Yuyi Morales Wrestles the World, or Jumper Cables for an Emotionally Tense and Spiritually Bankrupt Socius

Yuyi Morales Wrestles the World, or

Jumper Cables for an Emotionally Tense and Spiritually Bankrupt Socius

Yuyi Morales (author and illustrator) and Tim O’Meara (photographer). Viva Frida. New York: Roaring Book P, 2014.

When Sam Loomis reached out and switched on the tiny FM radio, the music welled forth, annihilating space and time and death itself.

It was, as far as he understood it, an authentic miracle.

-- Robert Bloch, Psycho (1959)

The artist is the master of objects; he puts before us shattered, burned, broken-down objects, converting them to the régime of desiring-machines…the artist presents paranoiac machines, miraculating-machines, celibate machines as so many technical machines. Even more important, the work of art is itself a desiring-machine. The artist stores up his treasures so as to create an immediate explosion.

-- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:

    Capitalism and Schizophrenia

A few years ago I came across a book called Los Gatos Black on Halloween (2006). As a Halloween aficionado, not to mention someone interested in Latino/a literary and cultural studies, to say that I was delighted to find such a book is an understatement. Once I opened the book I of course enjoyed it tremendously. In particular, I loved the illustrations. The artwork that Yuyi Morales provides for Marisa Montes’s text creates a perfectly, tantalizingly gothic visual dimension that draws viewers into a realm of uninhibited creativity. I enjoyed Morales’s illustrations so much, in fact, that I honestly did not want the book to end. With every turn of the page I knew that I would encounter something gorgeous, brilliant, and wondrous. Perhaps the best way to phrase the ability for Morales to captivate an audience is by suggesting that once one enters the realm of her artwork, one does not want to leave.

What makes Morales’s work so compelling? As cliché as it sounds, there is a lot to her work. This, of course, is something that at first glance one might miss. In particular, one of the things that comes across through her work is a tremendously vibrant artistic soul. A reader can instantly and unmistakably see, tell, and feel the powerful creative energy that Morales harbors. What she produces is a manifestation of this precious energy. In this day and age of mass production, autotuned music, focus groups, mass media, and mass appeal—not to mention mass animosity and massive agitation¹—Morales and her flourishes of imagination are refreshing, desperately needed reminders that art, beauty, creativity, and inspiration are still possible.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that her picture book Viva Frida is a wondrous celebration and example of art and creativity. It is a tour de force showcase of Morales’s talents and spirit. With a combination of handcrafted puppets (photographed by Tim O’Meara) and painted illustration, Morales presents a text to which one can only respond with admiration and fascination.² What is more, as much as one will want to pore over and appreciate this book, it will inspire yearnings (or cravings) within a reader for more art in all of its multifariously finest and liveliest forms—poetry, painting, photography, puppetry. Ultimately, upon experiencing this book one may well want to make art her/himself.

Although the Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data lists Viva Frida under “Painters-Mexico-Biography,” it really is not a biography. Rather, with biographical overtures (some more overt than others) Morales’s book really presents Frida Kahlo as a character in an adventure story in which creativity and passion emerge as real, palpable drives and sensations. In essence, creativity and passion constitute the real subject of the book. By the same token, Viva Frida functions as a medium for exploring and indulging and encouraging aesthetic appreciation, sensibility, and creative passion--the sort of abstract energies (or “flows”) that Kahlo embodies and that otherwise get suppressed and squandered through, for example, the spiritually bankrupt emphasis in contemporary K-12 education on standardized testing and the Common Core curriculum.³

Incidentally, before the “story” even begins, the end pages and title page bespeak and incite a passion for art. The end pages feature lovely and colorful flower stencils splayed over a soft background. Such a layout effectively puts the reader in a mode that privileges aesthetic appreciation over, say, the sort of informational processing prioritized by Common Core language arts outcomes. The title page, meanwhile, functions as a splendid emblem of creativity: upon a table (which we might read as an altar of creativity) we find spread out, among other items, a parchment, pastels, a palette, brushes, and papel picado. Gathered in one close-up shot, then, is the stuff of art and inspiration. Also on the title page one spies a key in the paw of what at first is not a readily identifiable creature (the gothicist in me got especially intrigued thinking it was some sinister, babadook-like entity). The creature turns out to be Frida’s monkey pilfering the key from the table. 

