Another beginning...

Lyrics from Semisonic's 'Closing Time'

About two and a half years ago, I stepped out of the stable and wonderful life I was living. I left a great job, hugged my family, bid farewell to a circle of fantastic friends in a great city, and stepped onto a plane to elsewhere.

While sitting on that airplane, not knowing what to expect and shocked at what I was doing I wrote this:

‘Beginnings are a funny thing.

I oftentimes wonder if they exist in and of themselves at all.

Perhaps they are notable only because they make us take notice of the existence of something. As humans we need ritual to mark events in our shared and infinitely long story.

I am divided in writing this for it is unethical and impure to claim this as a beginning, but in my imperfection I need to start somewhere.

So welcome to this beginning, a folded page corner in a vast and expansive book. A small makeshift indicator to mark one human experience in our deliciously large and unfolding novel.’

Today is February 8^th, 2014. I reflect on the idea of ‘beginnings’ as I sit sipping coffee on a couch in Cape Town on an unremarkable, lazy Saturday afternoon.

I now believe that we mark beginnings to reflect something we’ve taken notice of, an arrival or change. Sometimes the arrival of a ‘beginning’ is irrefutable – a birth, a new relationship, a new job, stepping onto an airplane.

Other times beginnings don’t align with an external event and are so subtle we don’t even realize when they’ve crept up on us.

Getting onto that airplane was one of those irrefutable beginnings and I started this blog to mark it. I’ve recently somehow fallen out of the last chapter and stumbled into yet another new beginning without all the crisp fresh-paged symbolism of packing a suitcase and stepping onto an airplane.

This realization came about after a long period of practicing avoidance behaviour with blogging. The truth is that I don’t even want to look at my blog these days. I’ve been feeling guilty about not writing despite having ‘Write!’ perpetually on my to-do list.

Going deeper into the passing of months without posting and the associated stomach churning this elicits for me, I’ve come to realize that something between content and format and what is said and unsaid in this blog no longer feels authentic to me.

It was authentic then, but I have an acute sense that something, somehow and at some point shifted and is not reflected here.

When I take stock of the years since that life changing beginning, I feel both emptied and a brimming over. Things have shifted on so many levels - emotionally, spiritually, intellectually and physically. 

Looking back on these recent years, I feel like I’ve had many operations - some major, some minor – and I’m just learning how to use my body again. Things feel different and are in different places, but everything is somehow functioning in a way that feels authentic to where I am right now.

I wish I could somehow capture this shift, the steps that somehow walked me from the beginning of that chapter to where I now stand. A whole bunch of experiences and half memories spill out in a jumbled and irrational manner…

 ***

*the metaphorical and literal stubbing of toes and scraping my knees * adding wrinkles around my eyes from a combination of sun and laughter * succeeding some, failing more * writing tons * deep, aching longing for home, family and friends * crying and dreaming a lot * struggling with apathy * learning bits of another language * learning policy and administration theory * completing the coursework for a masters degree * losing hope * heart break * spending  time learning from men about how they live positively with HIV * witnessing country responses to the deaths of two leaders * fuel crises and hyperinflation * the swearing in of the first female president of Southern Africa * being completely embraced by the love of a family who didn’t know me a year ago * driving manual on the other side of the road * breakdowns on paved roads and in jungles * learning a new healing modality *connecting and loving SO, SO much * grieving the loss of a family member and friend from across the world * getting Malaria AND bilharzia * deeply questioning of the development industry * swimming in one of the worlds most beautiful lakes * celebrating a birthday where two oceans meet * having numerous magical serendipitous adventures * reshaping personal ideas of beauty * dancing barefoot on beaches and in cafes *

***

I could keep going for days, filling pages with a variety of experiences ranging from mundane to devastating to fantastic, but with what purpose? If I could somehow scramble all of the colours and textures and words and sounds and feelings of these experiences and drink them as a potion or don them as a shirt, maybe I could better embody what feels different. But in reality, they are already part of the cells that make up my body and absorbed into my experience of this life.

I’m excited by the opening of this new chapter despite not having any idea what it will hold or how to express it.

I’m not taking the blog down or changing the address. All former blog posts will remain as they are, chapters past, but what will come will be different somehow. I have nothing to promise as I have no clue what to expect. 

Thanks for reading this incredibly self-indulgent post and helping me mark a new chapter. 

HAIR - Part 2

Take 1

Take 2

Take 3

Lesley's Commentary (vis-a-vis previous blog post)

I didn’t write the last post on my blog, although no one would question that it was mine based on the content.

 My dear friend Doreen, an incredibly talented writer, gender activist and lovely person did. In addition to both being 28 year old females, Doreen and I have a lot in common in terms of interests, values and beliefs.

One thing that is different about us is that Doreen grew up in Zimbabwe in a ‘Black’ body and I in Canada in a ‘white’ one.

We decided to post our own personal experiences and struggles around hair on each other’s blogs, in each other’s names.

