Twisted

The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture

Emma Dabiri

• Editorial: Harper Perennial
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062966735
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Discrimination & Race Relations

A Kirkus Best Book of the Year

Stamped from the Beginning meets You Can't Touch My Hair in this timely and resonant essay collection f rom Guardian contributor and prominent BBC race correspondent Emma Dabiri, exploring the ways in which black hair has been appropriated and stigmatized throughout history, with ruminations on body politics, race, pop culture, and Dabiri's own journey to loving her hair.

Emma Dabiri can tell you the first time she chemically straightened her hair. She can describe the smell, the atmosphere of the salon, and her mix of emotions when she saw her normally kinky tresses fall down her shoulders. For as long as Emma can remember, her hair has been a source of insecurity, shame, and—from strangers and family alike—discrimination. And she is not alone.

Despite increasingly liberal world views, black hair continues to be erased, appropriated, and stigmatized to the point of taboo. Through her personal and historical journey, Dabiri gleans insights into the way racism is coded in society's perception of black hair—and how it is often used as an avenue for discrimination. Dabiri takes us from pre-colonial Africa, through the Harlem Renaissance, and into today's Natural Hair Movement, exploring everything from women's solidarity and friendship, to the criminalization of dreadlocks, to the dubious provenance of Kim Kardashian's braids.

Through the lens of hair texture, Dabiri leads us on a historical and cultural investigation of the global history of racism—and her own personal journey of self-love and finally, acceptance.

Deeply researched and powerfully resonant, Twisted proves that far from being only hair, black hairstyling culture can be understood as an allegory for black oppression and, ultimately, liberation.

1

It’s Only Hair

YOUNG, IRISH, AND BLACK

It is not from my mouth

It is not from the mouth of A

Who gave it to B

Who gave it to C

Who gave it to D

Who gave it to E

Who gave it to F

Who gave it to me.

May it be better in my mouth

Than in the mouth of my ancestors.

(West African poem)

The year I turned eight, the consumption of Christ’s body and blood became imminent. After months of deliberation, extravagant miniature bridal dresses had been bought; lace, satin, and net hung expectantly in wardrobes. The communion money, which could quite reasonably be expected to stretch into the hundreds—a veritable fortune in 1980s inner-city Dublin—was the hot promise occupying everyone’s thoughts. After months of slaving over the catechism, of hard work and dutiful preparation, my peers were ready to make their first Holy Communion.

No catechism for this badman, though. I had elected not to take the sacrament. Young Emma’s contribution, having reached the “age of reason,” was instead the production of a spiffy little anti-slavery pamphlet called “Break the Chains.” The length of a copybook, it was based on the story of Olaudah Equiano, the eighteenth-century abolitionist. The conclusion, I remember, attempted to locate the contemporary conditions of Black America in the brutal experiences Africans had endured in that land and sought to suggest solutions. Hence the title. Nice and light. Standard childhood fare.

While I wasn’t particularly praised for my efforts, I certainly wasn’t forced to join in with the other children either. With hindsight, this is telling, if unsurprising. There was always the insistence that, despite my being born in Ireland and having an Irish mother whose maternal ancestry stretches back into Irish prehistory, I wasn’t really Irish. I was frequently singled out for special attention. I seemed to be a firm favorite of nuns, particularly those who had been missionaries in Africa. I remember on one occasion being apprehended outside the Bird Flanagan pub in Rialto and presented with a Miraculous Medal by a concerned nun who wished to bestow the grace of the Virgin Mary on my little brown body. It was not the only time I was presented with one of these—I seemed to be quite the miraculous magnet! And I remember visiting a friend’s elderly great-aunt—another nun—whose watery eyes refocused then blazed upon sighting me. “I spent years in Nigeria,” she thundered, before proceeding to pull my lips back over my teeth, because “Your people have such beautiful teeth.” Given that this rather intimate exchange occurred before even the most basic of introductions, one might think it, at the very least, rude.

So yeah, I had a complicated relationship with the world I lived in. And I think the fact that I embarked on the Equiano project was most likely interpreted as just the sort of weird shit that a “foreigner,” a “blackie,” might do. I mean, “What d’ye expect from the likes of them, like?”

