Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black

Author:Emily Rapp Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

– Violation / Veneration –

Frida’s leg was made in New York City in the 1950s; mine was made in Denver in the 1980s. My prosthetist, a man with dark hair and waxy skin, who looked at me the way I wished boys my age would look at me, marked the places where the wooden leg attached to my body by a strap that became increasingly worn each day and soaked with sweat, until eventually the fabric wore thin, and then it started to shred. When I started my period later that year, the strap became blood soaked and rank, and my mom spent hours trying to wash away the stains, clean away the stench.

There was a gap, as the prosthetist described it, between my hip and the top of the residual limb that he needed to ‘tweak’, and so he used Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow lipstick to make a series of red, waxy slashes like tiny misshapen mouths kissing around my crotch and upper thighs, to mark his tweaks. Okay, just there he said, and the cool wax slid over the scarred skin. When he left the room with my leg to power up the leg saw in the back (to carve down the foot, the thigh, the calf), I looked at myself and thought Frankenstein’s monster, stumbling into his life with his body carved up the way a butcher marks the parts of an animal: haunches, breast, thighs, rump. We were reading the book in English class. At night I would read two pages, then fourteen, then fifty, shut the book, place it in bed beside me, and weep. There was such powerlessness in difference, which created, it seemed, not just a barrier to success but also a barrier to love. Who could stand it?

Then I stopped eating and, for a while, I found power. I was the pure, starving, virginal, intact woman, but with one part that would never be intact. It was that severing I sought to overcome by silencing all other desires.

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