[Marxism] Janet Jagan - Thunder in Guyana IMPORTANT

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The story of Janet Jagan, who together with her husband
Cheddi Jagan, moved to Guyana and successfully organized a
progressive political movement. They were able to win office
and hold it until overthrown twice, first by the British who
were then colonial rulers, and later by the actions of the
CIA, whose de-stabililzation efforts we read about in the
blurbs. It looks like a thoroughly worthwhile presentation.

>From everything  I've read, Washington's destabilization
efforts in Guyana were of the same character as those it
successfully engaged in against the democratically-elected
government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 which were
echoed as well in Venezuela by the US-backed opposition in
recent years. I hope that someone can tape this program so
it can be shared and played for those who can't see it when
it's on the air, like myself here in Cuba!

It it's going to be broadcast in Los Angeles Saturday night 
and a schedule for other showing elsewhere can be found here:
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/thunderinguyana/film.html 

And I might add also that, though I know next to nothing
about Guyana, the fact that the Jagans were able both to win
office and to re-win it twice again after being thrown out
by foreign colonialists, and that Janet Jagan was able to be
elected president and after her husband's death means that
her life and experiences have a lot from which those who
wish to fight successfully for a better world can learn,
in terms of how to campaign and fight 


Walter Lippmann, CubaNews
http://www.walterlippmann.com 
===========================================================

To:     portside@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Two Reviews of Suzanne Wasserman, Thunder in Guyana
Date:           Feb 23, 2005 10:13 PM

Two Reviews of Suzanne Wasserman, Thunder in Guyana
1. The Nation
2. New York Times
===
In Radical Matrimony

by BAZ DREISINGER

The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050307&s=dreisinger

March 7, 2005


Suzanne Wasserman's documentary Thunder in Guyana,
which airs on PBS's Independent Lens series at 10 pm on
February 22, is the first in-depth look at Janet Jagan,
former president of Guyana. Attribute that to the
subject's obscurity: Guyana is roughly the size of
Britain, but as an economically strapped country whose
population grazes 800,000, it's a blip on America's
radar.

Or attribute it to the subject's enormity: Jagan's life
story is so much larger than life, it's almost too
cinematic for cinema. That story delivers dramatic
narrative tropes--rebellion, revolution, racial
tension--in operatic proportions. It begins in 1943,
when Janet Rosenberg, a pretty Jewish girl from
Chicago, immigrates to the land of her new husband,
Cheddi Jagan, the son of East Indian sugar workers in
what was then the colony of British Guiana. It ends in
1997, when 77-year-old Janet Jagan takes the helm of
what is now Guyana--to become the only American-born
woman elected president of any country.

Guyana's story, like Jagan's, is familiar yet
fantastic, at once a typical postcolonial ordeal of
independence and creolization, and a grotesque
hyperbole of these things, punctuated by crises--race
riots, rigged elections, political paranoia--that make
our 2000 election woes feel like, well, a blip on the
radar.

Considering the grand scale of her subject, first-time
filmmaker Wasserman--a cousin of Janet Jagan's and
associate director of the CUNY Graduate Center's Gotham
Center for New York City History--had her work cut out
for her. Recounting the life of a politician is itself
a challenge, because it means striking a compelling
balance between two narratives that threaten to
overwhelm each other: history and (in Jagan's case) her
story, public and private. When these two halves of the
saga are as sensational as they are here, achieving
this balance is more than a challenge; it's an all-out
battle between competing narratives. Thunder in Guyana
navigates that battle, but just barely. Its goal is
lofty, particularly for a fifty-minute documentary: to
give us public and private--not just Janet Jagan but
Janet Rosenberg.

Set during Guyana's 1997 election, Thunder in Guyana is
a deftly edited fusion of newssreel footage, photos and
interviews with Janet Jagan, her two children and her
political allies. The film is narrated by Wasserman,
who embarks on an odyssey to flesh out the cousin she
knows via weathered photographs and family gossip. It
lands her in Georgetown, Guyana, where Jagan pilots her
campaign headquarters with grandmotherly repose.
Wasserman voices the skepticism that her cousin clearly
lacks: "I wondered if the Guyanese people would really
elect a 77-year-old American-born Jewish woman for
president." The film is thus framed as a question: How
did Rosenberg become Jagan, and how did Guiana become
Guyana?

