Published by Seven Stories Press and distributed in Canada by the Publishers Group Canada, The Incantation Of Frida K. is a journey into the mind of a person who seems to no longer be able to distinguish reality from illusion. Why else would she describe her relationship with her husband Diego Rivera as one long foray into sexual perversion? The accident that maimed her when she was a teenager also, she is now convinced, stole her femininity and turned her into a man.
In her mind, she now sees her initial sexual experience with Diego as homosexual, with her being a boy named Pierre. Her opinion of herself has been so degraded by her current circumstances that she is unable to view her life as being anything more than a plaything or doll that Diego used as a prop to promote his own career as an artist. Throughout her life Frida was known for her habit of wearing the traditional clothes of the Mayan and Incan people who were Mexico's first inhabitants. In fact, she was so fascinated with pre-Columbian imagery her paintings drew heavily upon it in both style and content.
But in her distorted view of the world she now sees it as nothing more than another means of keeping her imprisoned and denying her an identity. While it's true that Diego Rivera was a lousy husband and had affairs continually during their marriage, Frida didn't just pine away at home. She had her share of affairs with both men and women, sometimes even with the same woman that Diego was sleeping with. Although she did divorce him at one time, they also remarried, and all biographies say that in spite of everything they loved each other deeply.
Braverman's Frida claims that Diego continuously disparaged her paintings and diminished her accomplishments as an artist. According to the recent movie Frida, which was based on the well-received biography of the same name by Hayden Herrera, Diego was in actual fact an ardent supporter of Frida's work, and continually encouraged her while praising its quality as being superior to his.
Braverman does not claim to have written a biography, or anything other than a fictionalized supposition of what Frida's state of mind might have been in her last days. Taken in that context, this is an amazing piece of writing that takes us on a journey through the avenues and byways of a mind teetering on the edge of sanity. On occasion Frida K. will have moments of lucidity where she admits to creating an imaginary daughter, and in the next instance she will refer to the daughter in conversation as if she were real.
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