It’s Giving Real Friendship: Read Jennifer Clement’s Poetic Tribute To Widow Basquiat

“I was already writing poems about Suzanne back then,” says author Jennifer Clement. “They were some of the first poems I ever got published.” She’s talking about her early days of her friendship with Suzanne Mallouk – the magnetic force at the heart of Widow Basquiat, the iconic book about her life, her love with the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the electric chaos of ‘80s New York.

In her converation with Dua (who picked the book as her June Monthly Read), Jennifer dives into era: the wildness, the art, the heartbreak – and most of all, the friendship. “We have to remember that we were just 20 years old [at the time]; we were babies,” Jennifer says. “I feel that Widow Basquiat grew out of the poems, and I think of Widow Basquiat as a book of love to her.”

Here, Jennifer shares one of those early poems — written in the moment, FOR SUZANNE, by someone who truly saw her. The piece is set during a time captured in the book: when Suzanne was painting, chasing light and survival, and immortalising women like Joan Burrows on canvas. “I feel the book is an expression of love to Suzanne,” says Jennifer. “She was Jean’s muse, but she was my muse as well.”

FOR SUZANNE by Jennifer Clement 

She paints Joan Burroughs with an apple
on her head.
Bull’s-eye, she says.
And she paints black men in cowboy hats with
“God Bless America”
lettered across the canvas.

We are two women
nestled in the grape of each other,
for all this we understand:
in some African places
women still marry trees,
she draws starved men shooting arrows
into branches.

At two a.m. she talks about a woman
with transparent skin,
found in Germany, before the wars.
By four she’s a Gypsy
with the breath of wheat.

She bends herself into my side,
tests lies that swell in her
like baking bread,
through them she is complete.
She dances, stepping on her feet.

And at dawn, when finally she sleeps,
her body round,
ear-shaped in the cove of her bed,
she wears the names
of African girls: Small Fish,
Pretty Arm, Hanging Bee,
Spilled Water.

Discover Jennifer’s full video interview with Dua here, or listen to it with the Service95 Book Club podcast here.