Frida's Bed by Slavenka Drakulic: book review

Frida’s Bed (2007, English translation 2008) is an innovative work with an intelligently conceived approach to the narration of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s life and death.

It does not begin at the beginning, for it is only 162 pages. It begins with her deterioration and dying, in her bed at her parent’s La Casa Azuli, The Blue House, in Mexico City. With flashbacks, the reader pieces together her agonizing life – where “life, not death, still posed the greater challenge” – and how her chronic lifelong pain – both a hindrance and an enhancement – influenced her art.

From polio at the age of 6, to the horrific bus accident at 15 (leaving her impaled and shattered), to the amputation of her toes, and finally the amputation of her leg at 46, a year before her death, Kahlo’s salvation was her art, and her painkillers.

The innovative style of Croatian-born Drakulic is not the fluid and simple, yet evocative and poignant writing – it is the way the information is revealed in three methods. It is undoubtedly fiction, and part historical narrative (third person), part fictional autobiography/memoir (first person narrative by Kahlo), and part art critique.

The third method – art critique – is easily discernible through the use of italics. However, the first two methods – narrative and autobiography – are so intertwined that paragraphs often combine the two techniques simultaneously. For example – “Last year when my leg was amputated it was my-what?-thirty-second operation? Frida tried to remember exactly, touching the scars on her back, her tummy, her leg. I can’t remember them all. I wonder if abortions count as operations.” Readers may find the style disconcerting at first, but I found that it enabled an understanding of the connection between agony and creativity.

The entirety of the novel is a chronicle of pain – its birth, its treatment, its physicality, its psychology, and its artistic manifestation. Its persistency and the pleasure of relief – albeit temporary – are constant themes. “Pain made me aware of my body. My body made me aware of deterioration and death. That awareness made me old.” Kahlo is depicted as old before her time – her ageing appearance, the loss of her teeth, and her toes, and her leg, and the odour of gangrene and rotting flesh - “a painful body, an unwanted body.”  

But it is also about the pain of a volatile marriage. She married Mexico’s most famous painter, the muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), who suffocated Kahlo’s visibility as a surrealist and magic realism artist in her own right. Born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderon (1910-1954), she married Diego “The Maestro” in 1929 when he was 42 and she was 22. They divorced in 1939 and re-married in 1940, but he was a notorious womanizer – and she knew it. In her early years with Diego she changed her style of clothing for him – trading mannish suits for folkish peasant dresses – which eventually defined her appearance. Her father had died long ago, and The Maestro was more a father-figure than a husband. She moved out of the marital home, and lived out her life at her parent’s Blue House, when he had an affair with her sister, Kity. Double betrayal added salt to her existing wounds.

“She still yearned for him. He continued to fill her world – whether from fear of abandonment and poverty, or because she sought an impossible love, it no longer mattered … she had become even more aware of what an obstacle the body posed – her own and other women’s …” Juxtaposed with this scene is a critique of Kahlo’s painting The Love Embrace of the Universe in which her husband is depicted as a baby in her arms. She is the protector, not him. “That makes her feel safe: he will never leave her … It fills her heart to cradle him, the way it would, she thinks, if she had a child.”

Of her 140 plus paintings, 55 were self-portraits. Her body and her emotions were what she knew well. Kahlo gained recognition post-humously in the 1980s during the Neomexicanismo movement. “White, not black, was the color of her death.” She died at the age of 47.

Drakulic’s novel contains brief critiques of various Kahlo paintings: Girl with Death Mask I, The Dream, Frida and Diego Rivera, My Dress Hangs There, Self-Portrait with a Doll, A Few Small Nips, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, What Water Gave Me, My Birth, The Broken Column, Self-Portrait dedicated to Leon Trotsky – Between the Curtain, Tree of Hope, Roots, Girl with Death Mask II, The Frame, and Self-Portrait with Dr Farill. It’ll make you view Kahlo paintings in a new light – while looking constantly for her portraits wearing the earrings Picasso gave her.

Every page is beautifully crafted, intriguing, insightful, and uncomfortable, throbbing with tenderness and stinging with pain. And in the end, it is not the pain impaled in your skin like an embedded steel rod that is remembered, but the loneliness – the lifetime of loneliness and endurance – that lingers.

Self Portrait dedicated to Leon Trotsky - Between the Curtain (Photograph taken during my visit to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, 2013)

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).