The first pages introduce a puppet version of Frida on the heels of the key-holding monkey. She is “searching,” the text indicates, for the monkey with the key. Because we at first do not know why she seeks the monkey with the key, this opening gambit sets a tone of undefined restlessness and adventure. Also implicit in the opening sequence is the notion of something locked up vis-à-vis a yellow, apparently locked wooden box that Frida has with her. Soon enough Frida manages a breakthrough in her quest/restlessness/adventure and “sees” the key/monkey. Once she catches up to the key/monkey, she proceeds to open the locked box. The image that shows Frida and the monkey peering into the box is an utterly charming one that shows them with wide open, captivated eyes. Moreover, the text of “Ah-ha!” combines with the lovely visual to impart a glorious sensation of a discovery, or, better yet, an uncovering. Inside the box is a kitschy dia de los muertos marionette with which Frida proceeds to play.

A number of implications emerge from this sequence of events. On one hand we get a portrayal of the idea that keys to unlocking hitherto repressed or hidden energies can lie in any of a number of things. In the case of Frida Kahlo, her pet monkey Fulang-Chang, who appears in a number of her paintings, can be seen as one such source of or agent for creativity. Hence we get the alignment of the key and the monkey in Morales’s text. That Frida uncovers in the box a crafty puppet waiting for her to “play” with figures play as a medium for accessing that which the puppet embodies: creativity, imagination, art, and, owing to its association with dia de los muertos, culture and tradition. In the process, play/creativity/imagination/art/culture/tradition all emerge as positive energies currently repressed and waiting to be unlocked (or accessed).

Interestingly enough, as Frida plays with the marionette, she has her monkey on her back. Some viewers might just take this arrangement as a pleasant instance of the little primate behaving impishly and so adding to the image’s dominant impression of play and unleashed energy. Another possibility occurs to me, though, one which still reads the monkey in terms of play but with more biographically specific implications. In my alternative reading, I read “play” in terms of creativity and artistic exploration. That is to say, then, I see play metaphorically, and biographically, operating here to suggest the very activities in which Frida engaged as a painter.

Continuing with this biographical line of interpretation, it seems possible to consider the portrayal of a monkey on Frida’s back as she “plays” (i.e., creates/paints) through the lens of the figure of speech in which to have a monkey on one’s back signifies a) shouldering some burden or distress, and b) struggling with addiction. By conjuring up the figure of speech, the image effectively (and actually) starts to point toward the difficult circumstances that the real-life Kahlo endured. That the puppet Frida is playing with a skeleton marionette ends up implying the exercise of a certain control over death (which, we might remember, is an aspect of the tradition of el dia de los muertos anyway). As regards Kahlo’s biography, then, Morales’s image of Frida pulling the strings of the marionette captures the burdened artist’s act of “playing”/creating as a means of controlling or prevailing over death.

With the reading that I am proposing, it thus becomes possible to see Viva Frida as working on different levels: a more surface level that we might regard as more accessible (and amenable) to children and a more metaphorically suggestive one. (Of course, this is generally how children's literature works.) Importantly, realization that Morales’s text works on multiple planes offers a counter to concerns that the text participates in the all-too-common mythologization and romanticization of Kahlo's life by overlooking the grimmer and tougher realities of it.⁴ Through close consideration, one realizes that Viva Frida does capture Kahlo in different, revealing ways, just not in a complete or necessarily fully realistic way.

To be sure, the sanitized, streamlined presentation or invocation of Kahlo that we encounter in Viva Frida raises a number of critical issues. Is the text problematically misleading and idealizing the Mexican artist? Is this a strategic introduction not only to Kahlo, but also to the concepts of art and creativity for children? Do Morales's objectives authorize this re/presentation of Kahlo? One can make a case for any of a number of positions on these questions.

Once we turn the page which has Frida playing with the marionette, we arrive at an image of her sitting on a knoll with her eyes and hand directed skyward. The text for the page reads, “I know.” The implication is that play/creativity has enabled a new, higher knowledge. Incidentally, we see the puppet barefoot—a detail which suggests the artist’s arrival at a state of heightened sense and sensibility (or sense-ability). All the while, the monkey sits off to a side tangled up with the skeleton marionette. Apparently, Frida has managed to transcend that which both represent.

