(#12/52) Post-partum Thinking, Creating through Pain with Frida Kahlo
March 1, 2018
I was a 10 year-old girl when I first learned about Frida Kahlo. I pushed the wayward stringy deep brown hairs out of my face and sat down on the floor with a thick book about her art and life, guiding the luminous glossy pages over each other and reveling in the color and fantastical images of Frida’s oeuvre. My father had given me that book on Frida and her paintings, only thinking to share the magic of her art with me and not so much about censoring difficult subjects.
Some of her paintings, you might know, are not suited for a 10 year old’s mind. There are images of Frida in situations that a youth cannot quite grasp. For example, her self-portrait titled Henry Ford Hospital or The Flying Bed which tells a horrifying story of failed pregnancy, showing Frida’s vulnerable body splayed out on what looks like a surgeon’s table, still connected to a child who has passed, with blood shedding from between her legs. There’s also the frightening image of A Few Small Nips which shows another nude Frida covered from in what looks like a knife attack, or some kind of domestic violence, with a frightening man standing behind her.
These images passed by my eyes without a lot of recognition, I stored them in my memory without a lot of reflection. I did know they were sad and could sense what I would later understand was heartbreak.
But the paintings I loved the most of hers as a child were the self-portraits: fierce images of herself as powerfully human, where she placed her face and upper torso in magical worlds with monkeys, flowers, flying birds around her eyes taking the shape of her strong brows, floating above the constraints of the world and the body.
I often stopped on her piece Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940, which I note now bears some Christ-like significance and witnesses to her pain. Even in the magical rêve she paints of herself, she expresses a full and stoic femininity.
Frida Kahlo’s work showed me how to self-reference in art, and that you could become whoever you wanted to be or express whatever part of yourself you wanted to express as long as you were creating. She has always been a reminder to me and millions of that truest sense of being an artist.
I began to take Frida’s works and lay tracing paper over them and with pencil slowly draw the shape of her face and her eyes, her cheekbones, her piled braided hair. Then I would use a mirror and draw my own face into her works. Reflecting on that young girl I was, I know that I was searching for an identity which seem to somehow be revealed in the mirror, and that mirror could be reseen in images. Auto-portrait, self-reference, self-revelation. These have all lasted with me over time. I think my fascination could also have had to do with my own trying to understand the parts of myself which were related to Mexico. My mother, grandmother, great-grandmother.
Frida’s heart was a Mexican heart that beat for Mexico and her people. She identified with the poor and the worker, and took up dressing in the traditional indigenous clothing of Tehuana, Oaxacan women’s garbs. Later in my life when I visited and lived in Mexico, I would often go to Frida’s house the Casa Azul and spend hours looking through her books and diaries. While I lived outside Mexico City, an exhibit of all of her written works and journals, including letters that she wrote to Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and others, was on exhibit in her home. By then, in college, I had realized that Frida was the kind of political thinker and artist who lived completely in her own perspective. Images of Mao and Lenin lined her home and their ideas filled her thoughts. She was an essentialist Marxist, a true communist who believed in revolution and the vanguard and the proletariat arming themselves. I had also realized by then, as I walked among her paint brushes and plants and personal belongings, that her whole life had been laid out in suffering.
Series of her body casts, which she painted throughout her life while undergoing painful surgeries, can be found on display at her house the Casa Azul which has become, of course, a famous museum in the center of the Coyoacán neighborhood in Mexico City. In her spacious, azure coated, multi-compartmental home with a large garden courtyard in the center, filled with trees and flowers, her bedroom was connected to her painting studio. The small bed that she slept in had a canopy and attached to the canopy above her was a full length mirror, so that while she laid in bed for perhaps months at a time trying to heal her broken bones and mend her muscles, she looked up at herself and saw only herself and painted. She also painted her casts. The original disaster which caused her so much pain throughout life was a terrible bus accident as a teenager when she sustained an impalement through her uterus which broke several bones in her pelvis and back, and likely rendered her sterile for life. Frida Kahlo lived with a disability throughout her life and often used a wheelchair, and also used the crutch, I would venture, of alcohol until her death.
All these lives of Frida that I discovered from a child to an adult (and somewhat mourned as she became the popular Mexican feminist saint that she know is to so many now — is it terrible to feel like so many people vaguely assent to her without knowing the fullness of her oeuvre and her pain?), have lived in my mind throughout my life. I’ve identified with her, but mostly looked after her, sometimes pitied her, but always entered into her work over and over again no matter what year season I found myself in.
Right now is the postpartum era of my life, and the natal time through the nearly 10 months of my body being given up as living space to a small baby. In this new journey, especially at the beginning, I take from Frida a special drive to create despite and out of pain.
