The Elephant and the Dove

Image courtesy of art.com

“The pain, the body, the city, the country. Kahlo. Frida, the art of Frida Kahlo.”

Never is the phrase ‘life imitates art’ more applicable than in reference to the life and work of Frida Kahlo.

Considered a modernist surrealist, her most famous works depict alarming, jarring images spurned from her constant daily battles with physical pain. Her tortured narrative. Yet, initially when one hears her name, images of bright colours and tropical flowers often spring to mind. Almost Aztec-inspired, and jovial in their nature. A fusion of bold vibrancy and nightmarish acid trip elements. Intriguing, no?

So where did it all begin?

To say Frida was no stranger to pain would be more than something of a mild understatement. This woman’s body literally held out for as long as it could (all of forty-seven years) which, given what it went through, actually wasn’t bad.

Frida famously described her body as tortured and cursed; betraying her on the daily, and that it was actively failing. To those outside of Frida’s personal orbit, this might be considered a classic overreaction from a textbook hypochondriac. Not the case. This was actually exactly what was happening.

It all kicked off (bad pun intended) when Frida contracted polio at aged six, which caused a growth defect in one of her legs, resulting in a ‘shrivelled’ appearance, as the leg in question was shorter and thinner than the other, thus leaving her with a lifelong limp. In writer Carlos Fuentes’ biography he described her as going from a beautiful, happy child; renowned for her ribbons and bows and adorable hairdo, to then being considered a circus freak in the eyes of her young peers; who would mercilessly bully her at school, dubbing her Frida pata de palo, which translates to Frida the Peg-leg. She would go on to spend the rest of her life self-conscious of this defect and it would be one of the reasons behind her trademark long, billowing skirts.

There is a general respite in physical torment for almost twelve years, which would then come crashing down with absolute gusto in 1925, when at aged eighteen, whilst returning home from school one afternoon, the wooden bus she was riding on collided with a streetcar on a busy street in Mexico City. The injuries she sustained from this accident were almost unimaginable. Here’s the general recorded low-down: a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, four broken ribs, eleven different fractures in her disfigured leg, at least two dislocated vertebrae, and a crushed foot. As if this wasn’t bad enough, a bus handrail had become detached and had impaled her through her lower back, exiting out of her vagina, shattering her pelvis in the process. Ouch…

Naturally, Frida was out of action for a good while. Her recovery entailed months and months of operations, bed-rest, physiotherapy, and body-casts and corsets designed to re-join her broken body, with materials ranging from typical plaster to stainless steel. In her lifetime, she had a whopping THIRTY-TWO operations. It’s now a bit easier to understand why Frida didn’t speak too highly of her body.

In theory she survived this accident, but in a way she also didn’t. The impact of her injuries would rear its ugly head in every corner of her life, and marked the beginning of the slow, lengthy descent towards her death. With the medical care of that time period being not quite what it is today, her body just couldn’t restore itself. As she got older she was in and out of hospital having gangrened fingers and toes amputated, and eventually her leg at the knee, forcing her to spend her few remaining years wheelchair-bound. Her extensive reliance on alcohol as a way of self-medicating and managing her pain obviously had counterproductive results on her body’s ability to heal and function. It’s said that she pre-empted her passing, and in the weeks running up to her death she jokingly referred to herself as a ‘walking corpse’…

Bet she was a hoot at parties… (she actually was but we’ll get to that later.)

“I am the subject I know best.”

The plus-side to all of this unholy mess – the silver lining – was that it would trigger her love of drawing and painting, and would be the carving of her artistic legacy. Whilst bed-ridden, with her movement exclusively limited to her hands and arms, she would wile away the hours by turning her white plaster body-cast into a mural of beautiful flowers, before moving on to more serious artistic endeavours, in which her dad would then rig up drawing boards with canvases attached from her bedframe so she could paint whilst lying down. The ramifications of both her injuries and the time it took to generally recover had shattered her dream of becoming a doctor, but ignited her love of art. Definitely a ‘no shit’ moment to the classic ‘everything happens for a reason’ theory…

Image courtesy of gravelandgold.com

She became an established artist and a household name in her own right, with her paintings being engines of her cathartic release. A lot of her well-known pieces are self-portraits which depict the alarming effects of her physical (and often emotional) state.

The damage from the handrail had rendered her reproductive system only semi-functional at best, which sparked a continual crisis within her about childbearing and would it be worth the potential physical and emotional risks. All of this is very evident in her self-portraits.

