THE
NEW ICON
The
icon you grew up with stays with you especially if you have an ideological
connection with that person.
For
me it has always been CHE and I must say my respect for him started long before
my affiliation with Cuba and perhaps even influenced the decision to put my
faith in Cuba.
Che
was iconic of a generation who wanted to see changes in the political systems,
which would help the majority of the population rather than a minority. Che
became a symbol of people’s hopes for a better tomorrow.
In
Cuba, the tourism industry has propelled CHE into teacups and magnets and hats
and tee shirts. But elsewhere his popularity is on the decline perhaps it is
like that in history, as new generations do not study their earlier
revolutionaries while they struggle to reinvent the wheel.
I
have paid homage to CHE, visiting the places he had lived and grown up in
Argentina as well as his final resistant phase in Bolivia in La Higuera,
Vallegrande.
Bob
Marley shone for a little while and is on the brink of extinction as an ICON.
While it was the taste for revolution that attracted one generation to the
ideology of CHE, the blackness and readiness to fight injustice, under the
smoke umbrellas of ganja, his music truly created a universal revolution.
I
was lucky to be associated with Jamaica when Bob Marley’s fame was at its
zenith.
I
truly enjoyed the message in his music, did sport his colours while I was a
junior doctor in Melbourne.
Move
over Marley, the new icon is…. Guess?
It
is Frida Kahlo
I
think it is congruent with the new resurgence in the Me Too movement as Frida
was an early feminist and independent soul who strived to portray herself as a
tormented person in rally against the societal stereotypes in a macho society
such as Mexico.
I
had gone to visit her house, Casa Azul on a visit in 2008 to Mexico City but
when did she enter my life?
Indian
oppression was well portrayed in a mural by Diego Rivera in the Government
houses in the Zocalo in Mexico City, and one cannot think of Diego without Frida.
A
Jewish father and an Amerindian mother, born and raised in Mexico City as a
rebel when such things were unheard of, poetry and art and selfies of her soul
garishly portrayed, Frida had become a symbol a very long time ago.
But
the iconization is quite recent.
At
the markets in Cuernavaca one sees Frida appearing on tee shirts and dolls, but
it was in Buenos Aires that I saw the full extent of Frida’s iconization.. They
have everything with Frida’s face or caricature of her with her prominent
eyebrows.
I
had decided to seriously take up the MATE drink and sip it during my travels.
And I needed a small bag to hold my Mate with its Bombilla and Yerba. So I
bought a small bag with the countenance of Frida on it.
I
look forward to sipping Mate sitting at a favourite restaurant, Genevieve’s in
Siem Reap in Cambodia, anxiously waiting for my Khmer fish amok dish.
