Elena Poniatowska: The Mexican Polish Writer & Anti-Princess
La Poni, Polaquita-Poleczka, Elenísima: Elena Poniatowska – the Mexican writer with a surname that sounds oddly familiar in Polish circles, was born on 19th May 1937. Marcin Żurek, a specialist on Latin America and a translator of Poniatowska's work, writes about the amazing life of this Polish Mexican anti-princess.
Poniatowska is a princess of Polish, Italian, French, Russian, American and Mexican pedigree. She is often somewhat embarrassed by her own, as she puts it, ‘absurd nobility’, and she looks for redemption for her socialite ancestors in caring for the disadvantaged, so tortured by their cursed history. For centuries, they were silent – at most arousing the limited interest of anthropologists – and she has helped to give them a voice.
She writes about the common Mexico better than most local writers. Whilst other authors troubled themselves with the idle lives of the nouveau riche, busy misappropriating the ideals of the Mexican Revolution, she was busy turning México popular , with its neglected streets and rundown neighbourhoods, into poetry.
Poniatowska's writing never becomes Writing, separated from the world at large. No merciless secretary protects her from the tenacity of fame, stands in the way of her Peace of Mind, devises intricate excuses which would free her from overwhelming, yet insignificant distractions. She is too close to the people to just lock herself in her office and tell the housekeeper to keep out intruders with the universal: ‘She is out, and I don’t know when she’ll be back.’
And so, Poniatowska ends up running to the pick up the phone, which keeps disrupting the rhythm of her inspiration at maddeningly short intervals – ‘will she give an interview?’, ‘will she do a reading?’, ‘will she support this?’, ‘will she sign that?’, ‘will she protest against that other thing’, ‘will she agree to this, that and the other?’ She will indeed agree, support and sign. She may just add, with innocent and harmless annoyance: ‘¡Ay qué lata! ’ – Oh! Woe is me!
Horrible people, nice people
Elena Poniatowska, during an interview with Spanish press agency Agencia EFE in Madrid, Spain, 29 January 2015, photo: Javier Lizón / EFE / PAP The accident of birth did not seem to be setting Elena up for the role of a ‘writer committed to the cause’. Niña bien , this girl from a good family, was to shine in social circles who knew full well about her dazzling aristocratic lineage of 300-plus relatives, who comprised an aristocratic clique built up by the provincial complexes at the height of pretentious vanity.
Poniatowska’s elitist mother was astounded to find that her teenage daughter was bored of etiquette and fascinated with the ‘riffraff’, the ‘horrible people’ who populated the world, making it unbearable – and forcing the ‘nice people’ (as the higher classes were known in Mexico) to wall themselves in in their imposing residences.
Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amelie Paula Dolores Poniatowska came into the world on 19th May 1932 in Paris. The daughter of Paula Amor and Prince Jean Poniatowski, she is 10 when she sets off for Mexico with her mother, who knew nothing of her homeland. They are running from a Europe torn apart by war, in which her father is performing heroic feats, trading his health for orders and medals.
Elizabeth Sperry Crocker, Poniatowska’s American grandmother – who was related to Benjamin Franklin – is terrified of the idea of her grandchild going off to a wild land, so far away from the civilised world, that she tries to scare her with pictures from National Geographic depicting Native Americans with human bones braided into their hair. ‘You’ll be living amongst cannibals; they’ll eat you too!’, she warns.
Only once in Mexico does Poniatowska find out that her mother is in fact, Mexican. Her great-grandfather, the wealthy landowner José María Amor y Escandón, had left the country in 1863. Bidding farewell to the San Gabriel hacienda in Morelos, which was later lost in the turmoil of the revolution, he went to Paris. Paula Amor and Jean Poniatowski met at a ball at the Rothschild residence at Place de la Concorde. A year after Elena was born, they had their second daughter Kitzia. Later, at the end of the 1940s, their son, Jan, is born – who will die tragically in a car accident at the age of 20.
Poniatowska’s mother sends her to the Windsor School, so she will learn English, while her French governess makes sure the girl’s French remains impeccable. Elena learns the contemptible language of her Mexican ancestry on the street. The influence of the family’s maid’s speech can be heard in the writer’s accent and amusing vocabulary to this day.
