I once heard this story of a poor family in Mexico City whose house had burned down in a fire.  Someone close to the  family had mentioned to the youngest daughter, “We are all saddened for the loss of  your home.”   But this little girl, who may have been six or seven, said,  “Oh we have a home. We just don’t have a house to put it in…”  I begin with this quote, for the little girl reminds me of a young Frida Kahlo.  I just began reading her Secret Book.  It’s not really a secret.  That’s the title – The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo – and I’m reading it twice: once in English, and then again in Spanish. There’s no secret.  I’m telling everybody.  Jaja.

This semester, I encourage my students to write about Strong Women. We are researching the likes of Gloria Steinem, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Amelia Earheart, Emma Watson.  According to Ariana Davis, author of the book What Would Frida Do? “The one thing we know for sure about Frida Kahlo: she was a badass….” Ariana’s work transcends biographical writing; she captures Frida’s fierce spirit.  She believes we all can learn to live more meaningful lives if we considered What Would Frida Do in our daily circumstances.

At age eighteen, Frida nearly died in a horrible traffic accident when the bus she was riding collided with a streetcar.   It was like her life exploded into a million pieces. The handrail she was holding onto broke and completely passed through her pelvis. Her spinal column was crushed in three places and her collarbone was fractured. Some doctors told her she would never walk again. Others wondered if she would live. She was confined to a bed for three months, and for the rest of her life she would be forced to wear plaster corsets.    She spent a lifetime in and out of physical therapy,  but just like the attitude displayed by this little girl at the top of my post,  Frida discovered for whatever she lost, she could create. Through her painting, she could shape an entirely new life and identity. She decided that all the physical and emotional pain she suffered could make her stronger.

My students will be afforded the flexibility to write what they want to write about, but writing about Frida’s role as a feminist icon wouldn’t be a bad choice.  In her darkest hours of her pain and isolation she translated her trauma into the artwork we revere today.  She laughed at her own agony,  she fought for her own respect, but her work was most often overshadowed by her famous husband, Diego Rivera.    I hope to see discussions of stereotyping in classroom workshops. Will my students be able to compare some of the challenges Frida faced with the challenges women face today?  I’m not sure Frida earned the respect she deserved before she was dead and gone. She once told a writer who she thought had slighted her, “I didn’t study with Diego.  I didn’t study with anyone.  I just started to paint.  He does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist.”  Frida wasn’t the kind of woman to pull back into her shell.

Hopefully, my students will leave enough room in their research papers  to provide their own responses to Frida’s art.  Frida attributed much of her creativity and artistic insight to the suffering she felt inside.  This is what she said of the near fatal crash that would ensure a life of both physical and mental  anguish:  “If you knew how terrible it is to know suddenly, as if a bolt of lighting elucidated the earth.  Now I live on a painful planet, transparent as ice; but it is as if I had learned everything at once in seconds.”  The real challenge for my students will be which painting or image of Frida to choose!

In 1938, Diego and Frida had separated.  Frida was struggling with her art.  She felt lost and abandoned; that’s when she was sought out by a famous magazine publisher, Claire Booth Luce, to paint a portrait of her long-time friend who had just committed suicide by jumping out the window of a tall New York skyscraper.  The young woman who took her own life – her name was Dorothy Hale – had been suffering for years since her husband had died in a car accident.  She had once been a successful Hollywood movie actress, but now she couldn’t find work and was living on the generosity of friends.  As her desperation became progressively worse, she entered a deep depression that she couldn’t come out of.  In October of this year, Dorothy put on her favorite black party dress with a corsage of yellow roses and thrust herself from her top-story suite.  

To commemorate Dorothy’s life, the magazine publisher suggested that Frida paint the piece in an ”ex-voto, retablo style.”   I’m writing this here in Mexico, where my friends and neighbors may have a different outlook for death.  For Frida, maybe, the pain of loss can be diffused by the memory of life, so in her painting,  she chose to concentrate on Dorothy’s beautiful eyes.  I have read that Dorothy’s eyes had often been compared to those of Elizabeth Taylor.  To memorialize Dorothy’s life, Frida showed the building, the blue-gray sky, and her upside-down figure still in tact, her dress still glistening, and her eyes wide-open the very moment before she splatters against the sidewalk below.  Mexicans often take gruesome, detailed pictures of death to Church to elevate their mourning.  At the bottom of “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale” Frida showed trickles of blood escaping from her ears, nose and mouth. From her perspective, the color highlighted the true beauty of Dorothy’s face. Claire Booth Luce didn’t respond in the way  Frida expected.  This commissioner didn’t understand.   “That’s absolute horrible,” she cried.  She nearly vomited when she took the painting out of its casing.

I’ve chosen to share this painting not to celebrate Frida’s artistry but to remember her defiance and imagination.  After reading  first chapter in The Secret Book, Frida reminds me very much of the little girl whose family lost a house.  At age six, Frida was diagnosed with polio which affected the growth of her right leg. Because one leg was skinnier than the other, she would be forced to walk with a limp for the rest of her life.  To no surprise, she wore long skirts to hide the appearance of  what she thought were  her ugly legs.  She felt isolated and bullied by her schoolmates.  They called her Pata de Palo – Peg Leg.   But, Frida learned very early on not to let anyone or anything bother her.  She would never allow her pain or misfortune to define her.  She told her stories in her own way.  Her life was her art.  Her art was her voice.  She dared to be different.