I’ve finally written my piece on Frida Kahlo and the shawl design I made for her. It’s been very hard to write this because I feel so ambivalent about Frida Kahlo. I finally started this essay a couple days ago but my application “quit unexpectedly” and lost my work. But I started again this morning and I think it’s better now because I remembered to include the trickster part, and that then helped me express the rest. I think I understand now.

When I solicited requests from my friends as I was starting the Female Power Project, I was urged by many to make a shawl for Frida Kahlo. The implication was that I could sell a lot of them, because, you know, FRIDA. I wasn’t naturally inclined to do this. Firstly, her image and art have already been reproduced all over the place. Either my production couldn’t add anything, or I would just be jumping on the bandwagon and participating in an exploitative cliché. Secondly, Frida has been idolized largely because of her pathetic life story. Look: she was a beautiful mess AND she made great art. Be like her! Really? Her life was a train wreck (literally determined by a streetcar wreck) and I think many who idolize her are being uncritical. I don’t see her as a role model at all. Her story is about pain and anger and an unhealthy obsession with a repulsive and unworthy man. Frida was a masochist and a narcissist, an alcoholic and a drug addict, a self-conscious seeker of attention. She used her pain to exploit and manipulate people. And people use her pain to exploit her right back. This is neurotic.

However, her artworks ARE amazing and important and vital. Furthermore, she is some kind of engine in the collective mind of our culture since the late 1970s, when she was rediscovered—or maybe invented?—as an artist and a personality. There has to be something important there. To make something for Frida I had to figure out a way to approach her story and her power without losing sight of the point of the Female Power Project—which is not about selling things. If you are going to “put on” Frida’s power, it should be an act that could produce something good in the world, not an act of perpetuating a neurosis. I started thinking about how pain—and anger—could be a force, or maybe a catalyst, for creative transformation. How do ugly weird accidents make beauty and life?

There are two things that allowed me to get past my reluctance to absorb Frida. One was my own experience of pain and anger and how that has produced in me an explosion of creativity. I was not the only woman who stayed up late weeping at the results of the 2016 US presidential election. But it was in January of 2017 that I realized just how alone I wasn’t, as hundreds of thousands of women came to DC to express those same feelings. This story continues as I write and the outcomes are not clear. But a train wreck has made it possible for me, at least, to find the power to flourish the Female Power Project.

The second thing is a connection I made between Frida Kahlo and the traditional trickster figure in mythology. The trickster is not a role model. The trickster is someone who breaks social rules in a grotesque and pathetic way that nevertheless creates something of inestimable social value—that creates the world and life. Social rules are based on the separation of categories—the exaltation of distinctions—and the trickster mediates distinctions so that a society can adapt to outside forces. The key for me was learning that Frida was a notorious vulgarian. She was an amazing cusser. Her cussing was an expression of anger, of course, but it also came from her famous allegria. Her biographer, Hayden Herrera, describes this as not just “cheerfulness” but as an enveloping force of joy in life that would emanate from her, surrounding the people near her. She would relish and revel in vulgarities. This is a truly transgressive mixing of anger and joy, especially for a woman in a macho society.

I set out to do research on the trickster by reading Lewis Hyde’s book, Trickster Makes This World. I was almost immediately confounded by his assertion in the book’s preface that the traditional trickster is never female, except in one case that he could find. His hypothesis is that this is because women are natural creators because of our ability to bear children. The trickster, an essential transgressor, is a male who yet can bear creatively and from his essence the way females do. My response: what about females who do not bear children? It is maybe new(ish) to realize that females do not always bear, so that can’t really be our essence. That is Frida the trickster. She bears without bearing. She literally bares herself in her many self-portraits, her most compelling works of art. Through baring she bears her pain. Frida is the trickster we needed when, as a society, we were separating from the traditionally rigid definition of female. We still need her. We are still coming to an understanding that females don’t even need to be women and that gender is not a dichotomy but a spectrum.

Childbirth and abortion appear as subjects in Frida’s paintings. She did not have children although she was able to get pregnant. It is not clear whether she couldn’t come to term or whether she decided not to. Regardless, the subject was important to her and was one of the engines of her pain. Gender was a site of her trickster performance as well. Much is made of her cross-dressing appearance in a family portrait. So, also, of her self-portrait with cropped hair. She knew that gender is a performance and that is her trickster gift. She was the feminist trickster at the beginning of Fridamania; she is the queer trickster, now.

I know I read somewhere in her biography, or her diary, that she called herself, “The woman who gave birth to herself,” but I’m not sure it’s worth looking it up, exactly. Psychologically, it comes from her difficult relationship with her mother with whom she did not attach as an infant. Although it comes from a primal wound, it is the perfect thing to call the shawl. A trickster female is the female who births only herself. And that creativity can, and does, suffice.

DESIGN NOTES
In this design I borrowed a few elements from my other shawl designs, and I also quoted from the life and work of Frida Kahlo. These roses also appear in La Guadalupana, which is appropriate since both the Virgin of Guadalupe and Frida Kahlo are definitively Mexican. Frida loved to wear flowers in her hair. The blue lace is repurposed from ERZULIE which honors the Haitian spirit of love. Lace is a potent signifier of femininity. The geometric pattern in bright colors references the embroidered traditional Tehuantepec garb that Frida was famous for wearing. The drops refer to the many depictions of dripping liquids in her paintings, and the strings wrapping the roses refer to the roots and ropes that bind Frida in many of her self-portraits. The writing, which translates into English as “Here I have Painted Myself, Frida Kahlo” is the signature from her painting, “Self Portrait with Loose Hair.” She births herself in her paintings. Finally, if someone holds it up and you back away from the shawl—which is quite large and flops and flows in your hands—the halftone dots can be read as the eyes and brows of Frida Kahlo. Those brows.

If you want to learn more:
Hayden Herrera’s Biography, a bestseller that launched Fridamania, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, 1983.
The Wikipedia article on Frida Kahlo is very good.
Vanity Fair, September 3, 2013, “Diary Of A Mad Artist” by Amy Fine Collins
Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 1998