Jean Girigori, a biographical note

Jean Girigori is with her forty two years a very young artist although she has produced an impressive amount of paintings. She is a Caribbean person by birth and a Curacaon artist by choice. One can best typify her as an autobiographical expressionist artist, that uses images and colors to paint the story of her Caribbean youth and pain, testifying about her sufferings while at the same time healing herself from that past to find new paths for herself and her hurting and beloved Caribbean community.
Jean was conceived out of wedlock and born on a ship on which her mother had embarked to flee her sad social circumstances and find Jean’s Curacaon father. So already before her birth, Jean was herself a symbol of the ongoing Caribbean exile.
She was meant to be born on Curaçao, but as so often happens with Caribbean boat refugees, destiny took over and Jean was born on the ship, that had to turn back for that reason. She touched land for the first time so to speak, not in Santo Domingo, but in Anse Sapito, a little bauxite town in the south of Haiti.
But later on, Jean’s mother returned to Santo Domingo and Jean grew up in the empire of her grandfather, the Callejon Chandi.
This grandfather Chandi was one of the many Curacaons that were stuck in Santo Domingo on their way to or from the sugarcane fields of Cuba before the Second World War. They were called “kokolo’s” leftovers. The word still exists in papiamento and means that delicious part of the “funchi” that children like so much to scrape up out of the funchi-pot a day later.
Somewhere between Calle Rafael Maria Ruarte and Calle José Martí in the vicinity of the Boulevar 19 of March, this Chandi had built his empire. His sons got distinguished jobs with the water and electricity companies and the Shell. Jean’s mother was a well-educated woman who had attended secondary school and who was also a handy sewer. Jean’s father was a womanizer and known in the so-called “Bar de Cien”, in the neighborhood of Borojol, not far from the Callejon Chandi. It was one of those heavy Caribbean bars where people can go on dancing in all tranquillity on one side, while other people are stabbing each other in an other corner of the locality.
In Santo Domingo of those days, Curacaons with their multilingual education and worldly ways were often admired. Jean remembers that period of her life in any case as a dreamlike episode of colorful gowns and birthday parties with seven stories high cakes.
But all this changed when Jean’s mother found her second man and changed city life for the countryside at Yawati. The princess of the Callejon Chandi became a house-slave as there still are so many in the Caribbean rural communities. She still remembers the walks of hours to fetch water, with the heavy containers on her head. She still remembers the loads of clothes that had to be washed and dried in the rivulets. She remembers the grinding of mais with milling stones. The “mai mole” of Haiti and the “chenchen” of Santo Domingo.
If Jean were a writer instead of a painter, she would already have filled books with the hardships of Caribbean country life. Now we see that hardship in the images used in her work, in the many paintings where children and masses form the main theme. Perhaps nothing in this period has made more impression on her than the act that she was raped at the age of five in the countryside by a cousin of her mother’s new man, who was forty years older than her.
In 1967 Jean went to Haiti to stay with an aunt of hers. There she met the renown Haitian painter Paul Jorge Hector, who became her first husband. With him, her life as a painter started. The marriage did not last too long and after that Jean decided to try and regain Curacao, the country where she was meant to be born, the country of  her father to which she kept looking all through the years of poverty, abuse and misery.
Much of Jean’s painting can be considered a fierce outcry against the depravation and abuse the people of the Caribbean are subjected to. Above all, the children. This accusation has made her, beside a productive painter, also a strong political voice in her country, that always is heard when the cause of justice and human dignity is at peril.

“I want to say that from my birth on, it was written in the stars for me, that I would have to live my life consciously and living consciously hurts. It really hurts. But I know that there will come a moment of vast education in the Caribbean that will also mean a vast solution.
I know that art is an important medium to bring the message clear and healing to the nations. I hope that all Caribbean artists will dedicate part of their efforts to look for solutions against the analphabetism, the misery, the degeneration, caused by corruption. Degeneration that drags behind it a generation of violated girls”.

The Caribbean suffering creates in Jean a restless agony of which she is continuously afraid, which she tries to subdue through her paintings. Knowing that there will be no easy solution, no easy alternatives, she can only continue by crying out as often as she can in outbursts of forceful images of human beings or contained lucidity.

1993