Mirror Images: Disabled Writers on Frida Kahlo

AFTER UNDERGOING JOINT replacement surgery, the unnamed narrator of Katherine Brabon’s new novel Body Friend encounters another disabled woman who, she is delighted to discover, “was shaped just the way [the narrator] was.” The two meet in a hydrotherapy group, where a physiotherapist assigns them identical exercises. Observing this woman, whose swollen joints, stiff neck, rashes, and limping gait resemble the narrator’s own, is “like watching a distant mirror.” They soon strike up a friendship, each “mov[ing] like mirror images of the other” in and out of the pool. But this other woman does not merely reflect the narrator’s physicality; she also models the pursuit of a kind of bodily control that the narrator seeks as she recovers from surgery. Tenacious, self-motivated, and self-assured, this woman appears to have the “capacity for everything.” “I just had to be like her,” the narrator confesses.

This magnetic other woman’s name is Frida. The reference to Frida Kahlo is hardly subtle, given that the artist experienced physical impairment due to childhood polio and a bus accident she survived as a teenager. Elsewhere in the novel, the narrator makes another chronically ill friend, Sylvia, who is an equally overt reference to the poet Sylvia Plath. Later, the narrator references Kahlo by name, describing her self-portraiture and practice of painting her corsets while wearing them. “She became the work,” the narrator explains; “her body wore it. Frida’s body was always the first work.” Though not a painter, the Frida in the novel also considers her body her “work.” She exercises “aggressively” to feel in control. Her “faith in water,” evidenced by her almost religious commitment to swimming, recalls Kahlo’s 1938 painting What the Water Gave Me, which shows her wounded lower body submerged in a bath filled with symbols of both pain and comfort.

As she grapples with pain in the wake of her surgery, Brabon’s narrator begins “to orientate [her body] by Frida’s” (and later, to Sylvia’s). “We swam together, drank coffee together, ate together after our swims,” she recalls. She hopes that emulating her new friend’s approach to living in a disabled body might be “a path to betterment.” Through fiction, Brabon imaginatively realizes what the writer Emily Rapp Black describes, in her 2021 memoir Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg, as a “longing for Frida herself, for her friendship”—a longing that has been termed “Fridamania” and “Fridolatry.” Amid the onslaught of media depicting Kahlo, disabled writers—including Brabon and Rapp Black—have laid special claim to her image as a vehicle for understanding one’s own embodied experiences.

Writing in her diary in 1950, Kahlo recounted a cherished childhood memory of imagined friendship that inspired the 1939 painting The Two Fridas. “I had the intense experience of an imaginary friendship,” she writes before describing “a little girl … roughly [her] own age.” She recalls that the girl “was agile” and “dance[d] as if she were weightless. I followed her in every movement and while she danced, I told her my secret problems.” Kahlo dates this memory to her sixth year, around the same time that she fell ill with polio. During her first of many periods of acute physical impairment, Kahlo found solace in this twin figure. Her “agile” body was not a foil for Kahlo’s own disabled one; rather, she saw her imaginary friend as a guide she could “follow” and in whom, through such mirrored movements, she could confide her pain.

This private recollection was published in 1995 in The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait. In the nearly 30 years since its publication, Kahlo herself has become an imagined friend of sorts for many viewers of her art. Her ability to make her interiority visible on canvas, to convey experiences of physical and emotional pain through self-portraiture, has made many believe that they know her intimately. “I wanted that girl to be me,” Rapp Black recalls of her first encounter with Kahlo’s description of her imaginary friend, “and for that magical friendship to be mine and Frida’s, one in which I could share all the secrets of my body that I believed nobody else would understand or want to know.” In this memoir, an excerpt from which was published by LARB, Rapp Black interrogates her own long-standing attachment to Kahlo. The author, whose leg was amputated when she was a child and whose first child died of Tay-Sachs disease, feels profoundly tied to Kahlo, who was also an amputee and who experienced multiple miscarriages. Just as the young Kahlo “followed […] every movement” made by her imaginary friend, Rapp Black determined early on that Kahlo “would be [her] guide.” Of the first time she laid eyes on The Two Fridas, Rapp Black recalls, “I thought yes. I thought you see me.” The sight of Kahlo’s body in her paintings offered, in Rapp Black’s words, “a mirror for mine,” one which enabled her to see herself anew.

Kahlo herself was no stranger to the mirror. She began painting self-portraits at the age of 18 after sustaining severe injuries to her spine, pelvis, and right leg in the bus crash. In the aftermath of her accident, Kahlo started painting from her bed, above which she affixed a mirror. More than simple solipsism, mirrors also became a tool the artist employed to invite others to see themselves in her work—and in her body. After completing the 1937 self-portrait Fulang-Chang and I, which depicts Kahlo with a pet monkey, she designed an accompanying mirror in a matching frame that allowed viewers to see their own portrait next to hers. Similarly, the medical corsets that she wore and painted required her to use a hand mirror to see her own work, but she also embedded small mirrors in the corsets themselves, creating miniature portraits of anyone who gazed upon them.

