By Nick Rabinowitsh
Daily Bruin Contributor
[email protected]
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It is easy to see why Kate Braverman finds the life of Frieda
Kahlo, the subject of her new book, called “The Incantation
of Frieda K.,” so intriguing.
“She was bisexual, she was a communist, she was a morphine
addict, an alcoholic and the first woman in Mexico to be
psychoanalyzed,” Braverman said in a telephone interview.
Not to mention that she was impaled at age 17 by a 12-foot metal
spike while riding on a trolley in Mexico City, an accident that
would affect her for the rest of her life.
Braverman, a former UCLA professor, recently released her new
book with a different perspective on Kahlo’s life.
Her book is based on Kahlo’s lesser-known side. Braverman
makes it clear that although Kahlo is probably best known for her
relationship with famed Mexican painter Diego Rivera, this aspect
of her life is only one of the most trivial in the grand scheme of
things.
“What I can’t get over is that most people still do
not know who Frieda is,” Braverman said. “She was a
prototype for modernity. Because I’m an experimental writer,
she was a natural portal for me to enter and explore human
consciousness.”
Braverman calls her work an exploration into the
“subterranean Frieda,” the part of her life that most
people do not know about.
“I found myself as a sort of anthropologist imagining
Frieda’s solitary rituals, her sudden spasms of song in the
great silence of her life,” she said.
Its release in Los Angeles will prove to be especially
interesting to Braverman, as the city is often, as a whole, the
least receptive community to her work.
She admits that her style often makes it difficult for her to
get published. After all, she has even been turned down by Playboy
because, she says, her work delved too far into the feminine side
of fantasy rather than the masculine.
For example, when speaking of her former work, “Lithium
for Medea”, the author made a claim that sums up her bold
approach to experimental writing.
“I wrote about the first heroine on heroin in the
world,” she said in a telephone interview. “If you can
find another woman who did this before, I’d like to
know.”
After spending her undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, Braverman
lived in Venice Beach, which at the time hosted a community of
artists. As the city changed, though, she and the other artists
decided to move out to the “barrio.”
“I lived in the barrio. That’s where the artists
went after they decided to deconstruct Venice,” she said.
“They began building condos, getting rid of verminous
artists.”
Instead of being a curse, though, the neighborhood proved to be
an inspiration in itself.
“A bunch of us went to the barrio and it was a fascinating
place to live,” Braverman said. “It always seemed to me
that the great Los Angeles novel would be written with that kind of
global pulse.”
Eventually, though, Braverman began to find the literary
environment of Los Angeles intellectually stifling. After having
spent almost all of her life here, she found Los Angeles to have
grown up and lost part of what she found most appealing.
“Los Angeles has never really had a literary community;
it’s always been overrun by screenwriters and I don’t
know how that is going to change due to the reactionary positions
of the L.A. Times and UCLA.”
She recently attended the L.A. Times Festival of Books, which
she sees as a welcome recognition of literary talent, but she also
feels that Los Angeles, including UCLA, has far to go in becoming
more conducive to new forms of literature.
“It is amazing to me how little books have changed
compared to the other arts in the past century,” she said.
“Books really look a lot like they looked 500 years ago. The
format ““ you are still supposed to have a beginning, a middle
and an end.”
With regard to her inspiration and influences, she cites an
eclectic array of literary talent including William Burrows, the
Beat movement, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sylvia Plath and J.D.
Salinger.
Braverman now resides in the East, which she describes as
between Toronto and Pittsburgh.
Despite serious criticism for her work, Braverman definitely
knows what she is doing. As for whether her writing will be more
widely acclaimed in Los Angeles remains unclear. Until then she is
right at home in the Allegheny mountains.