A few years ago my favourite song sported the refrain "I am not my hair...". This song I loved not because it made profound musical sense to me or added any excitement to a night of vigorous dancing, but because it said, in words simpler that I could ever have thought sufficient, what I had been trying to say my whole life: "I am not my hair, I am not this skin, I am not your expectations (oh!)..."
So enamored was I with the song, that I mis-treated countless sleepy-looking fellow commuters to my loud sing-alongs, every morning while we were sitting miserably in old buses, sulking our way through the early commute, contemplating yet another lousy day at some form of employment or the other. I could think of no terms more fitting with which to describe every feeling and all the frustration that I had ever had with my hair.
Alas, recently I went where I swore I would never again go. A place where the odoriferous smells of petrified fruit and flowers,murdered and stolen from grassy, green hills; infected an atmosphere filled with high pitched giggles and the off beat blast of boy band genres bouncing off the walls of strange machines that could only have been the wartime armour of alien races. I went to the hair salon.
I have the misfortune to have been 'gifted', by genetics or creation or freak accident of nature-whichever is most cruel, a mass of tight, dark curls which seem to arouse the greatest interest of strange types who insist on the tugging, pulling and parting of it, much to the dismay of my delicate nerves. These people, generally saved in the folders of my memory as "people not to like", tend for the most part to be hair-care professionals and the mothers of children with receding hairlines. Every three weeks or so growing up, I would have to make the journey across town to have my hair done because being on the swimming team meant that I couldn't indulge in the fantasies of the Afro-Queens of the seventies or that hairstyle called "leave it free". These were the weekends I dreaded. They would conventionally be spent sitting on cold, hard, red ochre painted floors between the fat thighs of sweaty, noisy women who asked me questions about my parents and paid particular attention to me when my "tall, dark and handsome" father was at hand to bring me onto their premises. At the end of these sessions I would walk home, drained and devastated, my head pounding so hard I thought that I must have three heads rather than one, and all the while I would formulate in my aching head a master plan, a dream of freedom, the ultimate scheme that would, in the next couple of weeks, get me out of spending another day in the evil hands of a hairdresser. Creatively inhibited this plan usually consisted me bursting into tears at the sight of my mother, who would usually be exhausted from a twenty hour work shift, and as I clung to her skirt, screaming and begging not to be subjected ever again to such torment, she would roll her eyes at me and shaking me off her leg proceed to tug, pull and part my hair; roll her eyes again and click her tongue as her appraisal of Mama So-and-So's work fell far short of her expectations.
One day I stormed out of the hairdresser's and onto the street with my braids half undone and shampoo dripping into my eyes unleashing the flood of tears that only pride had prevented me from shedding in a smoky room full of women. Later that night the hair, my so called crowning glory fell from my head in thick chunks and as the wind scattered them into the darkness, to be evermore separated from my ungrateful self I felt liberated. I felt as light as a dandelion, that ill reputed weed, carried off into a horizon of possibilities. More than anything I felt like myself for the first time.
If in that moment I had been one of those records that the disk jockeys spin at nightclubs, then my sister's comment, abrupt and unkind, stopped my happy song and scratching my lyric against her needle forever changed my grain. "You're not my sister anymore. You're just ugly. I can't have a sister with short hair." For the second time that day the tears streamed down my face, hot and salty, punctuated by a spray of shaven hair and the prevailing downward flow of things took with them not only my mood but my self-image as well. What I didn't realize on that fateful evening was that hair grows back and when once again it came time to make my return to the realm of salons I was as usual reluctant and unprepared. After a few disasters, my mother frying my scalp into a crisp bed of scabs for example, I resolved that the best course of action was none at all and I let sleeping dogs lie. This might have worked fine if I hadn't actually started to look like a dog and people were finally coming up to me in the street and saying, "what happened to your head?"
It is interesting how deeply society can influence in us a sense of not only what is right or wrong but also of what right and wrong looks like and how we should present ourselves so as to be accepted within our social groups. On the night I cut my hair for the first time my sister, who couldn't have been more than six or seven years old, gave a voice to the monstrosity that is societal pressure and the sometimes-unreasonable standards that society does place on us. I was in effect being given a choice between being a beautiful young girl or an outcast with no prospects. I took the hard road and though I looked not at all different, having previously spent all my life with my shoulder length curls tied in a tight pony tail away from my face, I was labeled 'alternative' and had artistic types coming up to me and asking to take my picture because I suddenly looked 'African'. Hadn't I always looked African? After all I am African, right?
I think societies, individual members as well as all of us in a group, are always looking to justify to themselves the way that they are and to convince themselves that anything different is unattractive. It seems that rather than be different we would rather subject ourselves to countless, impractical measures, often painful and damaging. Recently I went where I swore I would never again go. To the hair salon. As I sat for five hours listening to the sound of my hair rip, one dread lock at a time, while the so called professional did something he called knitting, I thought about the reasons behind why I had let myself be dragged into a place I knew to be the equivalent of a thousand torture chambers and the hub of verbal salaciousness. The knitting was supposed to make my hair look neat; to increase, in polite society, its acceptability and regard and make me 'normal' again. When I walked out of that hair salon, my tongue smoldering with a repertoire of curses even I was surprised to find I possessed, I realized that I hadn't only subjected myself to the indignity of smelling like some key ingredient in a fruit salad and being followed around by the occasional visually impaired bee but I had also given up my image, my individuality. I arrived home, calmed by the gratitude of no longer being the subject of any person so cruel as my hairdresser, to a welcome that confirmed my suspicions: "Wow, your hair looks great, like braids almost!". My dreadlocks no longer looked like dreadlocks. I no longer looked like myself. I looked like just another sample from the coarse cloth that is society; the writing beneath the carbon paper that for so long had held me back and that I had though I had escaped the night I had cut my hair. Worst of all, I have found that I love my new look. It seems even I have trouble stating boldly that I am not my hair, that I am not anyone's expectations. Obviously I need to sing louder, and if not to the unfortunate people caught in the stagnant waters of the morning rush then at least to myself when I'm standing in front of the bathroom mirror trying to comb my eyebrows into an admissible arch: "I am not my hair, I am not this skin, I am not your expectations (oh!)...".
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