Remember - The Needle-Pierced Suffering; The Shared Pain of Baloch Women

“The wound of the heart, the wound of the finger, the wound of the eye, the wound of our neck bones… my neck pain, back pain from sitting all day sewing, my eyes can’t see now. I say I will finish this sewing and get glasses, but [before you know it] the money for that sewing is gone.” “The way the needlework is positioned on the leg and the way the head must be close to the fabric to see the threads.” “My eyes are ruined; I have kidney stones.” “Your neck gets problematic. Your back gets problematic. Sometimes I sit on a pillow but my back still gets stiff. My hands are full of holes from the needle. You sew something small and see how much your hands hurt; now imagine sitting day and night! How much pressure you endure; especially your neck.” “My aunt was sewing until the last moments of her life. She had aged a lot. She had to wear two pairs of glasses to see the threads. Her hands were crooked. Imagine someone sewing for eighty or ninety years. With those crooked hands and a neck that never straightened, she sewed until her last days. She kept her sewing and threads in a very old milk powder can, and when she passed away, this remained from her. That unfinished sewing she was still working on until her last days; with those crooked hands and the pain she endured with every needle prick on that fabric.” “My eyes are ruined. I have internal bleeding, and I can’t even go to the doctor. The neighbors know what misery I am in.” “Our needlework is good. Our art is good. I love my art, but it has no value here.” “I didn’t want to follow this path, but in the end, it seems like it’s not a choice and more of a compulsion.” “Sewing women are truly voiceless. They are in the corners of homes and workshops, and there is no voice for their pains.” These are sentences from the needlewomen of Sistan and Baluchestan, in the fourth part of the series “Remember”; women who speak of their pains; of neck pain, eye pain, back pain, kidney failure, and the crookedness of joints and fingers, and the needles of a lifetime of sewing… the needle-pierced suffering woven into all. They are afraid, afraid of many things, of the government and of the men in their families. In this episode of “Remember,” I narrate the suffering of Baloch needlewomen. I will not mention any of the women’s names, and I have slightly altered their voices [for use]. I invite you to listen, read, and remember. Embed Share Remember – Episode Four: Needle-Pierced Suffering; The Shared Pain of Baloch Women from Voice of America Embed Share Code copied to clipboard. The URL has been copied to your clipboard No media source currently available 0:00 0:57:04 0:00 Download 128 kbps | MP3 64 kbps | MP3 Pop-out player Dream Weaving in the Bitter Reality Have you ever looked closely at a piece of Baloch needlework? Have you ever stared for a minute at all that painful beauty? When you look at Baloch needlework, you see more dreams than reality. You see women from the heart of the desert and the torn nature, women with thorns in their throats and a historical thirst in their souls, weaving a single shirt, with dry skin that weaves the dream of a garden, the dream of greenery, water, and vitality. The patterns of Baloch needlework are entirely colorful and fresh; they have nothing to do with the living environment of the needlewomen; they relate to the dreams they weave in their heads; their threads and fabrics are made of imagination; distant, long imagination. Each piece of needlework is a fantasy woven by a woman far away; endless dreams in the cramped mud-brick rooms. A Baloch woman in an interview with “Remember” says: “I spend two or three months on one garment. My eyes don’t see well. My head hurts. My husband is sick. I sew so that someone gives me something to cover our expenses. We have no other income. I have a son who, God bless him; sometimes when he can, he helps, but he also has to support his wife and children; he can’t manage. My husband has been sick for twenty years, and I have been sewing. One of my daughters and my granddaughter live with me. My granddaughter sews, my daughter sews, it’s a small help. They have no income.” And another needlewoman from Sistan and Baluchestan says: “My husband is a laborer. He works and occasionally gets a little money. One hundred thousand tomans or a little amount around that. I have four children. One daughter and one son. Two of my children go to school. My husband’s laborer income does not cover our living expenses. I have to sew to help with expenses because the children go to school and need notebooks, pencils, clothes, and food. They want three meals a day. They want everything. The little one needs diapers. He is under a year old, but we can’t manage, and I have to sew.” Another woman says her husband is addicted: “I work for my children. My husband is addicted and has no income. I have been sewing for eighteen years. I sew from morning till night for one hundred thousand tomans, fifty thousand tomans; what pain does that relieve? It only buys a dry piece of bread. I am sick myself. I have diabetes, I have cholesterol, I have every illness you can name. And the people are also addicted. He goes out in the morning to collect plastic and garbage until night. Sometimes he doesn’t even come home at night. Where should I bring from? I have dependents, and the responsibility is on me. We are seven or eight people. One has no shoes, one has no clothes, one has no tent; all these are my responsibility. God knows how bewildered, miserable, and sick I am. No water, no electricity. The money I earn goes to cover these expenses.” Are you following the storyline? Under all the roofs and in all the huts of the villages and small, deprived neighborhoods of Sistan and Baluchestan, women are sewing, and men? I ask each of these women about their husbands’ jobs. What do their husbands do? Do they work? Do they have an income? The answers often lead to men who are either addicted, sick and disabled at home, unemployed and searching for a job that doesn’t exist, or simple laborers with wages below the survival line, which their temporary employer may or may not pay. This sewing woman says: “My husband used to work. I mean, it wasn’t that kind of work. He was in recycling. You know that recycling is about collecting things that have fallen in the street, like mineral water bottles or glass bottles; it had no income, but now all recycling has stopped. When my husband goes to the intersection, he sits from morning until afternoon, and his turn doesn’t come to go to work.” In a province with the highest unemployment rate in all of Iran, how likely is it that laborers return home with something in their hands? Most men, if they are not addicted or sick, go for daily labor. There