My personal history of sormeh

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The eyes have always been a focal point of Persian beauty for men and women and they have always been embellished with sormeh, or thick black eyeliner. Presenter Nassim Hatam's grandmother taught her mother how to apply sormeh, which originates from a 4000-year-old recipe, and when the family was scattered to the four winds by revolution she made it her responsibility to supply the family women with their sormeh wherever they had settled. Now for Nassim, and millions of modern Persian women, the wearing of sormeh or black eye makeup has become something much bigger than make-up – it is an important part of their resistance to oppression.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So I've come to the grave, it's very beautiful. My aunt always makes sure that there's fresh flowers.
0:10.0	And yeah, we have my grandmother and there is no date of birth on my
0:17.4	grandmother's grave. We simply don't know when she was born. Isn't that odd?
0:22.2	And this is where the story of Sormel begins for me. This is where
0:26.7	our story begins. My grandmother was a vivacious woman full of life and very beautiful and I am
0:35.8	Nasim Hatam of the BBC World Service. My grandmother Esijun was born in the
0:42.3	Kastian Port City of Anzali.
0:44.6	Sometime in the 1920s,
0:46.6	Anzali was famous for its cavier
0:49.1	and just across the water from what was then the Soviet Union.
0:55.0	Esoe Jun was exiled from her country after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
1:00.0	One of the ways, especially young women in that period pushed and I think challenged a lot of the laws through daily life was through their appearance.
1:12.0	Also the more of any writer of the book Lipstick Jihad.
1:15.0	Now whether that was the color of their headscarves or makeup,
1:19.0	when you feel inclined to be civilly disobedient and you are living in a country with
1:27.6	conservative Islamic laws there's not a lot of space on your physical person to do that with that space is your face, to do that with.
1:33.0	That space is your face,
1:35.0	and for us it means the eyes,
1:37.0	Sorme, black eyeliner,
1:39.0	some of you know it as coal.
1:41.0	And so the face became a kind of tableau for women to kind of say something
1:48.7	about their identity, their originality, along with some of their uniform style, you know, Islamic
	...

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