This idea came about during an impromptu dinner at Matipa’s house. Matipa and Doreen are best friends, work together and both hail from Zimbabwe. While eating Matipa’s beautifully prepared dinner, we (as usual) talked about all the off-limit topics: politics (the recent elections in Zim, the human trafficking bill that recently passed in South Africa) and ‘personal’ stuff/politics.

The ‘personal’ discussion focuses on hair.

We talked about the politics of ‘Black’ hair… how natural is oftentimes not considered as beautiful. How many women wear wigs and weaves, many which seemingly replicate ‘white’ hair (read long, straight, etc).

It is a complex, politically charged topic of which I know little about, save for what I’ve learnt watching Chris Rock’s ‘Good Hair’ documentary and conversations with friends.

They told me about a blog post The Hairy Nature of our Race Identity  that Doreen wrote on hair that caused a bit of controversy after Matipa tweeted it to a Zimbabwean hair blogger. One critique that Doreen received on her post was that she didn’t speak about ‘white’ hair.

They then turned to me and asked my mop-headed self about my hair experience. I told them this which Doreen published on her blog at the same time I put her story on mine.

Tipa and Dor were surprised to hear the similarities that my experience had to theirs.

Despite having very different hair colours and textures, we realized we had something in common in that we have been conditioned into believing that our natural hair is somehow sub-par. We’ve all spent a lot of time and money trying to manipulate our hair to fit societally imposed ideals of beauty.

The intention of these posts is to point out the widespread societal constructions of what is beautiful with regards to hair (which is usually straight and long). The intention is not to undermine or delegitimize the experiences of ‘Black’ women with regards to hair. Indeed the racialization of hair is a complex and horrific phenomenon which I have not experienced living in the body of a ‘white’’-skinned middle class woman, with all the accompanying privileges.

While not intending to minimize or sideline focus from the political and social evils propagated against ‘Black’ hair (as they have been aptly highlighted by African American comedian and actor Chris Rock in his documentary Good Hair and Toyin Agbetu’s new documentary Beauty Is… and many others), we decided to post this as a general and united commentary of the painful and degrading politics of hair in which people around the world are taught that their hair isn’t beautiful if it doesn’t live up to a narrowly defined norm.

Doreen’s Commentary:

  

As my dear friend Lesley has already highlighted above, the last post I put up on this blog was in fact written by her, a Canadian 'white' woman activist, scholar and writer/blogger. We decided to do a blog swap after exchanging hair war stories and realizing that a lot of what each of us was saying could very well have come from any one of us as there were so many similarities in our stories regardless of our ethnic and racial differences. (see the post actually written by me here)

I particularly found it interesting because as a womanist/Afro-feminist I strongly believe in the recognition of intersectionality within any conversation regarding the empowerment of women. I also believe that it is important to acknowledge that the oppression of women is not all the same or always informed by the same politics or at the very least, in the same way, and that the different groups of women have different lived realities from that of what is the archetypal feminist i.e. the working class to middle class, heterosexual, able bodied, secular ‘white’ woman; however, during this conversation I was reminded that although our struggles can have their unique aspects, there are similar struggles that we fight as women, albeit informed and exacerbated by different politics, and that is the narrowly defined standards of beauty and acceptability even in these current times in which we live.

However, it is perhaps because we live in these times that the politics of hair have finally found a platform in public discourse where they can be picked apart and interrogated. In the last two decades or so we have seen people challenge the prescribed definitions of beauty with a particular focus being directed at body image and the fashion industry; more recently we saw the German plus size model, Mariesther Venegas  protest the Berlin fashion week’s continued marginalization of fuller figured women [models] by walking down the streets of Berlin naked for the Finally - Navabi campaign (which was strikingly similar to brown neo soul/ hip hop artist Erykah Badu’s personal protestagainst “group think” in the video to her song Window Seat where shealso bared all). Also, in the recently concluded Paris fashion week, US designer Rick Owens [controversially] opted to model his creations usingAfrikan American stomp dancers instead of the conventional leggy, uber skinny and mostly ‘white’ super models we are accustomed to.

Hair politics are not exclusive to female members of our society but also extend to the male members of our society where there too they have particular standards they have to subscribe to, especially ‘black’ men. A couple of years ago there was an uproar when Nivea produced an ad for their Look Like You Give a Damn campaign for their products for men that featured a ‘black’ male model holding the (decapitated) head of his former self, who's sporting a beard, an afro, and a pissed-off expression and has the words "Re-civilizeYourself" scrawled across the image, with the smaller phrase "Look like you give a damn" on top, implying that Afrikan men, along with their hair, have to be packaged in a particular way in order to be considered to be civilized. The same expectation is extended to ‘black’ women as we are constantly discouraged from keeping our hair natural let alone finding empowerment and strength in it. However, as we have seen from this exercise between Lesley and myself, that this marginalization of the ‘other’ also extends to white women and perhaps men too, with a certain type of hair although comparatively, the degrees and negative impact of said marginalization differ from race to race, gender to gender and sex to sex etc.

