Hair Insecurity
Sometimes something tiny warps the fabric of society just enough that you are able to see something that you were not meant to see. My hair is one such object. Over the past 10 months of quarantine, I’ve been growing it out. It’s the longest now that it’s ever been in 24 years. Here is what it’s taught me. [An essay.]
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*Disclaimer: this essay centers myself and my experiences. If you’re looking for literature on curly hair from an African diasporic perspective, I recommend checking out https://www.teenvogue.com/story/hair-relaxers-lye-natural-hair-essay and https://www.naturallycurly.com/curlreading/learn/10-books-that-will-change-the-way-you-think-about-hair to start you on your journey down the hair rabbit hole.*
Curly hair is a metaphor for everything coiled. It exists in the world but hides in spiraled insecurity. Curly hair believes that if the world saw it plainly, without curves, nuance, and dissembling, that its secret would be revealed, to its detriment. It’s just hair — keratin, plain and destructible. But it fears a worse humiliation, that of being declared defective. You see, curly hair is softer and weaker than its straight counterparts. It curls because its follicle shape is oblong, it tunnels into the skin at an angle, and its shape necessitates more disulfide protein bonds than straight hair. It can’t stand on its own.
For its inherent weakness, curly hair possesses an innate delicacy, a sensitivity. It has a weird and sharp sense of humor, which straight hair doesn’t have; and a self-destructive sense of adventure. Simultaneously, curly hair is none of those things. It’s arrogant, distrustful, and humorless. It’s narcissistic, indulgent, and awkward, somehow neither masculine nor feminine. Curly hair is too girl for boys and too boy for girls.
Curly hair is holding on, as a way of life. To what? If it has secrets, they’re hidden in plain sight. But to let it develop, in safety, is special. To let it get long enough to experience gravity sends a loving message: Go and play. You are not so different from the others.
Growing curly hair out — really curly hair — I mean dry, screaming, kinky hair (not the Taylor Swift variety) — is a quiet affirmation of worth in a world that wants to straighten, flatiron and steam out the kinks.
For example, my hair tells a story of ancestors. It is chaotic and refuses to obey. My hair tells the story of fearful peoples who refused to assimilate and were conquered, whose method of resistance was in internalizing distrust of the grandiose confidence of the majority. It tells a story of people who preferred to dwell in corners, holding on to their belongings and culture: secretive, ethnocentric, exclusive, people, with no money and a lot of pride. It reminds us of a tribalism which has no place in today’s world. My hair is furbizio, the Italian concept of sly cleverness. My hair is diaspora.
My hair is belonging to something small and being excluded from something big. My hair is misunderstanding, attraction, and also fetish. My hair is the circus — “Step right up! White boy with hair like poodle!” “5$ to see the boy with pubic hair on his head!”
My hair is an open call for others’ opinions, one of which everyone, of all races and ethnicities, has. My hair is an invitation for people to ask “what I am.” Unbeknownst to them, curls solicit advice — mostly from people who have no experience with their ownership — on what they mean, what they remind you of, and how to wear them.
My hair is a teacher. My hair bears witness. It quietly presents evidence that between the fault lines of the American racial conception are mistakes, aberrations, exceptions, intersections.
At the end of the day, the process of growing my hair out over quarantine has taught me something. Ready? Here it is:
My hair is (drumroll, please) just f***ing hair. It grows, it gets gum stuck in it, and someday it’ll recede embarrassingly and then fall out. I’m getting it cut today because I want to, not because I’m ashamed (for the first time). And yes, I’m Jewish, I’m Italian, I’m white. But no, you can’t touch it. You can’t touch it… anymore. It is mine - to enjoy, to obsess over, and to accept. And as for you, for once, you may keep your opinion to yourself.
