He hath couerd my soule inwarde
A! Performance Festival
Akureyri Art Museum, Iceland
October 12, 2024
Duration: Approximately 30 minutes
As a woman who lives her life submerged in the spillage of “what happened to her,” I have come to find that in general, people do not really want to acknowledge the pain that has been inflicted on her. Surviving intimate partner violence was not a goal I set out for myself yet it has defined much of who I am. I now live with Complex-PTSD. While many have deemed me brave to speak about my experience, I have also been demonized for making others feel uncomfortable by my truth. In fact, many survivors experience this.
I’ve come to realize that while we all can acknowledge that inflicting harm on another person is wrong, openly discussing that wrong has its limits. Victims continue to pay the price with their mental and physical health, financial success/professional development, and interpersonal relationships, therefore establishing that both enduring THEN surviving abuse is a life sentence. Victim’s contend with society’s response to trauma and the strict judgement we establish as parameters of tolerance and empathy. As one in three women have experience a form of intimate partner violence (IPV),I view operating within these parameters as a form of “women’s work” and align it with the undervalued domestic labor traditionally done by women. This includes the often-coupled creative output associated with women as fiber arts and even fashion. While these are archaic attitudes, one cannot ignore that fashion and the arts are capitalist patriarchal system, undervaluing the output of women and those who are not cis, white, straight or male as lesser value.
Conversely, the image of women is valuable as long as it reinforces patriarchy. Conventional beauty, youth, sexual appetite and submissiveness are deemed acceptable and anything outside of that is “nasty,” shrill, difficult, and undesirable. While this proposal cannot surmise years of an unbalanced system, perhaps this allows for a foundation of understanding of the proposed performance, “He hath couerd my soule inwarde.”
The Western custom of covering married women’s hair was firmly established in the medieval and early modern period. Its origins go back, at least, to Syro-Mesopotamian, archaic Mediterranean, and late antique context. In Green black-figure vase painting of the sixth century BCE, Attic brides, goddess of the hearth, as well as Helen– abducted and returned– are shown with the ‘himation,’ an outer wrap, drawn over their heads… Women as potential objects of family shame through predatory male sexuality needed actual or figurative protective covers for their honor, and the veil provides one such a barrier. (Roslin, 2008).
Veils, a polarizing symbol of women’s oppression, implies the control of women. Muslim feminist scholar, Aisha Lee Fox Shaheed writes, “‘[social] codes . . . are represented in women’s clothing, and since [s]exual control of women is fundamental to patriarchy in both Muslim and non-Muslim societies,’” women’s bodies are often universally the targets of oppression, whether that is through imposed clothing styles or restricted reproductive rights.”
This performance centers on what happens under the veil– fear, anger, frustration, rage, sadness, anticipation– and represents the ongoing oppression of women. As the veil is worn for significant coming of age ceremonies, most notably, a wedding. Arguably this is the time where women are positioned as the peak symbol of the patriarchy, an object acquired by the male gaze but only if they can be both chaste in public and a whore in bed. The patriarchy does not encourage otherwise despite what media messages attempt to tell us.
Circling the performance back to personal experiences, I am conflating several years of IPV in the next sentence. My abuse, rape, assault and stalking by my partner and later by my (ex)husband was not believed by those close to me. In fact, that abuse was questioned and surmised by many that either I must have sone something to deserve it or I must be exaggerating and be mentally ill. Many years later as I became more forthright about my experiences, I was shamed, bullied, and further attacked and harassed by people on social media. This harassment extended to threats of physical harm via direct messages, emails, and phone calls. Bottom line, while I feel the distance and healing by what actually happened to me (twenty+ years ago), the ongoing pain is the lack of empathy and tolerance for continued struggles.
Citations
Jougla, K. (2014). The Ideology of the Veil: Fundamentally Misogynistic or Fundamentally Misunderstood?. The Morningside Review, 10. Retrieved from https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/TMR/article/view/5431
Koslin, Désirée G.. "9. “He hath couerd my soule inwarde”: Veiling in Medieval Europe and the Early Church". The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics, edited by Jennifer Heath, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, pp. 160-170. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520941601-013
