The last time I shaved my hair was in November 2007 or thereabouts. I don’t keep a diary of such mundane things. This latest attempt to let my hair grow into a luxuriant, kinky crown has largely been unremarkable until now.
All of a sudden it seems to excite the most vivid interest in people I meet, whose response could be encapsulated in the stock Fanonian phrase: “Look, a Negro.”
I mostly shrug, but we must live in a world starved of symbols that even long-neglected, rather unkempt hair is interpreted as a political statement of sorts. “I see your hair is long now. Are you planning on having dreadlocks?” some ask. “No, I don’t like them. They are too heavy and need a lot of attention,” I say.
“Oh, what is that? You are even growing a Castro beard there,” others say.
“Hai, hai, what’s this now?” some say in agitated tones. “You’re too unkempt. This does not suit you at all.”
Normally I say my Cameroonian barber has gone to be with his family or that I have become a Nazarene, that Old Testament sect that forbade the cutting of one’s hair and the taking of wine.
These responses seem to excite-enrage them all the more and they get more reckless: “So it’s really true then that you have joined the Black Panther Party?
“Yes, its true,” I say. “I am its interim secretary general.”
How I wish I could tell them what I told a friend, particularly beautiful and enamoured of her own good looks, who used to go on and on about this.
Once exasperated by her narcissism, I told her that she was more than her looks. In the same way I think I am more than my hair.
The sum total of my life, my experiences, my beliefs, can’t be contained in my hair, as long as it is. My hair is simply my hair. It can never define me, in fact it can’t have a life of its own. If my hair were ever to have ideas about a life of its own, then I would have no choice but to cut it short.
The only experience my hair has is of shampoos and some hair food, now finished, left at my place by a friend. Oh, and it has also been machine dried. Once. And that is the sum total of its independent experience. Boasting a life this thin, one imagines, it can’t be a statement against black women who have fried hair or against those who choose to be clean-shaven.
But the reactions have got me thinking. Apparently, there is more to hair than — eh, hair. Perhaps in a world in which men are going bald in their twenties, someone flaunting his mane may just be too much. I wonder whether hair has come back in fashion as a symbol of virility.
My hair has grown a metaphysical existence of its own, quite separate from me. For some it has the boldness and the fury of the Black Panthers, for others it is matted with the unpredictability and madness of the hobo, yet for others it has the counterculture and retro appeal that brings back bell-bottom trousers and those jackets of the heady, contrarian 1960s. But for me, it doesn’t have any of this: it is just hair. My hair has become a site in which some people live out their fantasies and fears.
There may be something of Negritude, that trans-Atlantic organisation that celebrated blackness, in my nappy hair; that groping in the dark in search of an identity. Or something of the Black Panthers, that 1960s organisation that advocated black nationalism, black pride and black civil rights and self defence against police brutality; maybe something of the pride of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement. Laudable philosophies, I admit, but none of these have anything to do with what I am doing, or rather more accurately, what I am not doing, to my hair.
As Frantz Fanon wrote: “The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions. I am my own foundation.” My hair has no roots, certainly not in the Panthers’ America, nor in Castro and Bob Marley’s Caribbean or Biko’s Africa or indeed anywhere else. The roots are firmly in my head. Take that, you baldies.