Over the past few decades, many have taken up the opportunity to see themselves reflected in Kahlo. While her visage has become a pop culture phenomenon, emblazoned on an endless stream of coffee mugs and tote bags, her body has become an object of profound identification for disabled writers in particular. When Rapp Black travels to Kahlo’s famous Casa Azul residence in Coyoacán, Mexico City, she encounters hordes of “strangers, oohing and ahhing” over the same sorts of medical objects—“legs and corsets and empty bottles of Demerol and piles of bandages”—that drew her to Kahlo. This scene of spectacle turns Rapp Black’s attachment to Kahlo into possessiveness: “I know Frida, I want to say to the people I watch emerging from the house […] I know her, and you do not. I am the secret friend of her long-ago dreams.” She experiences the other tourists as intruders upon what otherwise might be an intimate reunion, even as she is aware of the fallacy of this “fantasy” that her connection to Kahlo is exceptional. “I might understand Frida least of all because I assume that I do,” she admits, feeling that, having projected her own experience onto Kahlo’s so intensely, she herself has become “more of a voyeur and a violator than anybody here.”

Rapp Black’s status as a white American tourist in Mexico further exposes the limits of her identification with Kahlo. When she travels to England to view an exhibition of Kahlo’s clothing, prosthetics, and corsets at the Victoria and Albert Museum, she notes that she has dressed in vague “homage” to Kahlo, since “it would be ridiculous for [a white] American woman to wear a Tehuana dress.” The disabled Mestize writer Naomi Ortiz has critiqued the phenomenon of white women’s overidentification with Kahlo. In their poem “To the Non-Disabled White Grrrl with the Frida Kahlo Altar in the Living Room,” Ortiz cautions, “Grrrl, if you’re going to gush to me about Frida, / you better […] have experience of body meeting surgical knife.” While they see a “kindred soul” in Kahlo, they warn against the titular “Non-Disabled White Grrrl” doing the same: “You can’t inhabit someone else, and expect to find your own way.”

In Body Friend, Brabon does not transpose Kahlo’s Mexican and Indigenous identity onto her white Australian narrator but rather removes it from the story entirely. The Frida from the pool is a doppelgänger of the narrator and is distinctly not Kahlo. And yet, the novel is littered with allusions to the painter, which makes the comparison hard to avoid. This whitewashing of Kahlo seems at first to be exactly what Ortiz warns against, but we can also read Brabon’s reduction of this Frida character to a version of the narrator herself as exposing the consequences of overidentification.

Inverting Rapp Black’s anxieties about appropriating Kahlo’s identity, Brabon shows how projecting oneself onto another can obfuscate the idiosyncratic nature of chronic illness and the reality that there is no singular “right” way to be disabled. As the novel progresses, the narrator’s sense that she and Frida are direct reflections of one another begins to crack. The two gradually fall out of step as they cycle asynchronously through periods of relative illness and wellness. When Frida suddenly stops appearing at the pool, the narrator must make her own way through the water. “I would do it alone,” she declares, but she finds she is slower and enjoys swimming less without her companion. When the narrator’s condition worsens and she takes a break from swimming, she feels guilty about not meeting Frida’s standards. “There was a sense that she was right, that she would always be right, […] both morally and bodily,” the narrator thinks. Toward the novel’s end, as Frida’s health declines and her gait and posture change, she substitutes lap swimming for free floating. Her once strikingly familiar body becomes “strange” to the narrator, who feels her own body getting stronger, at least for the time being. These moments of divergence are crucial to the novel’s figuring of affinity and identification. “We want enough similarity not to be alone,” Brabon writes of doppelgängers, “enough difference to know ourselves.”

Even amid the risks of overidentification, there are ways of engaging with her work that keep Kahlo herself in sight. In an essay written on the occasion of the artist’s birthday, Mia Mingus recalls a time when Kahlo, whose self-portraits were “some of the only visual images of disabled women of color” she had, felt like a “reflection” of herself. Mingus carefully reminds us that Kahlo was not a face in the mirror but a woman with her own perceptions. “I wonder […] if she would have recognized me,” Mingus admits. Moreover, she imagines Kahlo as a mirror that allows her to see herself not only in the artist’s own iconic image but also in those around her. Kahlo’s paintings, she asserts, “were a way for me to recognize pieces of her, and in turn, a way to recognize pieces of my self, and allow me to recognize others.” Her relationship to Kahlo is not a self-affirming end in itself but a portal to forging a broader disabled community. Studying Kahlo’s art, she suggests, offers an opportunity to “practice recognizing each other.”

Indeed, as disabled writers work to see themselves reflected in Kahlo’s paintings, they might also shift their gaze ever so slightly to recognize the myriad others, both like and unlike themselves, who have gathered around her hoping to catch a glimpse. Such a view brings into focus not only

Kahlo herself but also the disabled community that has coalesced around her likeness.

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Featured image: Frida Kahlo. Las Dos Fridas (The Two Fridas), 1939. Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City. CC0, mam.inba.gob.mx. Accessed July 11, 2024.