Speaker of Pain

So, it’s fairly easy for us to empathise with Frida’s use of art to tell her story and to exercise her various physical demons, but Frida was also very politically-motivated and only too aware of the events of the world. Her childhood years from aged three to thirteen were dominated by the Mexican Revolution, which saw over one million of her people slaughtered. She also lived through both of the World Wars, with her ancestry going back to German and Hungarian Jewish origin, and so was naturally rattled by Hitler and Stalinism. She was a lifelong member of the Communist party, and so the Arms Race and McCarthyism that rumbled along in the background of her later years played a part in her anxiety.

She also notably allowed for some dark humour to creep into her work. At some point, she was commissioned to paint a tribute portrait of young Hollywood starlet who had committed suicide by jumping off of a building – and her tribute would be exactly that. An image of this woman sailing out of the window and crashing to the ground…

It’s not known as to whether the painting was some rather dark and rather tasteless joke, or whether Frida was just moved by this woman’s dramatic exit and wanted recreate her final journey. Latino culture famously celebrates death as a beginning and not something to be mourned, so the thought-process behind it was a matter of some debate. Either way, the commissioner reportedly nearly fainted at the sight of it. Individuals much-less concerned by propriety, however, thought it was hilarious. Nevertheless, it was a piece of art that wouldn’t be forgotten in a hurry.

The Elephant and the Dove

Image courtesy of art.com

Frida met and fell in love with the famous Mexican mural painter, Diego Rivera. They married and then divorced and then married again (as you do) and remained married until her death in 1954. Though the relationship was somewhat volatile and fraught with infidelities from both parties, as well as antagonised by her physical pain, his workaholic nature and lack of sensitivity, and then temporarily fractured by a very aggressive miscarriage that had hospitalised Frida for two weeks, thus triggering a months-long depression, theirs was a coupling that defied a lot of odds. They were mutually supportive and unquestioning of each other’s artistry, abundant in affection, physically and politically compatible, and simply loved each other in a way a Brontë sister might have written about. Not quite #couplegoals, but not far off.

Those who have seen pictures of them together will understand the meaning behind the ‘elephant and the dove’ reference, which was initially coined by Frida’s folks upon hearing the news of their marital ambitions. Let’s just say that Diego wasn’t beauty pageant fodder. He was built like a brick shit-house and had a face for radio, bless him.

So What Makes Frida a Badass?

I think the more relevant question is what doesn’t make her a badass?!

It’s acceptable to suggest that Frida’s work is an acquired taste, and not necessarily the type of art you’d like to see first thing in the morning hanging on your bedroom wall. But she was brash, unique and unapologetic in her artistry and she didn’t give a foof what anyone thought of her. She painted what the hell she felt like, wore what the hell she felt like, drank what the hell she felt like (and that girl LOVED her tequila), fucked who the hell she felt like (I don’t condone adultery, of course, but it’s more a context sort of thang), swore like a sailor, and could fiesta ‘til the cows came home.

But what I really like and what is a continual theme within my writing, is women (particularly women from yesteryear) who aren’t afraid to stand within their power, and have no issue defying expectations and saying ‘you know what? Sod you. I’m doing life my way or the highway.’ It’s not easy – even today – to have that attitude and it sure as hell couldn’t have been easy for a woman in 1920s Mexico living under a fascist dictatorship and within a tortured body that straight-up just wouldn’t play ball. So for that I say good on ‘er! Vive la Frida!

[All words are my own and are subject to copyright, with the exception of the opening quote, which is from writer Carlos Fuentes. Information is sourced from both him and essayist Sarah M. Lowe. Illustrations by Frida courtesy of La Vaca Independientes. All other images are referenced above. No copyright infringement.]

Extract

Rose had fought tooth and nail against her parents and society to bypass the linear movements of most young women in the late 1950s. She hustled her way through her degree and her Masters, and into the murky, male-dominated pool of psychology. Grappling all three and nailing them down, and doing it all with little fanfare.

Which is why it bewildered everyone when she decided one day to simply pull the plug on it all. To them it seemed a monumental waste of time, energy and money, and to some of her enemies in the field; devoted and unmoved on their initial opinions, a typically impulsive and illogical action that seemed to personify women as a whole. To those more fervent in their professional distaste of Rose, they saw this as a victory. Proof, really, that women just aren’t cut out for the workplace.

