Slavenka Drakulic’s novel Frida’s Bed is a journey into the mind of Frida Kahlo as she lays on her bed just before the end of her life at the age of 47. Drakulic creates in blistering but beautiful narrative the kaleidoscoping thoughts of Kahlo as she veers through her memories, cycling back and forth in time, much as real thinking reels from place to place. Rarely do we think sequentially; our thoughts follow their own logic and Drakulic’s recorded thoughts for Kahlo do the same: they move from topic to topic, from one age to another and back again, offering an unfettered glimpse into Frida’s bouts with illness, dependence, independence, following her in and out of love and desire and lust, through periods of intense attachment and then into slack periods of self-adjustment and promotion. But even the self-promotion was a form of art: “it was yet another provocation, a way to make people not only stop and look but also see.” That is what Art is all about: making people not only look but also see, and through seeing, understand. Drakulic does that with this novel about Kahlo: I saw the artist in a new way through the narrative recounting of her deathbed thoughts, and I understand both the woman and her art in a new way.
The understanding I came to is that the only steady force in the life of Frida Kahlo was her pain. Her relationships wavered, whether her two marriages to Diego Rivera, her many affairs, or her back and forth relationship with her sister Kity, her mother, and her father. Her only constant companion was pain. Struck by polio as a child and then horribly mangled in a tram accident as a young women, Kahlo knew pain every day of her life: “It could be momentary, piercing pain that would pass if she changed position, or it could be dull, milder pain signaling the permanent presence of an inflammation. A fever often accompanied the pain and then she would feel as if her bones were breaking and her body was being crushed to pieces.”
From this pain, Kahlo created herself as an artist: “Because all I ever really painted was my accident” and only painting “could quell or control” the pain. She saw her painting as not only representing a female reality but also the reality of a sick person. Like her father who had been an epileptic, Frida had a lifelong illness, and its signature, her “demon“, was pain.
What Drakulic is able to create through her looping but highly committed writing is not only the constancy of the “demon” pain, but also Frida’s own overpowering personality, her incredible will to survive and be noticed, to be taken care of and validated, even as she was wracked with insecurities over her art and her crippled body. Drakulic uses first person, second person, and third person narrative, as well as italicized descriptions of Kahlo’s paintings, in her writing of this novel. All of these narrative devices work together to convey the story of Kahlo in quite an intimate way: instead of being distracting, the different narrative voices pulled me in, engaged me as if in a conversation.
But this book is not for everybody. In addition to the shifting in narrative voice, the entire novel takes place in the mind of Frida Kahlo. All action is seen through her thoughts, not through the reader’s own direct observation of events. The result is a kind of distancing of the reader from the action, from the active experience of the life of Kahlo; we sacrifice first-hand experience to gain a first-row seat at the workings of her mind. I like that kind of observation but there are readers who will find the distancing from actual events to result in a distancing from the novel itself.
What is so interesting about Drakulic’s creation of Frida Kahlo is that she relies on the paintings of Kahlo as the basis for imagining Kahlo’s thoughts: the person Drakulic creates is only as real as the woman Kahlo herself presented in her canvases. The question is, how true was that woman Kahlo painted in her self-portraits and in her canvases of dreams and nightmares? More importantly, what understanding can occur if the basis is not fact but fiction? The answer, of course, is a great understanding. We understand life through Art, through fictions created by others to convey truths. The Frida Kahlo whom Drakulic creates is real insofar as I am connected to her through the writing of the medium, Drakulic, who in turn created Kahlo through the medium of Kahlo’s creations, her paintings. Two fictions, one written and one painted, to convey truth, and I was convinced.
Having been thoroughly convinced, I came to admire Kahlo. Not only for the force of her personality and will to live, but for her humanity. When in the end she reaches conclusions about life and about love, I understood the context of her life that leads her to say that “understanding somebody means taking responsibility, it means having to help.“ It is why humans often veer away from understanding pain or illness or sadness in another person, because of the commitment such understanding implies. And yet Kahlo accepts that “people do only what they can, give only what they’ve got — and that is precious.” It is precious, whenever people give us what they are capable of giving us. Kahlo was speaking then to Rivera and about Rivera, and her statement is a declaration of both love for him and of acceptance of the kind of love, jagged and disloyal and yet constant, that he offered her.
When Kahlo claims that “Chance is fate“, Drakulic is asking her readers to disagree. The entire novel is a demonstration of will over chance: it was chance that placed Kahlo in the horrific tram accident but it was her own tremendous will and courage that made her turn the pain and disability into a fantastic and genuine outpouring of artistic creation. She became the artist and the personality that has engaged generations not because of fate but because of her own determination, her self-determination. And it is thanks to Drakulic’s determination as a writer, that I gained understanding of Kahlo, the painter.
