The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Kahlo biography, and had begun lobbying to play the lead role. By 2000, however,
Hayek’s film project was competing with another in which Jennifer Lopez was to star.
Eventually, “the right woman won”, suggested Julie Taymor, the eventual director,
Hayek was the right size, she argued, wore a real Kahlo shirt, and “Salma even looks
like Frida”. By acquiring and owning the right to tell and step into Kahlo’s life, and by
completing the film, Hayek discharged a two‐decade long obsession and ensured that
the Mexico of Frida was the Mexico of Salma, to be consumed at the box office. This
domestication, ‘devouring’ and appropriation of the Frida Kahlo life story of pain and
triumph ensured the creation of a Frida/Salma/Hollywood association, whose major
beneficiary would be Hayek’s professional career. 68
The Biographic Landscape of Memory
In the domain of public history, commemorative artworks, memorial landscapes and
sites of national remembrance have celebrated the greatness of political leaders. While
many memorial practices and memorial edifices continue to work with simplified
narratives of biographic greatness, disputes and controversies over their management
and symbolic meanings have shown how contested memorial biographic
representations can be. In post‐colonial African settings, at Lenin’s Mausoleum on
Moscow’s Red Square and at various sites of the civil rights memorial landscape in the
United States, where notions of great lives have been cast in stone, struggles have taken
place over the form and content of commemoration as well as over the interests that
remembrance serves. In addition, museum exhibitions have begun to transcend limited
notions of great and exemplary lives and narrow methods of documentary truth. During
the 1990s, exhibitions on the creation and circulation of images of Mao Zedong, Patrice
Lumumba and Che Guevara began to ask deeper questions about image creation and
circulation, and the cultural construction of lives. These public biographic claims and
contests have emerged as part of the memory work of the display and collecting
68 Discussion between Oprah Winfrey, Salma Hayek and Julie Taymor, Oprah, etv, 27/2/03;
Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Salma the siren gets serious’, The Sunday Independent Sunday Life, 2/3/03, p 12;
Margaret A Lindauer, Devouring Frida, p 173.
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