Incidental Iconoclasm
Ruel Johnson reviews Frank Birlbalsingh’s Oral History of the PPP
Guyana Chronicle
May 20, 2007
An Oral History – despite Birbalsingh's clear morally-inspired bias towards Cheddi Jagan, the betrayed man, the wronged political hero – represents a first step in the construction of an objective historiography in Guyana, granted if it is objectivity by default.
WHEN Professor Frank Birbalsingh launched his newest book three weeks ago, there was an almost apologetic tone which pervaded the entire ceremony.
Chairperson of the event, Ameena Gafoor spoke of Birbalsingh's commitment to truth first, as an academic, and that an author must look at all sides of the coin.
Academic Al Creighton, in his brief remarks, described the book – a compilation of 27 interviews conducted by Birbalsingh over a period of some years – as "courageous".
And then there is Birbalsingh's own introduction to the book which states in part,
"…although one may sympathise with the genuine feelings of pain and frustration over past political failures in Guyana, the political trauma of the Jagan-Burnham era will not simply be wished away: it must be faced squarely, analysed impartially, and understood, especially in its historical and sociological dimensions, before it can be exorcised. Nothing could be further from the purpose of these interviews than to inflict pain by conjuring up the remembered trauma of previous failure in their record of modern, Guyanese political history."
A thorough reading of the heftily titled The People's Progressive Party of Guyana: 1950-1992: An Oral History would yield a probable cause for such premature apologias. To understand why however, the reader would have to look at the principal underlying trait of Guyana's post-Independence historiography.
There has been relatively little written about post-Independence Guyanese history relative to the scope and depth of all that happened during the past fifty years; and precious little of what is written can have any serious claim to historical objectivity or even accuracy.
Our historiographic bent has been either towards deification or deconstruction of the two key figures: L.F.S. Burnham and Dr. Cheddi Jagan. A recent example would be Dr. Baytoram Ramharack's book, Against the Grain: Balram Singh Rai and the Politics of Guyana. Published by Chakra Publishing House – a Trinidad-based company whose major focus is the marketing of Hindu nationalist literature – the book is at once a juvenile academic attempt to knock Jagan off of one particular pedestal, while proposing Rai in his place.
Frank Birbalsingh, in contrast to Ramharack for example, is that rare thing in Guyanese political analysis: mostly objective. He is arguably Guyana's best public academic, and has compiled and written interviews, reviews and articles on a wide-range of subjects, from Indo-Caribbean history and literature. With An Oral History, Birbalsingh has put together a book no one on any side of Guyana's divisive political arena can embrace without reservation as their own. This includes the ostensible subject of the book, the ruling PPP, something seemingly underscored by the fact that no senior cabinet member was present at the book's launching.
There is the old adage that one should not judge a book by its cover. An Oral History is a physically bland publication, the cover – featuring the PPP's still-living founding members Cheddi and Janet Jagan, and Ashton Chase – giving a misleading symbolism by dividing the three pictures by a cheaply done graphic representation of a rip.
While Chase has long given up politics, it seems more to have been a fading away from it than an actual rift with the party. And there has been no historical documentation of any division – personal or political – between the Jagans.
Given the content of the book, the subject it explores, and the period which it covers, L.F.S. Burnham would have been a more suitable substitution for Chase, and the exclusion of Mrs. Jagan would have had a negligible effect.
The book purports to cover forty years but in truth, the focus is roughly on the first fifteen years or so. Birbalsingh's major concern seems to be an interrogation of the causes of the split within the original PPP in 1955, an interrogation geared both at confirming the historically established villains – the Burnham, Britain and America – and emphasising the hero of the era, Dr. Jagan.
Later interviews touch upon the time Cheddi Jagan led the PPP in Opposition, but they are less about the PPP's actions than the actions of CARICOM leaders like Eric Williams to provide support for the charismatic regionalist Burnham and their side-lining of the “legitimate” political leader of Guyana.
The Cheddi Jagan of Frank Birbalsingh's ultimately emerges as the Father of the Nation as so many in Guyana believe – the key individual force behind the anti-colonial movement of the 40s, 50s and 60s'; but he is a surrogate parent at best, a deeply flawed heroic figure whose principles and pragmatism – the two inherent and often conflicting qualities of any good politician – never quite reach a workable balance.
For example, Jagan is seen as principled enough to be unwilling to hide his Soviet sympathies while campaigning for support in McCarthy era America; it could be said in fact that he flaunted it, if only in good faith.
On the other hand, he is also seen as clandestinely receiving Soviet financial and technical support – his young party unable to survive and function otherwise, without realising that the Soviet Union's Cold War arch-enemy, the United States could be even more clandestinely supporting his opponents as well.
"I do not believe that Dr. Jagan's adherence to Marxism/Leninism," says Rupert Roopnaraine in a 1996 interview, "was either a flaw or some kind of grand error. But there was a tactical problem for the early anti-colonial movement…In the 1950s, the problem for Dr. Jagan was one of pragmatism: how to deal with the oppressor in terms of his Marxist/Leninist ideology?
In this respect, Dr. Jagan's view has always been doctrinaire, and I think that if there is a weakness in his politics, it has to do with his inability to ground international science in indigenous experience. There is a real sense in him of an exotic ideology imposed on domestic reality, and where it did not fit, he trimmed the reality, not the ideology."
