Page - 140 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

140 | Ulrike Luise Glum www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 123–143 who did not, as is evident from the eyewitness accounts. Most eyewitness- es connected the tattoos directly to ethnicity, for instance Gayané Adourian: “The Chechen took me to Telhafar – a town in Iraq – and sold me to my new Turkmen father. I remained with him for five years. […] They tattooed my face with blue ink to give me the appearance of an Arab, and they gave me the name Nouriya.”59 Sirena Aram Alajajian states that as a result of the tattoos, she not only looked like an “Arab”, but she also became an “Arab”: “But afraid of losing me, one day they seized me by my hands and feet and began to prick my face with blue ink down to my breast. I shouted from the pain but there was no one to hear me. In fact, this was their custom; they had made me into an Arab.”60 And elsewhere she asks, “Do you see my face? The Arabs have tattooed my face, pricking with pins and pouring blue ink in order to make me a fellah Arab.”61 Here she implies that for her kidnappers, the motivation for tattooing her face was to regulate her ethnicity. This regulatory function is even more obvious in Barouhi Chorekian’s statement: “Swimming across the Khabur River (river flowing near Der-Zor), we reached near the Arab Bedouins. They sheared off our lice-infested hair; they tattooed our face with ink in order to hide our Armenian origin.”62 Barouhi Silian similarly recounts that the tattoos were a means to overwrite her Armenianness: “I fled with four other girls to the forest and then swam across a river. An Arab took me to his home and told me, ‘My daughter, I know you do not have the same custom, but let me tattoo your face with blue ink so that they will not take you for an Armenian.’ I cried. I had neither bed nor clothes. They tattooed my face; they sheared my thick braids.”63 The visual demarcation between the Armenian women and their Armenian community was not easy to overcome once the women had escaped their captors. For many missionaries, aides, and Armenians, the tattoos marked a border between themselves and the women. These processes of delineation were reinforced by the specific historical and political situation that the Ar- menian people was confronted with at the end of the First World War. Civil and religious aides, along with the Armenian elite, were driven by the idea of rebuilding the Armenian nation. For the Armenian elite in the Middle East, 59 Svazlian 2011, 445–446. 60 Svazlian 2011, 411. 61 Svazlian 2011, 410. 62 Svazlian 2011, 413. 63 Svazlian 2011, 414.