are many laborers and little work. When a vehicle comes from afar, everyone runs to be chosen. Most spend the entire day waiting and are left empty-handed by sunset. This sewing woman says the men are not to blame: “Previously, perhaps, husbands committed crimes or worked in fuel smuggling, or maybe they ran shops; now even those jobs are no longer available. The men only rely on their wives to see when they take sewing jobs and when they deliver them. In our province, the men are not guilty. There is no work; they have no capital. If they go for fuel smuggling, they get killed; if they go for crime, they get killed! They are sick, they are addicted! I know a woman who has no documents, and neither does her husband. She says I have two children and I am at home; I go out to buy for her so that maybe she can feed me and my children at night. Her husband is also an apprentice at a shop and cannot even feed his own children, and now this addicted brother and daughter-in-law and two children are also there. It’s very hard.” Here, this young sewing girl talks about the curse of sewing for Baloch women: “Its existence has caused women to get stuck and put excessive pressure on their shoulders. Look, in every village and city where there is no work for boys and men, sewing is for women. Therefore, all the financial pressure of the family is on the shoulders of women, and all the pressures of the feminine parts of life are also on them, and these women never have the right to protest. It’s as if there is a written duty that they must perform, sewing from morning till night, taking care of children, preparing food, and never claiming anything. That’s why for me, sewing, alongside the love it carries, is a curse.” She depicts a day in the life of a Baloch needlewoman: “Sewing for Baloch women is like this: they wake up in the morning, pray the morning prayer, make tea for breakfast, and sit down to sew, and all day until they sleep, this sewing is on their legs. In between, they have to take care of children, prepare food, clean the house, and return to sewing.” The entire burden of the family rests on the frail shoulders of sewing women whose art tells the story of their suffering. This sewing woman shares her observations about other women: “Not that it’s a stranger; we have acquaintances, it’s from our own family. Where there was leisure, he told his wife, ‘No, you don’t need to come! Stay home and do your sewing because we need money at the end of the month.’ Well, that’s not the woman’s right.” It’s not just these. Sewing women are often doubly marginalized. They often do not have identification documents, and not having identification means not being counted, means not having a bank account, means working and having no rights over their meager wages. That same sewing woman talks about women without documents: “Some women also do not have documents. Most of them do not have documents, and their money goes into their husbands’ accounts.” Sometimes sewing women have identification documents, but the unwritten traditional law prohibits the repetition of the family name for strangers who buy their work and are supposed to deposit their wages into their bank account. Parvaneh, a young sewing girl, explains: “The income from sewing often doesn’t even reach the woman and goes directly to her husband’s card, and he [the man] decides how to spend that money, even for his own addiction. It has become so normalized in society that a woman thinks she has no place or right to protest and say, ‘This is money I earned at the cost of my health, and I want to decide to buy something for myself or my daughter.’ Such a right does not exist. It is very normal for sewing money, especially when sold elsewhere, to go into the man’s pocket! It may seem funny, but even sensitivity is shown over women’s names, and the woman cannot give her card that has her name on it; she must give the man’s card for the money to be deposited.” When we say wages, what exactly do we mean? Poor, underprivileged women artists who remember nothing of life except sewing and weaving threads and stitching flowers of imagination onto cotton fabrics, in the end, how much do they earn? One of them responds: “The sewing I work so hard for, I spend day and night on it, and I sacrifice my life for it; when I receive my wages, it weighs heavily on me that I have sat for hours, and even when praying, I cannot go, and I say I should sew more, and then when I deliver the sewing, the wages are so low that they don’t even cover my transportation [for delivery]. I get nothing for myself; it only goes to household expenses. I buy all my household items myself. If I need water, I provide it myself, and if I need bread, I provide it myself. There is no capital. Just enough for our night’s bread and water.” And this other woman talks about her wages: “I can’t even see under my feet well. I wish I had a higher income to solve my problems. What can I do with this hundred tomans and fifty tomans? If you want to buy a skinny chicken, it costs fifty-five thousand tomans per kilo. I can’t afford to buy it. I have a lot of children. I don’t know what to do with this little amount. One wants shoes, one wants clothes; this money doesn’t even buy dry bread. I buy twenty thousand tomans of dry bread daily.” And another woman explains: “It’s been three or four years since my husband passed away, and my job has become sewing to cover the expenses of my children and my sick old father. I am the head of the family. My father has no one else to take care of him. He has no money. The welfare committee gives him a small amount that doesn’t even cover his doctor’s expenses. He has nothing, and neither do I. We have no one but God. Only this sewing has a small wage. It doesn’t even buy a chicken. My eyes have weakened; my legs hurt. Do you see? My fingers have turned black! But what brings tears to my eyes is not my fingers, but my old father’s situation: “My father was sick here with me. Sometimes he is with my sister. He was here for two days. He was sick, and I didn’t even have money to give him for transportation. He walked from here to Khiyam Street. That night, my heart ached so much that at eleven o’clock at night, I called my sister and cried. I said my father was sick, and I couldn’t even take him to the doctor.” And a young girl who has also been sewing for seven years says: “I know I won’t reach my dreams. I have been doing this for seven years, but I am going nowhere because my father is sick. If I earn money, I give it to my mother, who also covers the household expenses. Nothing is left for me to buy a dress, shoes, or a chador for myself. I cannot live like other people. I have been growing up for seven years, and I only sew. If there were another job, I would go, but there isn’t. This is the end.