It began, we learn, as a love story. Beautiful,
athletic, fiercely intellectual Janet Rosenberg met
dental student Cheddi Jagan during her college years in
Chicago. Both were fervently committed to Marxist
politics and, soon, to each other. To Janet's family,
Cheddi was a triple blow--"a foreigner, a person who
wasn't white, a person who wasn't Jewish," Jagan says--
but by 1943, an undeterred Janet ("nothing much
frightens me," she shrugs) had married Cheddi and was
off to rural British Guiana, where she found her
rightful place: not in the kitchen with the women but
in political trade unions with the men. In 1950 Janet,
Cheddi and London-educated lawyer Forbes Burnham
launched the People's Progressive Party (PPP), which
propounded ardent socialism in a newsletter titled
Thunder.

The PPP represented more than national unity. A country
that naturally confounds categories--geographically, it
is South American; culturally and politically, it is
Caribbean--Guyana is known as "the land of six peoples"
because it's a postcolonial pilau, born of Amerindian
natives, European colonizers, African slaves and
indentured servants from China, Portugal and East
India, imported to work the plantations after Britain
abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833. An alliance
between the Indo-Guyanese Cheddi and the Afro-Guyanese
Burnham was thus an alliance of Guyana's principal
ethnic groups. Although Janet eluded any such category,
in 1953--when Cheddi was elected the first Marxist
leader in the Western Hemisphere--she became Guyana's
Minister and Deputy Speaker of Parliament. In the
American press, she was likened to Eva Perón and
vilified as "the ablest Communist organizer in the
Western Hemisphere," adept at spreading "propaganda
among the hungry, ignorant natives."

As Cheddi's story takes center stage, then, Janet's is
never just its footnote: A bright-red expatriate, she
attracted all the attention her husband did. It was not
the right kind of attention: 133 days after Cheddi
assumed office, Winston Churchill sent troops into
Georgetown to topple a so-called Communist regime. 

It was the end of a golden era, because it was followed 
by a racial rift that now defines Guyanese life: Burnham
moved far to the right of Jagan, founding an opposition
party--the People's National Congress (PNC)--that
appealed directly to Afro-Guyanese voters, exploiting
their fears of Indo-Guyanese domination. Gang-style
political warfare erupted in most Caribbean countries,
but thanks to its uniquely diverse population, Guyana
(like the similarly populated Trinidad and Suriname)
added race to the mix and bred a monster: apanjaat, or
divisive racial politics. Afro-Guyanese endorsed the
PNC; Indo-Guyanese stood with the PPP; exceptions to
that rule were scarce.

The US government, for its part, regarded apanjaat as a
way of weakening Cheddi Jagan, and worked covertly to
encourage this shameless race-baiting. Re-elected in
both 1957 and 1961, he confronted a hostile media in
Britain and the United States, where his socialist
convictions made cold war leaders shudder. "Where do
you stand on this fundamental division in the world
today, between Communism and Western democracy?" an
O'Reilly-like anchor asks him on Meet the Press, in
language eerily reminiscent of President Bush's
evocation of a world starkly divided between the forces
of "freedom" and those of "terror," between us and
them.

While the PPP's mission statement--"to build a just
socialist society, in which the industries of the
country shall be socially and democratically owned"--
was clear enough, Cheddi refused to take sides in the
cold war: "I don't like this sort of either Communist
or West, you know? I think this tendency toward black
or white is a tendency which can lead to a lot of
harm," he tells a reporter. America, however, turned a
deaf ear to this reasoning, determined as it was to
avoid another defeat in the Caribbean after the Bay of
Pigs. So the CIA committed what Kennedy adviser and
historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later admitted was "a
great injustice" against Cheddi Jagan, funding strikes
and race riots in Georgetown in an effort to
destabilize his government. (Schlesinger's apology,
delivered to Jagan at the Nation offices in 1990, was
the subject of the magazine's June 4 lead editorial
that year.) As the violence spread, scores of people
died, Guyana's economy was crippled, a state of
emergency was declared and, by tweaking Guyana's
electoral system (Britain replaced popular with
proportional representation), the West got its wish: In
1964 Burnham became Guyana's president. And in 1966,
with the country still in a state of emergency, Guyana
became independent.

