"عيب"

“I have sinned a rapturous sin” — by Forugh Farrokhzad

It finds us at the threshold of our womanhood, in that long, confusing, delicate transition out of childhood. Shame becomes a new feeling, but not new for long. Before we’ve come to know ourselves as women, we know our shame far better. 

I remember the first time I came back home from school with red lipstick. I will never forget those eyes that met me at the other end of the kitchen when I stepped in. The look of disgust, and something else I’ll never find the words for. I remember the silence that told me so much of what he was thinking. It’s been more than 10 years, and I still encounter those eyes in the mirror. 

But the lipstick is nothing more than a symbol, not the story itself. Shame has long arms. It gathers into its wide embrace every part of femininity and sensuality: the way a woman laughs, or dresses lightly, or dances, or the way her body shapes itself… all these beautiful, natural moments of growth, tainted with toxic, sticky shame that clings to each woman – this is the story. 

I began trying to share with you the experience of shame through this very clean, careful white frame of me half covered, half-uncovered in a white sheet, dancing around a pair of penetrating, shaming eyes. Then I thought, I’m still making art as if I have to be careful. And that is what shame does, it follows you through every attempt to speak honestly and every effort to find the woman it robbed you of. So what I did is I printed more of those eyes, and I tried to shape something that was closer to my experience, which is inevitably messy and ugly and far more haunting. But I also kept the original work to visually compare between a careful, hesitant protest, and a freer, more honest one.