Ilhan Abdullahi Omar (born October 4, 1982) has been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Minnesota since January 2019. She came to the U.S. as a refugee when she was 10, her family secured asylum three years later, and at 17 she became a U.S. citizen. She is part of the most diverse group of women ever voted into power in the U.S., and a member of the self-identified “squad” of progressive Democrats which also includes Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). She and Ms. Tlaib are the first Muslim women voted into congress, and Omar is the first woman to wear a hijab on the House floor, the first Somali-American, the first naturalized citizen from Africa in Congress and the first non-white woman to represent Minnesota.

Omar has been the target of many conspiracy theories, death threats, and other harassment by political opponents. The “squad” were singled out in a Tweet by the president as he told them to “go back where they came from” and at a rally Omar was targeted when the crowd started chanting “send her back.”  She has responded in social media by quoting Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, great American female voices of courage and defiance (and subjects of Female Power Project works). We can see how messages from and about female power build a foundation for female power.

I believe Omar’s story is one of the great American stories. She is a refugee who comes to America, works really hard, seizes opportunities, she is scrappy and brave, smart and committed, and loves the democratic process. People hurl abuse at her and call her ungrateful because she thinks America can do better, that there can be better justice for more people in our country, one based on mercy, compassion, and nurturing, not a justice limited by competition and privilege. 

There are several meanings of “represent” I am trying to get at with this print. “Represent” is about who she is, what she stands for, and what she does. As this particular American she is an example of a refugee, an immigrant, a Muslim, a woman, a person with dark skin. Because she is a public official from these intersecting, marginalized communities she never gets to NOT represent these things in our nation. It must be exhausting. Her ability to defiantly meet this challenge is truly a power. She stands for a particular story about what America is: a land of immigrants, of different kinds of people coming together and creating something that is complicated, dynamic, confounding, flawed, and so much greater and more interesting than its constituent parts. And she does her job. She represents the interests of the people who elected her, who sent her to speak for them. (70% of the people in her district are white, by the way.) These are the people who crowded the airport to welcome Omar home to Minnesota after that other crowd chanted “send her back.” She went back home and then she went back to Washington to do her job.

Representation is important. Of the already iconic image captured by Martin Schoeller for Vanity Fair of six new women* in Congress, Joshua Moradel writes, “With 100 women being elected to Congress in 2018, the faces of these six is a clear representation of the diversity that is starting to transform the federal government. … They pave the way for other citizens, regardless of their religion, gender, who they love, or where they come from, to believe someone like them is fighting for their best interest, well-being, and success.”
*the women in the picture are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Deb Haaland, Veronica Escobar, and Sharice Davids. See Buzzfeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/joshuagmoradel/first-woman-congress-diversity-photo-2019

Design Note

This design is based on Ilhan Omar’s official portrait as a member of congress, photographed by Kristie Boyd. I knew for certain that I wanted to do a print about Omar once I saw this photo, because she is wearing a red, white, and blue hijab for her official portrait. Her hijab is representing her Americanness. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ilhan_Omar,_official_portrait,_116th_Congress.jpg

Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 and died in 1954. “Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country’s popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.” from Wikipedia 

Queer Trickster Medicine: Making My Peace with Frida Kahlo

When I solicited requests from my friends as I was starting the Female Power Project—when I was only making shawls and scarves—I was urged by many to make something 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 embrace 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 Luis 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.

The shawl and scarf for Frida are called, “The Woman Who Gave Birth to Herself.” I know I read somewhere in her biography, or her diary, that she called herself this, 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 perSISTER design I have adapted elements from the shawl design, in which  I quoted from the life and work of Frida Kahlo. I first used these roses in my “La Guadalupana” shawl design, and it’s appropriate to use them here since both the Virgin of Guadalupe and Frida Kahlo are definitively Mexican. Frida loved to wear flowers in her hair. The lace and the geometric pattern in bright colors reference the 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.  She births herself in her paintings.

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

Marie Curie, born Marya Sklowdowska in 1867, was a Polish chemist who spent her working life in France. She was extraordinarily brilliant and won two Nobel prizes, one in physics for investigations into radioactivity (she coined that term) and another in chemistry for her discovery of the elements Polonium and Radium. She worked closely with her husband, Pierre, and without his admiration, support, and acknowledgement it is unlikely that Marie would have been as publicly successful as she was. They adored each other. Their daughter, Eve, wrote a biography of her mother, and when I read the (graphic!) description of his accidental death I wept in sympathy.

Marie came of age in a part of Poland that was under oppressive Russian rule which forced Polish identity to go underground. On top of this cultural oppression, Marie was forbidden to pursue a university education because she was a woman. Because of these obstacles Marie worked 8 years as a governess to make money so her sister could get a medical degree in Paris, with the understanding that her sister would then support Marie’s education. This is what came to pass. In Paris Marie was first in chemistry in her class of 2000 students, and second in mathematics. She earned doctorates in both subjects. Because of Pierre, she never went back to live in Poland although she was passionate about justice for Poland.

Marie was a child prodigy and taught herself to read at the age of four. Her early interest in the sciences was sparked by her father’s encouragement and the display case of scientific instruments he had in his study. When Marie later was maturing as a scientist, part of her success came from her precise use of scientific gadgets to measure radiation and the mass of very small things. She had amazing powers of concentration, and I see this ability to FOCUS as her special power. The idea of concentration is also demonstrated in the work that won her that second Nobel prize—Marie single handedly processed a ton of waste ore from uranium mining (pitchblende) to create a tiny sample of pure Radium. She boiled huge cauldrons of the crushed rock in a caustic solution and then set the results out in small dishes to evaporate. She describes the beautiful sight of the hundreds of dishes glowing with radiation in the dim twilight of their decrepit laboratory.

Marie Curie’s first breakthrough was noticing something worth looking into. Antoine Henri Becquerel first noticed a peculiar property of Uranium, that it could expose photo paper. He had been studying phosphorescence, but these new rays were different because they did not depend on the material first being exposed to light—they were coming from the material itself. But, after writing six papers on the subject in 1897, he went on to other things because he thought he had found all there was to find. It was Marie’s idea to measure the electrical charge of the rays using a device that Pierre and his brother had invented. The device took great concentration and precision to operate, and few people were as patient and dedicated as Marie, who took a week to teach herself how to use the device. Measuring the strength of radiation was key to her finding that there was something more radioactive than uranium in the pitchblende ore—Polonium and Radium. Work on the nature of radioactivity was profoundly important to the development of our understanding of matter.

The Curies became enormously famous around the world but they lamented this distraction from their work. Albert Einstein said he had never met anyone who was as unaffected by fame as Marie Curie. She was also a very unusual woman for her time in other ways. She was not interested in clothes and other traditionally feminine things, although she was dedicated to her family life. I get the sense that she was workman-like about this, just as she was with her research. She was very passionate and had a scandalous affair with a married physicist after Pierre had died. She was generally not concerned about social constraints and rules. Why shouldn’t she be with a man she loves? However, she was shamed by the press and was nearly denied her second Nobel Prize because of the scandal. This episode was so painful to her family that Eve Curie couldn’t write about it in the biography. Eve said only that gossip created a scandal, and that the gossip was incorrect.

I have also created a shawl and scarf design for Marie Curie.