Ghost Portraits

By Paradise Khanmalek

I am an Iranian woman with facial hair. My mom always tells me about how hairy she used to be, how she used to thread her own face with thread tied to her bathroom sink faucet. She constantly encourages me to get laser hair removal. Strangers have encouraged me to get laser hair removal. One time I was getting on the bus and the bus driver recommended I use Nair. I respect people who do decide to remove their hair but for various personal reasons, I usually don’t.

My cousins one time called me the “American one” because I speak Farsi with an American accent and I was born and raised here. I am definitely very American, culturally. But I like to think about ancient Iranians or really just pre imperial Iranians and imagine times when women had beards and it was considered beautiful. I love old miniature Iranian paintings of men and woman with identical wispy facial hair. I love Old Iranian wall tiles of women with thick unibrows. I love finding celebrations of my body in Iranian art and craft.I’m an artist who loves imaging the past, the future, and alternate realities; situations and paradigms where my body isn’t weird or ugly. When my father died, this fascination fused with an emerging obsession with ghosts. I felt my father’s spirit all around and inside of me. The blanket draped between me and the spirit world had so many holes poked in it from me and my dad’s attempts at sharing space. Along with his spirit, however, other ancestors leaked through those holes. I would be sitting in front of the TV, drawing without thinking, just rubbing color pencil to paper, and I would start drawing a face. These portraits were so familiar to me. They were uncanny and intense to look at. They were ancestors showing themselves to me, comforting me in my grief. Since this experience, I haven’t stopped exploring this path of portrait drawings. I get to know my ancestors through drawing them. Many of my ancient relatives have shown me their silky beards and body hair. I love drawing them. I love a perfect plethora of thick black hairs on vibrant yellow brown skin. I put these portraits up on my walls and wake up to stunning brown eyes and beards every day.