Thinking about Equiano now, my decision does seem radical. I can’t remember precisely what my motivation was, but my childhood was often characterized by unusual choices and interests, informed by a strong sense that my impulse to tell black stories originated from a source that predated my birth: “It is not from my mouth . . .”

Though it might sound peculiar and it certainly felt strange to me, I felt intuitively that I had a working relationship with the past and with my forebears. It was as though the past happened to be particularly foregrounded in my present. Of course, I couldn’t articulate this, even to myself, and had I been able to, I would most likely have elected not to. As a child, I was considered strange enough. No need for further ammunition. It was only when, years later, I went to university and studied African cultures that I learned about the centrality of ancestral veneration, that ancestral spirits were intentionally invoked. On my paternal side I am Yoruba. The Yoruba are the largest ethnic group in southwestern Nigeria and one of the third biggest in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. Many Yoruba were sold into slavery, particularly during the nineteenth century. As a result of this relatively recent, wide-scale movement, many Yoruba beliefs, practices and customs can be identified to this day throughout the New World. During the 1980s and 1990s, a more recent Yoruba diaspora was created, as Nigerians fled their tragically failing economy to migrate to countries such as the US and the UK.

It wasn’t until university, however, that I learned that traditional Yoruba concepts of time were cyclical, and of the belief that the “past” is not necessarily dispensed with but is in fact in dialogue with the future. I discovered that Yoruba names such as Babatunde (“Father comes again”) and Yetunde (“Mother comes again”) are so common because of an indigenous belief in the transmigration of the soul. This invocation of the past, like the Ghanaian philosophical concept of Sankofa (which urges us to take from the past to design a better future), does not limit progress or place an emphasis on doing things “the old way.” On the contrary, improvement is the objective. The urge to ensure that “mine be better in my mouth / Than in the mouth of my ancestors.” It is believed that our successes are our great-greats’ successes too. Finally, I could locate my experiences in a belief system where they made perfect sense.

Received Western wisdom routinely denigrates African history. The attitude was summed up by the esteemed historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in his famous 1963 address at Sussex University, which was broadcast on national television, as well as being published both in a popular periodical and as a book:

Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.

Assessed through a biased, Eurocentric framework, perhaps this is the case. Yet if we shift the optic, we begin to realize, in the words of Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, that “the darkness so readily attributed to the ‘Dark Continent’ may yet prove to be nothing but the willful cataract in the eye of the beholder.”¹

And in banishing that darkness, I am far more interested in how African peoples understood themselves and their cultures—in examining their methods for telling and documenting their lives—than I am in attempting to situate them through a European lens that proposes universality but is inherently culturally specific.

We should remember that communication and learning in oral society are not limited to the spoken word. Complex nonverbal languages are part of the milieu. Take for example the bata, or “talking drum,” as it is translated into English. Echoing the tonal patterns of Yoruba, the bata literally speaks. Were the British colonialists, unable to decipher what the drum said, illiterate too? Or is the term one we apply only to “primitive” peoples?

The Anglo-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah describes African hairstyling as a “subtle interplay of the sociological and the aesthetic.” As a practice, hairstyling has much to offer and opens up excitingly decolonized possibilities for better understanding the African past in order to shape a better collective future.

In terms of my early attempts at decolonization, the freedom demonstrated by the Equiano project was sadly not to be repeated. I think it was permitted on this occasion primarily because it kept me out of the way. Until the late 1990s, being black and Irish in Ireland was to have almost unicorn status.

Except everybody loves unicorns.

There has not been a significant black population in Ireland for very long. When I was growing up, there were very few of us indeed. Many mixed-race people I met, certainly those who were any older than me, had grown up in institutions. They were often the “illegitimate” offspring of Irish women and African students. Not to put too fine a point on it, unmarried mothers were generally, in Ireland, treated like scum. Add the disgrace of a black child and, sure, you couldn’t really sink much lower. Commenting on the mixed-race children unfortunate enough to be placed in Ireland’s now-infamous industrial schools, a report submitted to the Irish Department of Education had this to say in 1966:

A certain number of coloured children were seen in several schools. Their future especially in the case of girls presents a problem difficult of any satisfactory solution. Their prospects of marriage in this country are practically nil and their future happiness and welfare can only be assured in a country with a fair multi-racial population, since they are not well received by either ‘black or white.’