Whilst in the midst of her profession pioneering (and personal existential crisis), one of her clients who had been with her since the infancy of her practice, and had remained a devotee to his treatment, had died unexpectedly, and unbeknown to Rose, had made her his benefactor. Initially this was nothing but a headache. He’d owned a small apartment in Jessons County, Maryland, which revealed him to be the very definition of a hoarder. Mercifully, he’d left her no debts to deal with, but the hassle of having to clear out all of his belongings – none of which had much value or even practical use – had meant having to close her practice for a few days and reschedule her patients.

It was sorting through his abomination of a home that she discovered the deeds to a little property he’d owned in Napa County, California. Complete with ten acres of land.

Rose had become a psychologist because the human mind fascinated her. She’d later opened up her own therapy practice because she had wanted to be the vessel that made her patients reveal to themselves (and her) pockets of their psyche that marred their lives. But as interesting as her patients usually were, people exhausted her. The endless hostility from her male professional peers, the constant prying into her personal life, (“I don’t see a ring on that finger?”) the clinginess, and the attempts at breaching doctor-patient boundaries in the quest for Rose’s friendship, or romantic involvement from more than one needy male patient who thought that if he could just find himself a wife and homemaker all his problems would be solved (“you’re such a good listener” they’d often coo at her.) All of this would eventually lead her to believe that the mind was so seemingly irrevocably moulded by society, that the mysteries that it once held for her had begun to evaporate. Her job was to help people, not to revolutionise society one depressed individual at a time, or to shatter the American dream, which was something she knew held dear to many. Not so much a dream but a belief system.

She knew she’d be labelled a quitter, and she didn’t care.

[image and all words are mine and are subject to copyright]

The Casket Girls of New Orleans

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Those familiar with the legendary New Orleans vampire culture will surely have heard of the cult phenomenon better known as the Casket Girls of New Orleans. Sound a bit morbid?

It’s actually not.

Let me say this now: what we know that’s factual about the Casket Girls is iffy at best…

Let’s just say whoever was doing the historical scribbling or census recording in 18th century New Orleans… well… they did a bit of a shit job.

What we do know is that they were a real thing, but that’s about it. Everything else is basically leftover snippets of historical gossip; more or less merely the bi-product of Chinese Whispers and urban legends rolled into one that now largely exists for the benefit of the tourist trade.

But here’s what we do know… (generally)

It all stems back to those pesky Colonial settlers and their cute little habit of reclaiming land in America as their own.

Around about 1719 when New Orleans as a city was just a baby, it was being occupied by explorers, tradesmen, priests, you name it. Men who had come across the pond from France on their onesies (as in without wives or girlfriends) and soon realised that the place was a massive, MASSIVE sausage-fest, and that all their hard work in building a city and creating a life and legacy would largely be a waste of time if their bloodline ended with them and there would be no offspring to pick up where they left off.

So here’s their first attempt at conquering this problem: they appealed to fellow French-occupied areas of the South (such as Mobile, Biloxi, etc – areas older than New Orleans) and said they needed some womenfolk and could they do them a solid and send some over?

Well, the answer was yes, of sorts… What they did was empty the female jails and brothels and shipped them all over to New Orleans.

I think it’s important to say now that a LOT of the French settlers (if not all) were very, very Catholic men (see my Voodoo blog for more on the Catholicism element of New Orleans) and would have wanted a nice well-behaved French Catholic wifey.

It turns out, interestingly, that these ladies weren’t the domestic goddesses they’d been hoping for. Let’s just say it didn’t go well…

So here was their second plan: they decided to crank it up a notch and appeal to the French King, Louis VI, for help.

And this is what he ALLEGEDLY did – as in what he said he’d do: he would accost some bishop to go around to all of the convents and Catholic orphanages in France and send some good, proper, virgin girls and women over to be contracted wives. Lovely…

Here’s where it gets a bit foggy: rumour would have it that the King wasn’t actually that arsed about the types of ladies he sent over, and apparently followed a similar route to the folks in Biloxi and Mobile, and just tipped the female jails and brothels on their heads and sent their occupants packing for America, thus solving the nagging problem of the NOLA sausage-fest, and temporarily relieving France of its female rogues. Again – this is all we have to go on. There is no record that that’s actually what the King did, and the Casket Girls are something their New Orleans descendants are fiercely proud of.

That’s all well and good, but what actually is a Casket Girl?

So. Good question. It actually has nothing to do with caskets, or death, or anything remotely ghoulish. Again, it’s really the result of Chinese Whispers. ‘Casket Girl’ stems from the phrase ‘Filles à la Casquette’ which roughly translates to ‘woman with suitcase’. That’s literally what they were. Underprivileged women travelling across seas with their few belongings in a trunk. Bit of an anti-climax, no?

