soap

In a film from 1986 entitled “Bashoo”, Iranian director Beauzai depicts the journey of a dark clandestine child, displaced from the southern regions of Iran as a result of the war with Iraq, across the country into the distant villages of predominately fair skinned northern Iranians.

Upon his arrival, apart from being terrorized by the local groups of rat-faced Iranian farm children, he is welcomed by a concerned-country-cattle-cooking woman who attempts, desperately, to wash him of his naturally dark skin with a bar of soap. His skin color worries the woman about the peril of sin.

Soap rids us of our immorality.
Soap is the super-ego of hygienic supplies.
Soap is repression.

It is the temptress that seduces taboo.

This is made apparent in its most explicit form, when acknowledging its use as a physical censor for transgressive language. A punitive measure applied by the common house-wife against the non-complacent child. The soap is shoved into the mouth for extended periods of time. In such an instance, however, soap mediates morality not by a positive sensation bubbling from the fictitious dissolution (washing away) of guilt, but establishes the limitations of guilt itself, by manipulating the memory of the child's misfortune in relation to a disagreeable impression.

The oral drive (and therefore the ethos of our existence) is dominated by the Mother.

Vis-à-vis the breast. Vis-à-vis the soap.

Soap, therefore dissolves the internal dissatisfaction stemming originally from the boundaries blurred by the morality of our mothers, the accumulation of dirt, and the bastardization of black.

It is the alchemical ingredient which makes water white and holy, the ritualistic application of which, confuses our notions of interiority (sin/idealism) and exteriority (soil/materialism).