When I exited the delivery room 1 month ago, taken directly to surgery after my daughter was born, I was unconsciously entering a time of recovery, and hence a time of pain. My labor had gone on for over 30 hours, but the labor pain is not what I remember. I felt like I was doing work. It’s the impractical hereafter of relearning to walk and work in normal stretches, balancing the desire to breastfeed with the pain that can accompany that as well, balancing the explosive love I have for my daughter with the knowledge that her entrance into the world left me semi-disabled for a short time.
I have always depended so much on the strength of my hands and legs, but in the early weeks of postpartum, I have had to give these things rest and soak them and salt them and let them sleep. I have had to relearn how to walk, after a final trimester of pregnancy with the heaviness of 50 extra pounds pressing down on my sciatic nerve and hips, forcing me to take stilted babysteps everywhere I went. I’m also recovering from the postpartum surgery which only added to the re-learning to walk normally again. For now, I want to learn how to move my muscles correctly and to not have any pain that comes and goes, but this is all a process. I had to sit (sometimes lay) still instead of running (or waddling) full speed ahead.
I have thought about Frida laying down in her bed as I was laying in my bed. I have wondered, “How will I do it?” about my work and life. How do we as women continue to work and live when those things which have worked for us — our legs, our reproductive systems, our bodies — suddenly seem to betray or disable us?
This has all been very difficult, and a pause I have not easily taken. It is like taking my roots out of soil and stranding me on a table without a way back to the water of the earth.
Frida’s life showed me for 20 years that even if there is not a way back to your fullness of health or the picture perfect version of yourself as an artist, you have to make with what you have. And that becomes your soil. What grows out of it becomes your work. These are what experiences can turn into for artists.
I want to say that the intimacy and novelty of Frida’s portraits and body of work should always be reflected upon as the fruit of suffering. In the early 20th century, she grew life and art from her bed, challenged norms of gender and political identities, broke barriers from her bed and from a wheelchair.
In 6th grade, I encountered my first struggles with depression. At that point I think became more sympathetic perhaps to what those images of Frida in so much pain were actually saying, because I was learning emotional pain for the first time in combination with becoming very sick from mononucleosis and being stranded in bed with my struggles and imaginations. My teacher at the time asked our class to identify an artist and present them to the class by creating a representation of what we thought that artist would make if they were creating a new piece, our own interpretation of their work. At the time it was easy for me to know that I should choose Frida Kahlo. I already used her work to create my own art. So, I sat for myself in a mirror for hours, and painted a self-portrait of myself, trying to imagine what I would look like as a “grown-up,” with flowers in the clouds. I gave myself her strong brow perhaps for its strength; I mixed her into me. I called it “Myself as an Adult” or “Yo Adulta”. I love this painting because it feels somehow prophetic to me, seems to express some foreknowledge that I later would go to live in the beautiful country of Mexico and connect more to the world of suffering that she embodied and the city and the earth of Mexico that she loved, which also connected us somehow.
Frida’s suffering is everywhere in her work and perhaps something that as a disabled woman was never truly recognized in her lifetime. How much of her work she did in a wheelchair or in bed for so long creating her life on a canvas, perhaps a life she couldn’t live fully outside of bed. In my own healing process I want to take Frida’s desire to be whoever she wanted to be and let it shape my desires to do good things with what I have. I’ve taken so much from her and learned so much from her, and this is one more place in which I continue to learn.
Slowly, 5 weeks later after the birth, I begin to get the hang of my post-partum life. I slink into the tub, pour out the Epsom salts, and allow time to hold me. I am strengthening my gait, my core feels like it will be fortified again; my healing is coming through, and my pain will not be chronic.
Gazing into my baby’s face allows me to feel a gratitude I’ve never known, and I know motherhood is the fruit and the gift of this suffering. I have hard days, but I also have days where I feel completely normal, and I can see myself putting one step ahead of the next.
This Women’s History Month, I can’t think of a way to honor my postpartum experience except through this remembrance and connection with Frida. Women are strong, and sometimes that strength (I want to say often) is coming out of suffering, unfolding, birth, being set aflame by some experience in life that gives way to what’s underneath that, what can grow and regrow by starting again from nothing.
Every woman responds to pain and recovery in their own way, mine is typically and foolishly to full on attack it. My strength against God. This is an Arian foolishness. It could be seen as resilience, but I think actual resilience can also take the time it needs to take so that things can grow back in the right way, so that my hips can reset and grow muscles the right way, and my nerves can locate their beginnings and ends again in the right way.
The body of Frida’s work took on legs and walked, and that was her healing. She confronted the world from her bed, even if she never saw a full healing.
Laying in bed in the first weeks post-partum, struggling to do simple daily tasks, I thought of her often. “How can I do this?” Because I remembered her in those moments and began there, it was a good step to begin my healing, a step which Frida Kahlo inspired me to take.