There’s some half-arsed rumour that some of these suitcases were so big that they looked like the could hold a corpse, but that’s twaddle. These were women who’d been living in convents, and/or abject poverty, and whose worldly possessions probably comprised solely of a crucifix and maybe a pair of knickers.

So where do the vampires come in?

Another good question. They don’t, really. The loose connection between the two (and I don’t use the term ‘loose’ loosely…) was that the women had spent weeks or months at sea in filthy conditions, hustled in together below deck with rats and all kinds of shit (including actual shit), and those who hadn’t kicked the bucket already were very, very exposed to Yellow Fever, Scurvy, Typhoid, Tuberculosis, severe malnourishment, and a whole bag of other delights that come with travelling at sea during those grotty times. It’s said that the ladies were somewhat worse for wear when they docked in New Orleans; some absolutely riddled with TB; vomiting blood, deathly pale, etc., and so became synonymous with the New Orleans vampire culture.

There’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest any blood-sucking shenanigans went down. They just looked the part, is all.

So that really concludes the mysteries behind the famous Casket Girls. Once they’d docked, those who managed to survive the grim trek over were then chaperoned to a convent on Ursulines Street in the up-and-coming French Quarter until they found themselves a hubby.

And they say romance is dead…

(All words and photos are my own and are subject to copyright. )

Woolf Mother…

In celebration of Pride month, I am paying tribute to some of the LBGTQ+ writers who have inspired me over the years.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

I first became aware of Virginia Woolf, or at least the character of Virginia Woolf, a little embarrassingly, by way of another writer. Those familiar with Michael Cunningham’s novel, The Hours, will recall the rather honest and (generally) factual portrayal of Woolf during the genesis of what would later become her novel Mrs Dalloway – and like Mrs Dalloway, follows the ‘day-in-the-life’ concept. Those who have read both novels will see the obvious similarities in tone and structure, as well as emphasis on singular moments and emotions throughout a person’s day; focusing both on the trivial and the monotonous, as well as the small, creeping fragments that, if indulged, threaten to cause their life as they know it to unravel.

The Hours (as named after the original title of Mrs Dalloway) is of course a fine novel (it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, and was later made in to a movie, which is also excellent) and I would recommend it regardless of whether Woolf’s work appeals to you or not.

I’d been aware of her before that, sure. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, Virginia Woolf is a household name. But her writing wasn’t something I’d stumbled on at school, or even at University (worrying really, as I studied Creative Writing…) and it wasn’t until I happened upon The Hours that it dawned on me (back then when I was first dipping my toe in the pool of writing) that I should probably give her a whirl.

Like most ‘gifted eccentrics’ Virginia Woolf’s infamy is just as much personal as it is professional. While she wasn’t wild, rambunctious, or into heavy-drinking like many established writers of the twentieth century were (yes, Dylan Thomas and Mr Hemingway, we’re looking at you) her notoriety stemmed from her rather precarious mental health. Woolf notably had at least three severe nervous breakdowns, and attempted to take her own life on two occasions before finally succeeding in 1941 at the age of fifty-nine, triggered by the onset of another breakdown which she was sure she’d not recover from.

I was drawn to her because of her fragility, and because I (having my own strained relationship with mental health) admire the beauty that came out of the darkness of it all. I like her tone (although it is almost shamelessly upper-class and by today’s standards, rather dated) and I like her trailblazing as a progressive female author. While you have your classic women novelists such as the Brontës and Jane Austen, who are acclaimed in their own right, Woolf followed an entirely different aesthetic, that by the standards of her particular era, where women’s literary inputs were by and large expected to be classically-structured romantic fluff, was bold in its use of modernist expression, with the ‘stream of consciousness’ approach being her trademark narrative. And it’s a hard narrative to pull off without sounding, well, ridiculous. I know this because I have tried.

Most people who are familiar with the Bloomsbury circle of writers and artists (the English and rather posh equivalent of the Beatnik movement) will know that Woolf (who was married until her death to the political theorist and author, Leonard Woolf) was known for her personal torment and her sad, untimely demise, as well as her frivolous nature; her love of parties, her playful gossipy side, and her lengthy affairs with several women, all of which inadvertently snuck their way into her work; demonstrating a story-teller that was of equal parts dark as she was sparkling.

Recommendations: (other than Mrs Dalloway)

To the Lighthouse
A Room of One’s Own
Orlando
The Waves
Jacob’s Room