Or as co-founder of the party, Ashton Chase, put it during his interview: "You couldn't jump straight from colonialism to communism. Those who thought they could, I think, made a colossal error of tactics in the matter. The tactics were hopelessly wrong."
That "colossal error", due to his role of leader of the PPP, was ultimately Jagan's. While committed to the working class, and the belief that there lay an inevitable ascendancy of the masses against the oppressor, his conception of exactly who that oppressor was seemed to be rooted in the colonial without any sense the role of the neo-colonial within the larger scheme of things.
The irony inherent in this strengthened when considering the fact that his more politically successful nemesis, Burnham, spent his political gestation period within the womb of the colonial power, while Jagan himself spent his own within the belly of the beast that ultimately defeated him, America.
There is also ample evidence of Jagan, the would-be national working class hero who was transformed out of the necessity of survival into becoming the ethnic leader. It is well-known that Jagan vehemently opposed the racist agenda of Balram Singh Rai, and even his staunchest critics do not assign any racist intent on Jagan's part.
Yet almost everyone is in agreement to some degree that he succumbed to the same cynical resort to ethnic support that Rai espoused and was ejected from the PPP for.
Inherent herein is the central fable of Guyanese politics: that of the national leader donning ethnic trappings in order to survive within our tribal political culture, and ultimately finding himself trapped by ethnicity. This arguably is the single greatest tragedy emerging from between the lines of this book, since it goes to the heart of the dilemma Guyana has found itself in for the past half century.
While An Oral History goes to great lengths to underscore Jagan's unparalleled contribution to Guyana's independence, it also presents an unfiltered majority consensus view of the former President as at times myopic, naive and a slave chained to the very dogma which formed the basis for his commitment to the liberation of Guyana's poor.
In short, it presents him as human. Herein is the incidental iconoclasm of An Oral History; Frank Birbalsingh has achieved, through his at times overwhelming sympathy for the late Dr. Jagan, a far greater erosion of the myth of the independence leader than a thousand hostile Ramharacks could have ever done.
Despite the explanations he has offered in his introduction, this will not be, as has been stated before in this article, a popular book with the converted on any side of the political divide. Those who condemn Jagan will see, despite his shortcomings, an admirable heroism. Those who despise Burnham will see, despite his destructive ambition, a man more ultimately aware than anyone else of the global context in which Guyana existed at the time of Independence.
With regards to the interviewees, An Oral History is a book full of other ironic surprises, as revealing about the persons interviewed as it is about the subjects they touch upon. Current WPA co-leader Rupert Roopnaraine – certainly not a great friend of the present PPP-led government – is full of praises for Dr. Jagan's role as the sole catalyst for the fledgling democracy movement in the forties.
On the other hand, one of the most vitriolic interviews comes not from a political warrior of Guyana's turbulent pre-Independence era, but from someone presumably above the fray of it all. In a 1997 interview Anglican Bishop Randolph George says of former President and then leader of the Opposition Desmond Hoyte:
"Hoyte has nothing to offer this country, as far as I'm concerned. The sooner he faded out the better."
And of the anti-PPP protests at the time, "We're all human beings. We never get it right. We go to extremes. This is a misuse of freedom. Can't do much about that."
Yet one of the threads running through the book is the role of the two political dominant religions at the time, the Anglican and Catholic faiths, in fighting the communist threat posed by the PPP under Jagan's leadership. Several interviews mention the role of Bishop George's predecessor, then Anglican Bishop of Guyana, John Alan Knight's role in ousting Jagan from the premiership through his close friendship with Governor Sir Alfred Savage.
The key failing in this book is the title, as it relates to what's actually between the two covers. A more apt title would have been something in the vein of, Post-mortem of Treachery: An Analysis of the Betrayals of Dr. Cheddi B. Jagan. Because that is what the book is essentially about – Jagan's futility in the face of betrayal by Burnham, Rai, Kwayana, the British, the Americans, the Anglicans, the Catholics, the CARICOM member countries and a host of other individuals and entities.
The overwhelming focus on the actions taken by and against Dr. Jagan obscures the fact that the party had other executive members who were also directly involved in the decision making process in the period covered – in fact it largely takes for granted the existence of the PPP outside of or separate from Jagan.
It also obscures the fact that Jagan's status as a political leader did not exist in a vacuum, but within the particular context of an ethnic support base made of real people with their own collective ideas about how the party should function or not.
To sum up, An Oral History – despite Birbalsingh's clear morally-inspired bias towards Cheddi Jagan, the betrayed man, the wronged political hero – represents a first step in the construction of an objective historiography in Guyana, granted if it is an objectivity by default. This book is not so much a definitive history as it is a sourcebook from which historical analysis can be culled.
In this sense it is, for this writer, the most valuable work on Guyanese political history that has emerged in a very long time - perhaps ever.
Somewhere within both the righteous self-justification of the Jagans and the not so plausible deniability of interviewees of Burnham era functionaries like Cedric Joseph and Robert Moore; somewhere within the intimately informed analysis of Lloyd Best and Ashton Chase, and the retrospective opinion of Nanda Gopaul; somewhere within the incisive analysis of Rupert Roopnaraine, and the academically gilt bias of Rahim Bacchus; lies the truth.
That's more than can be said of the vast majority of work claiming to objectively chronicle Guyana's post-Independence history.
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