Doing this exercise was not very easy. When Lesley and I set out to write our stories in our individual spaces before meeting up, exchanging them and posting, we realized that it was not going to be as easy as we thought it would be and questioned if it really was a good idea. Thing is, everything seems like a brilliant idea after a couple of glasses of wine and loads of rolling-on-the-floor laughter. We later confessed to each other when we finally got together again that we had both struggled with the initial pieces as we constantly battled to make the post as “racially aligned” as possible (i.e. convincing enough to readers that my piece was written by a ‘white’ woman and Lesley’s by a ‘black’ woman) in order to pull off the ruse. We were tempted to just forget about it, or at least I certainly was, until we realized that deliberately writing in such a way that alluded to a particular race was not only unnecessary but also contrary to the whole purpose of the exercise which was to find commonalities in the hair and identity politics of two women from different racial backgrounds despite perceived physical racial differences as well as informally investigate to what extent these commonalities, if at all, affect women of different races at an individual level.

The issue of hair (although it is a very personal thing) and how it positions an individual in the global economic, political and social hierarchical structure is proof that the personal is indeed political. People’s hair, although personal, is subject to the whims, attitudes and opinions of a society as a whole and not just the individual. It manifests itself as an identifier, a classifier and a political statement, whether we are conscious of it or not. Ultimately, whether we like it or not, our hair plays a huge role in deciding where society positions us politically, economically and socially.

*Note all racial references are put in quotations to denote that race is a social, rather than biological construct.

HAIR - Part 1

Throughout my life I have spent a substantial amount of time and money on HAIR.

As a younger person, my focus was mostly on grooming it, removing it, colouring it, straightening it and otherwise manipulating it on a quest to ‘look nice’.

Although I do still spend time on hair today, my focus has shifted in that I spend a bit less time manipulating it and more time reflecting on its social and political implications.

All other forms of hair aside (that would require innumerous more posts!), the variety that grows from our scalps is what I’m focusing on here - an intensely personal as well as politicized subject.

This is a multi-part blog post. This first section aims to share some of my personal experiences with my hair. The next one is co-authored with a friend and will be posted later this week to consider some societal and political implications of hair.

*** 

When I was a little girl I wanted nothing more than to have long, straight hair just like all the ‘beautiful’ women I saw on TV and in fashion magazines. I considered my own naturally curly hair unsightly and after much begging I finally convinced my mother to straighten it.

Seeing my hair straight and flowing for the first time in my life, I honestly believed that I looked like a Disney princess, particularly my favourite one, Ariel from the little mermaid, save for the difference in colour.

After that first experience, the twelve years that followed were a menagerie of chemicalisation, texturisation, wrestling, wrangling and taming my hair just to get it looking ‘fabulous’ or at the very least, get it looking as though it sat atop the head of a civilised human being and not a ‘primitive bush person’.

Buckets and buckets of money and tears alike went into this quest to achieve ultimate beauty and with each success hair story, I surprisingly felt a small part of me die. With each battle won against the kink in my hair the less I recognised myself and for some reason I felt the opposite of what I expected the resultant straight hair to make me feel. Of course I felt beautiful, if for only a moment, there’s no denying that, but I also felt like a fraud.

I was always complimented for ‘my’ long, flowy, straight hair and I was the envy of other girls at school. I was told that I had ‘good’ hair and that I was very lucky that it ‘behaved’ so well when I made the effort to ‘fix’ it. Everyone always oohed and aahed and people always wanted to touch it. All this attention always made me feel special but never proud. It was hard to feel proud of something that wasn’t authentically yours. Something that you should have loved and cared for the way it naturally was but instead you resented and relentlessly abused time and time again with strong chemicals and harsh heat, yanking and pulling at it, ultimately weakening and destroying it.

I never realised back then that the way I viewed and treated my hair was an extension of how I viewed and treated myself. I always thought myself confident and comfortable in my own skin and yet the truth is I wasn’t. My confidence and high self esteem were only ever truly there when I received validation from other people and they were, and in some ways still are, inextricably linked to my relationship with my hair.

Upon realising this, I awoke one Saturday morning, four years ago and cut it all off much to the dismay of everyone around me. I realised that it wasn’t enough to just stop with the constant nuking I was conducting on my hair and just let it grow out; I actually had to purge and get a fresh start and reacquaint myself with my hair and by extension with my true self.

Four years on, I am glad to say I have mended my relationship with my hair and I am for the first time madly and unconditionally in love with it, knots and all. I am learning to take better care of it and I let it tell me what it needs and what it is comfortable with wish is usually just a wash and go; no combs or brushes required. Suffice it to say, this new found love for my hair, my natural hair, has also had a positive impact on my relationship with myself as a whole.