the seduction of the camera
sensuality as a form of resistance & the camera as a curtain
It doesn’t occur to her then, but she will look back at this moment and realize ten years had passed.
This was her first time trying again. And just like it happened ten years ago, she allows the fabric to do what fabric does on her body. She lets it to fall off her shoulders, this cloth and all the others that held the lie of the woman she never was and never would become. A decade of trying to be good, surrendering quietly to the more honest desire of wanting to be bad. A desire that had chosen her. A desire that still makes her want to take the roughest sponge she could find and scrub her body back to an innocence she never wanted.
“I felt guilty before I ever sinned. ”
Ten years later, and unknowingly, she returns to the same gesture. Except where there was nature there is now a wall, and where there were two women there is now one.
Ten years later, and the forest is gone. The river is gone. The soulless woman who watched them by the large windows is gone. It’s only her, this camera, and the new company of a shame she doesn’t remember finding the first time she tried.
Against the backdrop of a forest coming into spring, a fourteen-year old girl raises the camera to her eye. She doesn’t know her grandmother is watching. She tells her friend to allow her sweater to fall off her shoulders, asks her to lean deeper into the nature around her. She was responding to a primal desire, leaning deeply into a longing for a sensuous world and all the wild possibilities it carried, long before she consciously knew there was such a world and such a possibility. It would take her ten years to return to the camera again, and maybe a whole life to return to the woman who held it for the first time..
And when she finally returns, she gives her body to the camera the same way she gives it to her lover: with rage, with a feeling of dirt falling from her skin beneath’s god eye. She wants to do this before an audience. She wants to move her body and let fabric fall with a room filled with people who can witness the war she carries. She lies to herself that her sensuality is rebellious, but what is rebellion when there is only one to witness, and revolution when the hall is empty? She touches the dark part of her psyche that holds all forbidden things, and the shutter clicks with each contact. Touch, a flash of shame, the shutter. Touch, a stronger surge of shame, the shutter. The rage of it all sends her to bed with a camera filled with blurry images of a body that refuses to speak to her. Lover of the self that doesn’t return the love. A rejection that resembles all the others. A sensuality that mocks a loyal woman who doesn’t know how to repair the coldness. A woman emptied of her river.
She who was in me is gone* and she left before I got to know her. This world of everything that makes a woman feel alive, locked away from her in the word of sin, was gone before I had the chance to walk in it. In her place is the voice of my grandmother who raised me, telling me not to enter the forest, not to ever pose in front of a camera like that again. I know only this long journey out of that voice and into everything it warned me against. I know little but I know enough that everything worth knowing sits where the tribe tells us not to go.
I know to follow the darkness, but only in my mind. These desires— floating candy wraps, caught for a moment before a camera, then returned to the wind. The sinners are bored with me. I am bored with me.
It’s in the imagined sin I live, before the camera, on paper, in the quiet hour of my mind on a train. I live it. But in the world you know, this life, these desires, the wanting remains unlived.
In the same rupturous way cinema cheats your mind into entering a story you wouldn’t dare enter with your body, photography holds a world to me that I’ve only known in solitude. A cigarette gets lit. A bra unbuckled. A defiant look rises in eyes that publicly beg for invisibility. And for a moment, you have her. We have her. This shy one that’s not so shy after all. This defeated one that’s not so defeated in spite of it all.
The camera is a curtain, and the truth of who I am and what I want to do with this body stands behind it. Each year, I push it a little further, bare more skin, bend the body more, reveal more of the face behind the woman who is both hiding and begging to be seen. She moves her hips in a way she wouldn’t know how to do in public even if she tried. The camera hides her and allows her to share proof of the existence of this hidden version of herself. To say here, hold this photo beside me when you meet me. Don’t believe the shy one. Believe her.
““There is tolerance for all acts as long as they remain secret…we cannot live well when we’re afraid, when we feel guilty. ”
But there’s something about sensuality performed in the dark that leaves a bitter feeling in your body. It disappoints you. It scatters images of a singular body trying to mute its search for a second character. Instead of the relief you were anticipating, there is immense frustration, as there is in the aftermath of an intimate moment I told my god I would stay away from. In the surrender, in the opening of your legs to the hands and mouth of a man you couldn’t resist, is the exhausting feeling of a promise broken. Rather than celebrating the doing, the defiance, the I dared to, I sink into a sickening feeling of I did it, and now I have to bare the consequences. And, anticipating the punishment for doing something I was told not to do, I create it.
It’s as if I were given all this… desire, then given to the wind, and solitude, and dreams that can’t seem to enter the realm of reality. The camera patiently records the moment of waiting for what never comes. This body, approaching what won’t approach her, begging erasure, if only for a moment, of what she knows. I trade reality for a far kinder fantasy. It was early in my life that I learned that freedom was a thing I couldn’t buy with truth. So I learned to lie, learned to sever myself into the woman without camera, and the woman with. A woman who goes home, and a woman who takes the train. I learned to walk in a verse that no one else will read, where dreams are dreams and nothing is tried, and poems are poems and nothing is written.
And how could an Arab woman ever believe she goes unseen in her pursuit of pleasure, real and imagined. I was raised on this saying: that where there is a man and a woman alone there is also the devil. I think many Arab women would agree with this one instead: that were this a man and a woman alone, there is god.
The more fabric I shed, the further I dare, the stronger the consequences. I imagine that a woman begins her life with god nearby. Then, with each falling fabric, he recedes further and further into the wind until she has lost him completely. When I try to pray, I press this body against the darkness and find only the air returning the urgency.
“The closer you are to God, the less I see of you — so goes the thinking behind the niqab…It comes from an ideology that wants to hide women. [It] represents a bizarre reverence for the disappearance of women. ”
But on the other side of the river where the one she is meant to become waits for her, god is another character. The road to him is through the forbidden. His felt presence within the body, this same body that feels like a boat steering in the opposite direction of the divine simply by being and becoming. I am learning how real a prayer could feel in the acts of ‘shame.’ In the body, I am finding what I was told I couldn’t have because of this body. But we are all here because a woman dared to do what she was told not to. She reached for that fruit among all the others. She rebelled, and in her naughty rebellion, she birthed the world, and our story began. Imagine the other possibilities that remain untouched in the realm of the ‘forbidden’ that have the power to deliver us the soil of this earth.
Tell me, what other miracles are waiting to happen.
“Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayer making, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between-worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts. ”
***
Do you remember wanting to, and not? Before you became ordinary
before your wild collapsed into a pair of heels, and what you meant to do
boils with the coffee in a quiet kitchen.
Each morning to the walls you say, ‘life
won’t be like this.’ But it is my love.
It is.
How many women are saved by secrecy,
how many destroyed by it?
Tonight, I give you all of me,
on camera
One day it will happen with the rest of you into the room.
*Forugh Farrokhzad