Poniatowska goes on to attend a Catholic school near Philadelphia, and when she returns to Mexico, she is betrothed to marry a well-suited young man, in order to create the perfect couple – something akin to an aristocratic Barbie and Ken.
Picture display
standardowy [760 px]
Elena Poniatowska (at centre), walks next to Spain's King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia (R), after receiving the Cervantes Award 2014 at Alcala de Henares University, outskirts of Madrid, Spain, 2014, photo: Fernando Villar / EFE / PAP
Elena wants to study medicine, but her parents can’t quite fathom the idea: ‘And what, pray tell, are you going to do during anatomy class with all those naked bodies?’ Even though the seeming fate of social mores should have condemned her to balls, cocktails, fashion shows and being a marvel of socialite circles, she knows that she will undermine the pretence of her elite predetermination.
She’s 20 when she starts working at the Excelsior newspaper, publishing an endless expanse of interviews which she remembers with her typical self-mockery: ‘I asked such ludicrous questions that I made the readers laugh’.
In 1954, she publishes her first book – neither a novel, nor a short story, but rather an etude of youthful fantasy – entitled Lilus Kikus . The reviews are enthusiastic: ‘it’s a book which no writer who is entering the world of literature would be ashamed of’, while others believe that ‘in reading a debut, rarely do we have the certainty we are dealing with a great writer’.
Elena leaves for Paris. Thanks to the connections of her grandfather, André Poniatowski, she conducts dozens of interviews with the greatest stars of the time: Jean Marais, Jean Cocteau, Françoise Sagan, Grace Kelly, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Rubinstein and Louis de Broglie. She gains a reputation for being ‘the brightest young Mexican journalist’ – although some, incorrectly, maintain that ‘Elena Poniatowska is a pseudonym for a moustachioed writer of an advanced age’.
In 1957, alongside Carlos Fuentes, she receives a stipend from the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (Mexican Writers’ Centre), and it is the writers’ scholarship which convinces the state treasury’s bean counters to believe that the money is spent on promising talent. She manages to write some light-hearted diaries based on the lives of the upper classes, but she will soon completely dedicate herself to the fortunes of those cast aside from the annals of history.
Picture display
standardowy [760 px]
Elena Poniatowska during an interview at her home in Mexico City, Mexico,16 April 2014, photo: Sashenka Gutierrez / EPA / PAP
Halfway through the 1960s, during a visit to the Black Palace of Lecumberri – where she is visiting the imprisoned leaders of a railway strike – Poniatowska meets Josefina Bórquez, an illiterate woman who kept the world at a distance through unrelenting salvos of filth. Josefina reveals the hell and capital mystery of the underworld and is transformed by Poniatowska into Jesusa Palancares in one of the most impressive Mexican stories ever: Hasta No Verte Jesús Mío (Here’s to You, Jesusa).
The writer asks Jesusa about her pitiable present and a past that sounds like something from an adventure film, about the revolution ‘which never gave anybody a thing’, about the brutal world which thwarts us ‘to bring new enslavement’. Jesusa is against the idea of recording their conversations – that ‘damn thing’ is stealing her electricity. Elena gives up on the tape recorder and runs home to write everything down.
These meetings convey, to the accompaniment of Jesusa’s scolding mockery, all the poverty, hunger, ugliness and wrongs of this epoch in Mexico. As she looks upon the world underneath the veneer of bourgeois prosperity and the canon of customs that mask the tragic reality of the masses, the Polish-French girl loses what remains of her naive light-heartedness. Later on, she would comment:
Jesusa took me by the hand into the world of true poverty, where you have to carry water carefully so as not to lose a single drop, where people steal electricity, and where chickens lay eggs without shells because they never see the sunlight.
The book becomes famous very quickly, and garners praise: ‘one of the most outstanding Mexican stories of all time’, ‘a masterpiece you can admire a thousand times’, ‘pure poetry bestowed with a divine hand’.
