michael Manley (who coincidentally died a day after Jagan...
...Although the PPP won again in 1956, the British considered Burnham the less dangerous choice and were leery of DISSENT / Summer 1998 17 Jagan, who unabashedly looked to the Soviet Union and later Cuba as political models...
...Gone are the days of PNC and their incompetent government...
...0 N MY last evening I attended an informal "bottomhouse" meeting in Buxton village, a very poor black area that has witnessed terrible violence and unrest over the years...
...Finally, the next day, Jagan's widow, Janet Jagan, got on the radio and said to the country: "It's time...
...We have survived...
...When Jagan first came into office, he called on overseas Guyanese to repatriate, invest in the country...
...they might have been on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, with their homeboy jeans and hightops and New York T-shirts...
...The entire time, I was uneasy, not sure if this was safe for a woman...
...Sam's anger was palpable—he barely touched his drink, and he had an air of agitation and paranoia about the current government...
...Everyone knew its elections were rigged—even "overseas Guyanese" could vote...
...For others, it meant more of the same in a country dominated by two racialized parties and two charismatic personalities...
...On the way out, we talked about whether the country was doing better...
...Despairing of a frank interview, I nearly shut off the tape recorder...
...Though the two parties espoused almost identical political policies, the heady days of racial cooperation were over...
...Yet even this transition is being led by an icon of the past...
...why the crowds were so immense, the outpourings lavish with emotion...
...The feelings of nationalism and patriotism in Guyana are gone...
...There's a saying in the Caribbean," he laughed...
...He'd raised salaries as high as possible under the austere conditions— roughly 15 percent since 1993...
...I was depressed, listless...
...East Indians will rewrite it from a position of capital...
...Africans do not have sustainable communities because we have not gathered capital...
...Guyana's population is roughly 55 percent Indian, 35 percent African, along with smaller numbers of Portuguese, Chinese, and Amerindians...
...For Sam, the history of the country boiled down to race: the story of a larger, richer Indian bloc threatening an imperiled African community dependent on the state for its livelihood...
...Fifty years of resistance, we have endured...
...An era is about to pass," I was told many times...
...Our human social index is way down...
...During the Burnham years, nearly half of the Guyanese population settled overseas —in the last decade, this tiny country was responsible for the fourth largest immigrant group in New York City...
...Politics in Guyana continues to be about family: like aunts and uncles dwelling on an old, painful family feud, Guyanese rehash the dates of political betrayals as if they happened yesterday...
...The benches were packed with families, while in the back teenage boys were whooping it up...
...It reminded them of the vacuum of leadership their deaths would leave...
...There was a sense of serene prosperity in this part of the country: children bicycling home, pots clattering in the kitchen, people calling on the road...
...In its place was a rough wood shack, a new welding shop...
...It was a painful story, yet it gave me a telling image of Guyana during the bad political years: these proud Indian aunts, trapped in another era with their colonial airs, hostage to their wreck of a house as it was looted and destroyed around them...
...So the concept of a country doesn't exist...
...In 1985, when Burnham died, inflation was a raging 70 percent, Gross Domestic Product growth a laughable .4 percent, and the government couldn't pay its bills...
...We landed in the Sankars' complex in Essequibo, where the sorting machines hummed with efficiency...
...How are you going to get an underpaid civil servant to police a rice magnate...
...I realized that he saw me as an Americanized Indo-Guyanese...
...of acres of rice fields in two different parts of the country and a major mill in Essequibo...
...BEFORE MEETING with Janet Jagan, I was nervous...
...The story I learned was disturbing...
...THE NEXT day I flew with Beni Sankar to see his rice-growing and -milling operations...
...So he doesn't have any money to gamble...
...for the next twenty-eight years, the PNC would rule through rigged elections...
...Like the Jews in America...
...The speeches were stiff, old, party-style exhortations, as if this were a revival meeting of apparatchiks...
Vol. 45 • July 1998 • No. 3
