I was born in rain and I will die in rain. Know me as river, as harbour. They will say I was a slut with a brazen sailor’s mouth. They will not remember my elegance and restraint. They will say they looked in my eyes and counted one hundred forty-six pelicans flying in a wavering line into a marina at sunset ... I resist the obvious borders. For this heresy, I have been categorically penalized. Did you know they sealed me into a cast for one entire year? It was a premature burial where I kept breathing under dirt. They did this repeatedly, gathered my crushed bones like wild-flowers and used plaster as a vase. They sought to make an object of me. There was no composition. It was vandalism.
Kate Braverman, The Incantation of Frida K.
These days, we tend to hear a lot about the term 'Feminism'. We
tend to complain a lot too. About its meanings, purposes, and manifestations.
Time and again, we have seen the fleeting appropriations of 'phantom feminism'
and the unchartered, fragile bulge of female voices that fall short of the
'feminist' tone. Or sometimes, it is the other way around: A 'being' of feminism is imposed, overlooking
everything that qualifies for patriarchy. Maybe, it is our short-term, compartmentalized conception of
feminism. Equal pay, equal rights, equal status—terms that more than half of
the female population in the world, consciously or unconsciously, find
unrelatable. Then why do we, the women, employ such a term to represent the
status of our beings when the term itself is inadequate to represent us all?
In this net, it’s not just the strings that count But also the air that escapes through the meshes.
- Pablo Neruda
In the recent times, we have seen varying degrees of feminism. And
this is where Frida Kahlo's feminism steps in. Most of the books and articles
on her that I have come across dub her as a feminist icon, crowned in the
hearts of marginalized groups. And in a way, she is deserving of the praise.
The dense, singular eyebrows, the faint moustache, the colourful attires that
bespoke mexicanidad, the
bold strokes of her artistic brushes, and an even bolder promiscuous lifestyle
have conspired together posthumously to create a mythical Frida beyond the
confines of human destiny. Sadly, however, this construction falls in the dents
of misinterpretations and masquerades. Frida lived in the Rhetoric, nearly
feminist, nearly liberated, nearly replete in her mission. And like all her
paintings, her life had been short of that one brush stroke of completion. It
was beautifully unfinished!
There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.
- Frida Kahlo
Tragedy has been more faithful a consort to Frida than Diego
Rivera. The sheer frequency of her tragedies contributed to her heroic
reputation; she is seen as someone who rose above the physical and psychogenic
pain to paint the somatic. She fiercely and dramatically portrayed reality,
appearing neither attached nor detached of the misfortunes that shaped her
artistic imagination in the first place. Yet, the same countenances of
vulnerability is a bid towards the invulnerable. For instance, 'Herrera
evaluates Kahlo's entire oeuvre and her late-twentieth-century popularity in
terms of bipolarities subsumed within the overarching battle between
surrendering to pain and struggling for survival':
There is the tension created by Kahlo's festive,
be-costumed exterior and her anguished interior. There is a split between her
mask of control and the turmoil that thrashed inside her head. Even as she
presented herself as a heroine, she insisted that we know her vulnerability.
And while she was compelled to see herself and to be truly seen, she hid behind
the mythic creature she invented to help her withstand life's blows . . . .
[H]er self-portraits . . . were not just a means to communicate feeling, but a
device to keep feeling in check. Thus while her paintings draw us into her
power, they also frustrate. They are steely in their distance and obdurate in
their silence . . . forc[ing] us to come face to face with Frida . . . and . .
. with unexplored parts of ourselves. [Taken from Margaret A. Lindauer, Devouring Frida: The
Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo]
Isn't this an expression of submission to her fate? Not only her
paintings, but also her temperaments betrayed a certain submission. Her and her
husband's affairs, her dutiful marriages, multiple abortions, her exhibited
political leanings that uncannily dawdled behind her husband's are repeatedly
sheeted by her involvement in 'marginalized' issues. Her virile behaviour was
characterized by an obsessive promiscuity and unfailing flirtiousness. She once said, 'I paint my own reality. The
only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever
passes through my head without any other consideration.' In fact, her
self-portraits portrayed a Frida interacting with herself as a consequence
triggered by her interaction with the men in her lives. To name one of her
famous paintings, her 1932 Henry Ford
Hospital was inspired by a life-threatening abortion. 'The painting is considered to illustrate
the artist's mourning for her aborted child and despair over her apparent
physical inability to carry a child to term. This one-to-one association of life
events to the meaning of a painting follows the paradigmatic art history model
described by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson', the 'purpose of art-historical
narration is to merge the authorized corpus and its producer into a single
entity, the totalized narrative of the-man-and-his-work, in which the
rhetorical figure author=corpus
governs the narration down to its finest details'.
Frida's 'feminism' was conditional, operating within the confines
of Mexican patriarchy. She had incessantly employed a rhetorical attitude
towards her ideologies, surging and backtracking at the same time. One goes on
to doubt the honesty of her convictions but never their execution. Indeed,
still today, she remains the celebrated and confident embodiment of mortal
chaos, above human sensibilities, in every way living in the field beyond
rightdoing and wrongdoing. In life. And after life.
But, sorry! Frida Kahlo was no Feminist.
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