Tlatelolco & other catastrophes
Picture display
standardowy [760 px]
The exhibition 'Elena Poniatowska: A Work of Rage and Love' at the Cultural Centre of Spain, in Mexico City, Mexico, 19 May 2015, photo: Jose Mendez / EPA / PAP
In the summer of 1968, the student revolution breaks out: huge crowds march through the city, exclaiming not particularly friendly cries about the government. The government then decides to get the anti-patriotic troublemaking out of the heads of the ‘sons of bitches, illiterates, parasites and cynics’ – which, of course, hostile powers must be responsible for. They decide to teach them a lesson in Tlatelolco: on 2nd October, the army massacres a peaceful protest in the shadows of an Aztec ruin and colonial church. A few hundred people are killed, and those who survive are imprisoned.
Early in the morning, Elena is on the scene. She recalls her visit to the hospital, where a wounded Oriana Fallaci spews insults at the ‘barbaric government’. She listens to the stories of those who witnessed the tragedy, gathering their thoughts and talking to the imprisoned protesters. The Night of Tlatelolco is, according to many, her most important book. The Noble Prize-winner Octavio Paz reads it as a ‘historical chronicle, written before history had had the time to cool, before the words turned into nothing but documentation.’
The press is silent about the newest book by the author they had so recently been glorifying, but Poniatowska herself reminisces that:
Text
Many copies were sold, because there had been rumours that it would be taken off the market, with security agents confiscating shipments to bookshops. The publisher, ERA, even received threats that if the book was published, bombs would be planted in their headquarters. The owner, Tomás Espresate, said that he had taken part in the Spanish Civil War, so he was ready for another.
After Tlatelolco, Poniatowska published two more collections of reportage, forming a literary protest trilogy: Fuerte es el Silencio (editor’s translation: Strong is the Silence) in 1980, and Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Earthquake eight years later. The first was about the desperate people, who in autumn 1968 had hope for change – about people lost in a ‘dirty war’, about mothers on hunger strike in front of the capital’s cathedral.
Elena’s criticism of those in power is a shock to many consciences, but on the morning of 19th September 1985, an even bigger shock comes. As the city is still waking up, as workers are just beginning their shifts, as children are finishing their breakfasts and getting ready for school and their parents are tightening their ties and snapping their briefcases shut, as people are still out for their morning jog, as a seemingly normal day is starting – the earth trembles. It quakes with such force that it leaves a large part of the city in ruins. How many casualties are there? Ten thousand? Fifteen? More? Nobody knows the exact count, because the government tries to cover up the extent of the damage, and President Miguel de la Madrid states: ‘We do not need help from abroad, we can manage on our own.’ However, he quickly withdraws from his misguided sense of national pride.
Elena spends three months in the streets of this city of ruins, sitting down at her typewriter every evening. This results in a series of reportages, which will eventually become Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Earthquake : a chronicle of a foreseen tragedy, caused by officially sanctioned mediocrity and the government's total helplessness in the face of disaster.
Teufel, Tina… King Poniatowski
Picture display
standardowy [760 px]
Fragment of portrait of King Stanisław August Poniatowski in coronation garb by Marcello Bacciarelli, 1768, photo: Vademecum Zamku Warszawskiego, Warsaw
As a means of escape from these political as well as natural disasters, Elena digs out a draft of a novel she began some 30 years ago. The result is La Flor de Lis , whose heroine Mariana, a young girl from the upper classes, arrives in Mexico with her mother from France to reveal the lost worlds of her ancestors – whose Mexican histories had become lost in the labyrinth of cosmopolitan genealogy. The autobiographical thread ends there, however, with the most important role in the novel going to Father Teufel, a product of pure literary fantasy. He becomes for Mariana what Jesusa was for Elena, revealing before her the real world, which had previously been concealed by aristocratic prejudice, and which seemed to have but one purpose: to nurture caste divisions, to have someone admire us and so that we could have someone to lord over (supposedly out of reluctance and with nonchalance).
Shortly afterwards, she begins work on Tinísima , a biography of Tina Modotti, an Italian who, after a short-spelled career in the burgeoning film industry in Hollywood, comes to Mexico at the beginning of the 1920s with the renowned photographer Edward Weston. As a photographer herself, she showed her socialist sensitivity and had considerable success, all during a time when Weston was obsessed with artistic studies on toilet seats and other elements from the prose of life. Modotti became active in the Mexican communist movement consolidated around the El Machete daily.
