Jennifer Clement (Connecticut, 1960) is a prominent writer and former president of Pen International, but also a valuable witness to the cultural upheaval in Mexico City and New York in the second half of the 20th century. First, in his childhood and adolescence in the Aztec capital, he meets Juan Rulfo, lives next to the house-studio of Frida Kahlo and Diego de Rivera and learns of the comings and goings between Octavio Paz and Elena Garro. Later, at the zenith of his youth, he experienced the wild rebellion and artistic effervescence of the Big Apple at the end of the 70s and 80s, with graffiti, hip-hop and breakdancing. Years during which he discovered the worldly side of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“I feel privileged because everything was random. I didn’t look for it, it came to me,” explains Clément by telephone from New York, where he is visiting, since he lives in Mexico. The author describes his life’s journey in The promised party. Kahlo, Basquiat and me (Lumen). He says that when he was one year old, his parents came to Mexico because his father was assigned to a water treatment plant. The family settled in the San Ángel neighborhood, on Palmas Street (today called Diego Rivera House), next to Kahlo and Rivera’s house-studio. Even though the Mexican painters had died a few years before his arrival, the residence “was completely filled with them,” he writes in the book.
One of Rivera’s granddaughters, Ruth María, was Clement’s first friend. Thanks to this relationship, he regularly visited the house-studio which “smells of painters’ turpentine, oil paint and cigarettes,” he wrote. She also reveals in her memoir that she found Kahlo’s small bag of hairpins; The famous artist chipped her front teeth from opening the braces with her mouth and had to repair them with gold. He never pictured himself smiling. Through the objects left on his property, he knows the artists spiritually. He met other people, like Juan Rulfo, thanks to the connections his painter mother had.
Mexico, refugee asylum
In The Promised Party, the author of novels like Ladydi (Lumen, 2014) o Armed love (Lumen, 2019) tells that the meeting between the young writer of the time and the creator of Pedro Paramo It was uncomfortable. Rulfo, in his introverted and sullen way, asked her ironically if she was an illegal alien, because for 10 years the Mexican was an immigration agent and “had never arrested a single illegal alien and remained in a state of frustration” . In addition to national intellectuals, Clement lived, through his father’s friends, with the exiles who arrived in the Mexican capital. Refugees fleeing the hunt for communists in the United States, the military governments of South America or the remnants of war in Europe. There, on Mexican soil, were the persecuted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo or the children of García Márquez.
“Mexico was an incredible place that welcomed everyone. He had so much creative and intellectual fervor. It became very exciting with so many influences, like the surrealism of André Bretón, who arrived in 1941 on the ship Captain Paul Lemerle, with more than 300 refugees on board. Among them, Wifredo Lam, André Masson and Claude Lévi-Strauss,” explains Clément. Among all this mixture of celebrities, there are the colors and smells of Mexico and therefore of Latin America: the crisscrossed electric and tram cables that frame the clouds, the walls of the houses crowned with fragments of broken glass or the sentinel nocturnal which It whistles every hour during the night.
“I always bet on Mexico. The book is an odyssey, but I’ll come back to it. As a writer, my decision about my destination was Mexico,” she said in Spanish during the interview. To arrive at this certainty, he first experienced up close the glamour, art and bohemianism of New York, but also its violence, its drug addiction and the fall of his friends to AIDS. In 1978, at the age of 18, he left Latin America and traveled to the city that never sleeps to make the most of the 80s. Under the skyscrapers of Manhattan, she danced the “music of revolt » at the headquarters of the machinists’ union, saw the emergence of graffiti with messages of subversion in the metro and was encouraged by the protests of the Guerrilla Girls, who, wearing gorilla masks, entered museums by requiring women artists. There was one short-lived rule among all: “Always share drugs, cigarettes and lipstick.” »
Basquiat, Warhol and AIDS
Along the way, Jean-Michael Basquiat, Warhol, Keith Haring, graffiti artist Dondi and conceptual artist Peter McGough appeared. The closest to her was the former, described as the last great American painter or the most successful African-American artist in history, with paintings currently selling at auction for more than 100 million euros. To Basquiat and his stormy relationship with Suzanne Mallouk, Clément has already dedicated his most successful book to them: Basquiat’s widow. “In this book, I had already approached this New York, but with different eyes. They weren’t my stories and there was a moment when I realized I had to write these moments. My friends, the world of graffiti artists born in the Bronx and the East Village and how I experienced AIDS. Because I feel that this moment of rebellion, of revolution, of great freedom ends with AIDS, nothing will ever be the same again,” says the author.
The image Warhol showed him when he was introduced to him, through his friend Hal Ludacer, is striking. He writes: “I met Warhol one evening at Studio 54. He greeted Hal, slipped his hand down the front of his pants and groped him, which he did whenever he wanted (…) He really harassed Hal, as if his fame and fortune gave him the right to do so. “We stayed away from Andy as much as possible.” These eccentric artists have so much weight in The promised party like the less famous, the others who marked Clément’s life, including his nanny Chona. “I was their alphabet since I could neither read nor write. I told him that the bus goes to the center or that these lemons are very expensive. “He began to see the world with me,” he notes in the book.
Chona is one of the many anonymous women who parade between the pages of the text. People who suffered in silence in a particularly oppressive context. Without resorting to explicit denunciation, Clément recounts the oppression experienced by the women of his time, whether close or famous. Her friend Suzanne was ashamed to say that she was a painter for fear of criticism from her male colleagues; the deaths of Nancy Spungen and Joan Vollmer had their partners, Sid Vicious and William Burroughs respectively, as suspects; and the street harassment she herself experienced was normalized by its frequency and impunity. “In busy places, like markets or squares, men would come too close and whisper unpleasant words in my ear. The constant contact, as if I belonged to myself and my body was that of others, was something normal,” he writes in The promised party.
