Notes on Frida Kahlo's diary

• Frida is going to a concert: she arrives late and the sound of her sumptuous jewelry covers the orchestra and everyone is looking at her box, the concert doesn’t count anymore. An Aztec goddess, Coatlicue, a deity wrapped in her skirts of serpents, exhibiting her lacerated hands, like trophies. Or maybe Tlazolteotl, the vulture that has to devour filth to keep the universe clean. Earrings are as big as cartwheels; her rings transform her hands into claws.always hiding her tortured body, shriveled leg, broken foot, orthopedic corsets

• always hiding her tortured body, shriveled leg, broken foot, orthopedic corsets
• under the spectacular finery of the peasant Mexican woman, who kept jealously the ancient jewelry hidden away, protected from poverty, only to be shown at the great fiestas.

• Laces, ribbons, long skirts, rustling petticoats, braids, flowery peasant blouses, garnet-coloured shawls, moonlike headdresses[1] - form of humour, great disguise, theatrical, self-fascinated form of auto-eroticism, a call to imagine the suffering naked body underneath and discover its secrets[2]
• Her clothes were a manner of dressing for paradise, of preparing for death.
• “Kahlo, disguised in many clothes, a Saint Joan of the liberating culture of the Revolution”[3] : dressing and undressing, wearing her clothes were ceremonial acts, laborious, regal, ritualistic
• “I am not sick, I am broken.”
• Fooling death, fooling around with death, in her language, death was: La Mera Dientona [old buck teeth], La Tostada [The Toasted One], La Chingada [the Fucked One], La Catrina [The Belle of the Ball], La Pelona [The Hairless Bitch], La Tia de las Muchachas [The Girls’ Aunt]
• Nietzsche: Whoever has built a new heaven has found the strength for it only in his own hell[4]
• proud and defiant in her denim cloths and proletarian, urchin-like cloth caps, together with Las Cachuchas [The Caps]
• internal darkness under midday light, fantasy within realism – influences on the art of Frida
• Defenderse de los Cabrones – lifetime slogan
• Broken spinal column, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, left shoulder forever out of joint, one feet crushed, handrail crashed into her back and came out through her vagina
• Naked and bloodied, covered with gold dust
• Pain destroys language, pain is indescribable (Virginia Woolf)
• Nietzche decided to call his pain Dog
• Frida as a speaker for pain[1]
• 32 operations
• from 1944 she wore eight corsets
• in 1953 – her leg is amputated
• her wounded back “smelling like a dead dog”
• loses her fetuses in pools of blood
• forever surrounded by clots, chloroform, bandages, needles, scalpels
• personal suffering transformed into art, an art that is shared, not impersonal
• a ribbon around a bombshell – Andre Breton about her art
• she loved Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers
• beauty as truth and knowledge: Frida’s legacy to the marginal, invisible, faceless men and women, when only photogenic and shocking images merit a vision
• I am writing to you with my eyes
• sexual and political Mexican art- censored in US, in order to preserve their fake innocence, forget their dirty history: genocide of native Indians, rape and robbery of their land, Black slavery, wars against weaker nations, territorial annexations, robber barons, capitalist exploitation, urban violence – American culture is left without appropriate, lasting beautiful images of its own violence.
• The internal oneiric change is inseparable from external, political, material, liberating change: marriage of Freud and Marx. In Frida’s subversiveness that would be the marriage between Woody Allen and Groucho Marx.
• The more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. (Diego Rivera)
• I cannot, I cannot! [F on socialist realism]
• Deep down, you understand me, you know I adore you. You are not only something that is mine, you are me myself. [love letter to Alejandro Gomez Arias]
• Her voice was deep, rebellious, punctuated by caracajades [belly laughs] and leperadas [four-letter words].
• Theatrical persona – practical and linguistic jokes
• Love for carpas and cantinas, joy in singing and enjoying Mexican music
• She could sing couplets like La Malaguena with a perfect falsetto.
• Friend with carpenters, bartenders, shoemakers, anarchists, servants
• She was using a lot of diminutives, charming the words – form of defense against arrogance and oppression, a form of anesthesia.
• F vocabulary: Chaparitta – small women, chulito – male friends, doctorcito, herself: Chiquita, chicuita, Friducha
• Like Diego, she was baffled by gringo faces and could not paint them, they looked like "half-baked rolls". On her American female imitators: they look like “cabbages”.
• Mr Ford, are you jewish? [F. to renowned anti-semite Henry Ford]

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[1] Carlos Fuentes, p.12

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[1] Carlos Fuentes, “Introduction” in The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995, p. 7

[2] p.22-23

[3] Carlos Fuentes, p.11

[4] p. 24