Professor David Dabydeen recalls late former president Janet Jagan an engaging woman with a passion for politics and a love of the arts, in a tribute to her.

In a press release, Dabydeen said he met Jagan in November 1992 through her husband the late Dr Cheddi Jagan who had just been elected president. He said over the years they maintained a close friendship and “she became a friend, indeed like a mother to me.”

Dabydeen said during their many conversations on their shared love of the arts, Jagan had expressed an appreciation for Chekhov. She also spoke of Guyanese and Caribbean writers Martin Carter, Jan Carew, Wilson Harris, VS Naipaul and Derek Walcott and others she engaged with since the 1940s. “It was my privilege to listen to her talking about her meetings with Edna Manley, Phyllis Allfrey and other pioneers of Caribbean creativity,” he said, adding that her support of the arts was fierce.

This later led to the efforts she made for Castellani House to become the location of the National Gallery of Art and her work there as a board member.

Dabydeen said too he “had a huge admiration for her passion for books and paintings,” noting that Jagan had also authored several books of children’s short stories and had edited an anthology of Guyanese writing. “Janet Jagan believed that the reconstruction of Guyana was bound up not only with political reform but with a literary, artistic and intellectual renaissance. As such she was a politician of vision,” he said. “[B]ut for now I wish to remember, with profound gratitude, the insights she gave me into the unfolding of West Indian literature from the 1940s, and the inspiration she provided for my own writing,” the professor said.

Added to that, Dabydeen said to him she was not a sombre matriarch, “for over the years there was much shared laughter, gossip and irreverence, and the odd cigarette and glass of Baileys.” He said as much as she loved politics and books her life was abundant.