The result is that these girls on leaving the schools mostly go to large city centers in Great Britain . . . It was quite apparent that the nuns give special attention to these unfortunate children, who are frequently found hot-tempered and difficult to control. The coloured boys do not present quite the same problem. It would seem that they also got special attention and that they were popular with the other boys.² [my italics]

According to alumnae of these abhorrent facilities, this “special attention” seems to have extended to racist assaults that served to compound the physical, sexual, emotional, and mental abuse many of the children were subject to. During my own schooldays twenty plus years later, attitudes didn’t seem to have changed that much. Yet the Ireland emerging on the horizon today seems almost unrecognizable to me. There is now a visible black Irish population and, in terms of social progress, in 2015 we became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote; and in 2018, following another referendum, the draconian Eighth Amendment that criminalized abortion was repealed. This seemingly kinder, more diverse Ireland is a far cry from that which defined my miserable years at school, days when the smallest indiscretion—real or, usually, imagined—invoked punishment far disproportionate to the crime. And just like “our tempers,” my hair, too, was “difficult to control.”

From my earliest memories, my hair was presented as a problem that needed to be managed. The deeply entrenched idea of “managing” black women’s hair operates as a powerful metaphor for societal control over our bodies at both the micro and macro levels. Whether it’s historic bondage during the transatlantic slave trade, or indeed the attitude of the education system, the thousands of black women held in immigration detention centers today or the disproportionate number of black women in prison (in the US, black women are incarcerated at four times the rate of white women), our bodily autonomy cannot be assumed. Barely a month seems to go by without there being another news report about a black child excluded from school for wearing their hair natural. The 2016 case in Pretoria High School in South Africa was particularly shocking, not only for the violence of the altercation but also because of the geographic location. This didn’t happen in Britain or Ireland or America but on the African continent! Protests broke out because little girls wanted to leave their hair alone, yet Pretoria High maintained that natural hair was “messy.” The administration claimed that by not straightening their hair black female students were not conforming to the rules regarding “appropriate” presentation, and protests broke out when schoolgirls simply refused to straighten their hair.

Pretoria High School, August 2016. Zulaikha Patel, 13, refused to “tame” (chemically straighten) her hair and started a silent protest, insisting that black girls be allowed to go to school with their natural hair. I would like to point out that Patel’s hair is well combed and oiled, certainly not “messy.” Despite Patel’s bravery, the emotional costs of such efforts are high for children. The second picture shows a weeping Patel being comforted by a schoolfriend (who, interestingly, has straightened hair). It reminds me all too keenly of the many incidents in my childhood where I was subjected to the rage of incensed white adults who felt, I assume, that I did not know my place.

Photographs: Twitter

As a black child with tightly coiled hair, growing up in an incredibly white, homogeneous, socially conservative Ireland, I certainly wasn’t considered pretty, but that started to change in my midteens. I remember being told that I was “lucky I was pretty,” which meant I could “almost get away with being black.” However, there remained the unquestioned expectation that certain measures would be taken to keep my affliction at bay. Needless to say, the most offensive manifestations of my threatening blackness had to be rigorously policed.

As I got older, my skin color could almost correspond to the “tan” my peers were all obsessed with achieving. I still got the jokes about needing a flash to take a photograph of me, or the classic likening of my complexion to dirt, but it was my hair that remained unforgivable. Anything that could be done to disguise it, to manipulate and mutilate it, was up for consideration. The concept of leaving it the way it grew from my head was simply inconceivable.

There is long evidence of both weaving attachments as well as the use of wigs throughout Africa. In most black cultures the frequent and radical transformation of hair is typical, and the wearing of artificial hair, including wigs, is not traditionally stigmatized in the same way it is in mainstream—no, let me dispense with polite euphemisms, I mean “white”—culture.

Considering the great diversity of styles available, it is worth noting that throughout the twentieth century and until recently (with the exception of the Black Power period and immediately afterward) very few included wo...