For subsequent pages, such as “I dream” and “I realize,” the images shift from the relative realism of puppets to painted illustrations. Such a shift suggests a move from material external reality into a psychic, subjective, and fantastic one. The latter is a more contemplative and sensitive space which, the structure of the text suggests, one accesses through creative play. The valorization of subjectivity becomes especially crucial if we consider the ways that the overplanning or overscheduling of children’s lives prevents them from having any time to themselves with their own thoughts and feelings. Without the availability of personal space and time, childhood becomes, or remains, an overstimulated, hyperbusy experience filled with so much white noise and flux that the child never manages to fashion a sense of self.⁵ Of course, the same can be said for adults. As Paul Virilio indicates in his discussion in The Administration of Fear, “Our societies have become arrhythmic. Or they know only one rhythm: constant acceleration” (27).

One of the things that Frida realizes is “I feel,” which is another key step in the development of subjective selfhood. For this page we see her we tending to the eponymous figure from her painting, The Wounded Deer (1946). But whereas in Kahlo’s painting the deer is pierced by several arrows and features her face, in Viva Frida’s more kid-friendly rendering the deer is a separate entity with a single arrow in a foreleg. The implications are the same, however. As occurs in the painting, we see in Morales’s book Frida’s identification with victimization in the form of literal and figurative piercing (both of which the real-life Kahlo endured).

The puppet Frida’s act of feeling for the deer and tending to it leads to her, now soaring through the sky carrying the bandaged yet bleeding deer to safety on her back, proclaiming, “And I understand/that I love/And create/And so/I live!” While the image for “I love” of a puppet Diego Rivera planting a tender kiss on a beaming Frida’s cheek elides the very complicated matter of Kahlo’s actual relationship with Rivera, the cumulative, refreshing implication is that compassion, love, and art, and the beauty they all entail, are all the essential ingredients of a complete state of selfhood and vibrant life.

To the credit of Morales, her book defies the tenets of contemporary consumer culture, which orients the individual toward thinking that the acquisition and accumulation of material goods is the secret to a fulfilling life. It also provides us with that which Franco Berardi rightly says is needed these days: “poetry” that will “start the process of reactivating the emotional body” (20). The severity of contemporary social, political, and economic oppression and crises has resulted in the decimation of spirit and energy and sensitivity. For Berardi, “poetry” has the potential to remedy our current state of malaise, aggravation, and dispiritedness. In many ways, Morales’s book--even with questions about its re/presentation of Kahlo--is the sort of poetry the contemporary socius needs.

--phillip serrato, San Diego State University, Department of English & Comparative Literature

Notes

¹ “Getting carried away has taken the place of enthusiasm, and reaction, action. We are in the fit of rage” (Virilio 53).

² For a video which shows the labor and craftsmanship that went into the production of Viva Frida, see Morales, “Making Viva Frida.”

³ Bearing in mind terms put forth by Deleuze and Guattari, I wonder whether we might read Morales’s book as a counter to or defiance of the containment of different energies or flows which they identify as endemic to any social organization. As they note, “The prime function incumbent upon the socius, has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly damned up, channeled, regulated” (35).

⁴ See Mencimer for a discussion of the disjunction between Kahlo’s real life and wistful (re)conceptualizations of it.

⁵ For more on this kind of critique of childhood, see Douglas Wood’s picture book A Quiet Place (2002) as well as John Taylor Gatto’s “Why Schools Don’t Educate.” It is also worth

Works Cited

Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012.

Bloch, Robert. Psycho. New York: Overlook P, 2010.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.

Gatto, John Taylor. “Why Schools Don’t Educate.” The Natural Child Project. 31 January 1990. 5 January 2015. http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html.

Mencimer, Stephanie. “The Trouble with Frida Kahlo.” Washington Monthly June 2002. 5 January 2015. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0206.mencimer.html

Morales, Yuyi. “Making Viva Frida.” 4 September 2014. 7 January 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mu8mZLmewI.

Virilio, Paul. The Administration of Fear. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 2007.

Wood, Douglas. A Quiet Place. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.