Modotti mingled with the artistic elite, causing a storm of sighs among the admirers of her beauty, after which, however, she was deported for her alleged role in the assassination attempt on President Pascual Ortiz Rubio. As an activist for global communism, she left for Berlin and Russia. She took part in the Spanish Civil War only to return, clandestinely, to Mexico. Soon afterwards, and merely in her 40s, Modotti dies of a heart attack in a taxi.
Elena Poniatowska’s later works include La Piel Del Cielo (after it won the Alfaguara Prize, it led her aged mother to exclaim ‘Finally, you won’t have to write anymore!’), Tlapalería (one of the best examples of the writer's good ear and literary imagination, in which the banalities of everyday life are channelled into poetry), as well as novels inspired by the biographies of English-born Mexican surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and of Lupe Marín, the wife of painter and muralist Diego Rivera. And finally, something which has circled around Poniatowska as a biographical obligation: a novel about the last years of the Poniatowski clan in Poland. Nothing seems to suggest that ‘she will not want to write anymore’.
Originally written in Polish by Marcin Żurek, April 2017; translated by Culture.pl
Born in 1968, Marcin Żurek is a specialist on Latin America, whose articles have appeared in countless publications in the Polish media.
[{"nid":"5688","uuid":"6aa9e079-0240-4dcb-9929-0d1cf55e03a5","type":"article","langcode":"en","field_event_date":"","title":"Challenges for Polish Prose in the Nineties","field_introduction":"Content: Depict the world, oneself and the form | The Mimetic Challenge: seeking the truth, destroying and creating myths | Seeking the Truth about the World | Destruction of the Heroic Emigrant Myth | Destruction of the Polish Patriot Myth | Destruction of the Flawless Democracy Myth | Creation of Myths | Biographical challenge | Challenges of genre | Summary\r\n","field_summary":"Content: Depict the world, oneself and the form | The Mimetic Challenge: seeking the truth, destroying and creating myths | Seeking the Truth about the World | Destruction of the Heroic Emigrant Myth | Destruction of the Polish Patriot Myth | Destruction of the Flawless Democracy Myth | Creation of Myths | Biographical challenge | Challenges of genre | Summary","topics_data":"a:2:{i:0;a:3:{s:3:\u0022tid\u0022;s:5:\u002259609\u0022;s:4:\u0022name\u0022;s:26:\u0022#language \u0026amp; literature\u0022;s:4:\u0022path\u0022;a:2:{s:5:\u0022alias\u0022;s:27:\u0022\/topics\/language-literature\u0022;s:8:\u0022langcode\u0022;s:2:\u0022en\u0022;}}i:1;a:3:{s:3:\u0022tid\u0022;s:5:\u002259644\u0022;s:4:\u0022name\u0022;s:8:\u0022#culture\u0022;s:4:\u0022path\u0022;a:2:{s:5:\u0022alias\u0022;s:14:\u0022\/topic\/culture\u0022;s:8:\u0022langcode\u0022;s:2:\u0022en\u0022;}}}","field_cover_display":"default","image_title":"","image_alt":"","image_360_auto":"\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/360_auto\/public\/2018-04\/jozef_mroszczak_forum.jpg?itok=ZsoNNVXJ","image_260_auto":"\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/260_auto_cover\/public\/2018-04\/jozef_mroszczak_forum.jpg?itok=pLlgriOu","image_560_auto":"\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/560_auto\/public\/2018-04\/jozef_mroszczak_forum.jpg?itok=0n3ZgoL3","image_860_auto":"\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/860_auto\/public\/2018-04\/jozef_mroszczak_forum.jpg?itok=ELffe8-z","image_1160_auto":"\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/1160_auto\/public\/2018-04\/jozef_mroszczak_forum.jpg?itok=XazO3DM5","field_video_media":"","field_media_video_file":"","field_media_video_embed":"","field_gallery_pictures":"","field_duration":"","cover_height":"991","cover_width":"1000","cover_ratio_percent":"99.1","path":"en\/node\/5688","path_node":"\/en\/node\/5688"}]