Burnham is hardly seen in Thunder in Guyana--no PNC
advocates are interviewed--but he is the film's
villain. After taking office he turned sharply to the
left and, much to America's dismay, out-Jaganed Jagan,
nationalizing the bulk of Guyana's industries. As
Guyana became the second-poorest nation in the Western
Hemisphere, the PNC retained its power by rigging
elections until the 1992 presidential race, when the
Carter Center arrived in Georgetown as monitors--and
Cheddi Jagan ended Burnham's run.

Janet Jagan ran for office after her husband died of a
heart attack, but the results were so disputed her
victory was not declared until days after the election.
The "eureka" moment of victory was thus never quite
there for Wasserman's camera to capture; after winning
Jagan heads home to rest. Still, her level-headed
triumph is the crescendo of the film. Her presidency
may have been short-lived--because of health problems,
she stepped down after twenty months--but it was the
climax of Janet Rosenberg's transformation into Janet
Jagan.

Such is the plot of Thunder in Guyana--and it is hardly
impartial. In fact, there were gaffes on both sides of
the political fence: Afro- and Indo-Guyanese parties
relentlessly used their respective realms of
influence--the public-service sector and the
agricultural sector--to sabotage each other's agendas.
And while Burnham was indeed a corrupt dictator, he is
not Guyana's principal villain. That dubious honor goes
to race itself: a synthetic system of biases that
Guyanese and Western politicians consciously milked,
engaging in what Cheddi Jagan, in his book Forbidden
Freedom, called "the familiar imperialist game of
divide and rule." Professor Ralph Premdas concludes his
study of Guyana with a grim diagnosis: The country
suffered--and still suffers--from "ethnically inspired
collective insanity."

It is a surreal plot twist that at the crux of this
racial "insanity" sits a woman who confounds race
altogether. Who--what--was Janet Jagan? To the Western
media she was a dangerous Jew misidentified by
journalists as a relative of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg. To Burnham she was a "stupid American" (he
allegedly addressed her as such during sessions of
Parliament). To many Indo-Guyanese she was simply
white: "They used to call me a blue-eyed bouchie,"
Jagan recalls ("bouchie" is a brother's wife;
"brother," here, is Cheddi). Rolling her eyes, Jagan
shrugs. "I'm not even blue-eyed."

It's one of the few moments in the film where Jagan
addresses her racial identity; another is prompted by
an Associated Press reporter who directly inquires
about it. Jagan replies, "I don't know if people see
white when they look at me--except, you know, the
diehard politicians. But maybe I am living in a dream
world.... I don't feel anything like being a minority."
She pauses and adds that perhaps her identification
with the underdog was a product of growing up Jewish in
America.

It's a plausible explanation, as well as a familiar
one. Janet Jagan is one in a long line of Jews--from
1920s-era musicians George Gershwin and Mezz Mezzrow to
civil rights martyrs Michael Schwerner and Andrew
Goodman and hip-hop Hebrews the Beastie Boys--who have,
in various degrees and contexts, identified cross-
racially. How such crossover figures negotiate the
conflicting facets of their identities--how, for
instance, a Jewish-American woman feels about being, as
daughter-in-law Nadine Jagan puts it, "more Guyanese
than most Guyanese"--is a profound issue that Thunder
in Guyana could have probed.

It doesn't, perhaps because Wasserman's interviews with
her cousin, more informational than emotional,
emphasize the public over the private, history over her
story. We learn little about Janet and Cheddi's
relationship, and only slightly more about Janet's rift
with her Jewish family: "Unfortunately," states Jagan,
speaking flatly of her father's death, "my husband and
my father never met." Jagan seems uninterested in
reflecting on the emotional dimension of her cross-
identification--which alone could indicate how deep
this identification runs: Analyzing one's
identification with the "other" (as Mezzrow did in his
memoir Really the Blues) means standing apart from that
group; taking this identification for granted, by
contrast, suggests a sense of peace with one's cultural
crossover and, perhaps, with the inherently vexed
nature of race and identity.

The film's only reading of Janet Jagan's racial
identity comes from Nadine Jagan, who suggests a rich
tension at the heart of Thunder in Guyana. "She fell in
love with [Cheddi], and they had a common goal."
Jagan's daughter-in-law shrugs. "That's all they saw."

The cruel irony of Janet Jagan's story is that her
personal narrative and her public one--her story and
Guyana's story--are at odds. Janet may have fallen in
love with Cheddi, and from then on seen cause over
color. But her beloved Guyana could never do the same;
it evolved into a nation that privileged color over
cause. In Janet's triumphant personal saga, politics
trumps race; in Guyana's tragic one, race trumps
politics. And though the latter saga is the more
disquieting one, it is also, in our race-fixed world,
the more universal and familiar one--and thus the
easiest one to recount. To plumb the depths of Jagan's
personal story is an altogether different coup, one
that Thunder in Guyana comes tantalizingly close to
achieving.

==

TV REVIEW |

'THUNDER IN GUYANA' A Radical Journey From Chicago to
Guyana

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

The New York Times February 22, 2005
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/arts/television/22heff.html?

Wondering if you've lived up to your potential?
Consider Janet Jagan. Named Janet Rosenberg when she
was born in Chicago in 1920, she grew up in the
suburbs. At Wayne State University in Detroit, she
turned radical; she met a gallant Guyanese student,
Cheddi Jagan, in 1942. Her parents objected (her father
threatened to shoot him), but she married him anyway.

In 1943, the Jagans moved to what was then British
Guiana, became involved in labor politics and formed a
left-wing political party. Cheddi was elected chief
minister in 1953. Then they had two children, were
vilified as Communist, went to jail. Finally, after
years in and out - mostly out - of power, Cheddi Jagan
was elected president of free Guyana in 1992. When he
died of a heart attack in 1997, Janet saw her calling:
She ran for president of Guyana that year and was
elected.

The filmmaker Suzanne Wasserman, an admiring relative
(she's a daughter of Ms. Jagan's first cousin), tells
this story in "Thunder in Guyana," a presentation of
Independent Lens that appears tonight on PBS. A simple
affair, the documentary uses voice-over, casual
conversation, interviews and archival images to portray
Ms. Jagan as fearless, forthright, principled, heroic.
Though newspapers in the 1950's hinted that she was kin
to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (she wasn't) and -
alternatively - called her "the second Eva Perón," she
is portrayed as a fair-minded progressive.

Ms. Wasserman is understandably most interested in how
Ms. Jagan came to abandon her tribe, their tribe -
suburban Midwestern Jews - to fight for another people
altogether. Did she do it for love of Cheddi Jagan? One
relative says so. Or was she driven by idealism,
willfulness, defiance?

Now in her 80's and somewhat removed from her original
motives, Ms. Jagan surmises that as a Jewish woman she
might have developed sympathy for the downtrodden. But
Ms. Jagan doesn't give the explanation too much weight.
Nor does she spend much time complaining about her
parents, despite their rejection of her husband. She
remembers her mother's mah-jongg games with affection,
and regrets having missed her father's funeral. She
also wrote many conscientious letters home.

Certainly some of Ms. Jagan's willingness to take up
the cause of the Guyanese must be explained in the
universalist language of Communism. She appeared to
believe, at least at first, that liberating Guyanese
workers from slave wages was part of a larger world-
historical trend, and she and her husband were openly
Communist during much of their careers.

Though Ms. Wasserman shows clips of Cheddi Jagan facing
a malevolent are-you-or-aren't-you interrogation on
"Meet the Press," she does not ask Ms. Jagan to explain
her ideology in the present day, and that's a shame.
What did she make of the fall of the Soviet Union? What
does she think of the example of Cuba? When, if ever,
did she stop reading Marx, who had so excited her as an
undergraduate? Does she think it's a joke now? Or
dangerous? Does she think some of the old ideas can be
saved?

Communism - as theory, as explanation, as promise -
motivated so many Americans in the 20th century, and
yet today the memory of it enrages the right and
embarrasses the left. The rage and the embarrassment do
a grave disservice to history. Marxist ideology did not
define history the way believers thought it would, but
its influence on people who changed their lives, and
the lives of others in its name, is incalculable.
There's nothing like it now, and we cannot comprehend
the lives of people like Janet Jagan without it.

'Thunder in Guyana' 
Independent Lens
PBS, tonight at 10; check local listings. 

Suzanne Wasserman, director, producer and writer;
Amanda Zinoman, editor and writer; Debra Granik,
cinematography; Steve Sandberg, original score; Deborah
Shaffer, executive producer.
_______________________________________________________


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