Untamed & Unbound: Reclaiming Love for My Hair on My Terms
I started getting so much utility and function out of my hair and loving the way it looked a lot more once I stopped seeing it as something to be ‘tamed’.
Today was wash day and I was supposed to be at a IWD event in the evening. Usually, wash day is an elaborate affair involving the oiling of my scalp (because I have dry scalp and dandruff that refuses to go away), washing, conditioning, drying and putting my hair into cornrows.
That is a lot of steps to fit into 2 hrs before work starts for the day and I managed to get to the drying bit of it during lunch which left my hair in this state of being a not perfect afro. Now the old me would have been panicking because I liked my hair a little ‘put together’, edges laid, no stray hair strand in sight and the afro would have not cut it. The current me was okay with it as-is and just patted it down a little and walked out the door.
It took me a while to get here though and I noticed this last year. In fact, it was supposed to be one of my highlights but I don’t know how I left it out. It has been more than a year since I ‘re-touched’ my hair and I am not itching to get it done any time soon. It’s not like I used to do it often; I did it like at 6-month intervals, even longer. However, this time around, the months just went by without me keeping track of when my hair was next ‘due’.
Now before you say it, no I did not have any inherited trauma around my curly hair. In fact, my mom was pretty strict about keeping the creamy crack — relaxer — away from my hair during my childhood even though she was on it for as long as I have had any memories of her. I didn’t get a perm till I graduated from secondary school. I was either 15 or 16 then.
I loved doing my naturally curly hair and it helped that I had feather-weight hair. I would pin it up in different ways and do different styles with it every weekend for the meetings at the Kingdom Hall. In the evening I would take it down to get cornrows for the week at the hairdressers.
So what changed? To be honest, I don’t know. I guess some of the media I was exposed to might have had some influence on me. It probably didn’t help that everyone around me had a perm so when I was finally of age to decide for myself, I jumped on it. We all know that once you get on the creamy crack, it’s hard to come back from that. It’s probably the reason why it is called the creamy crack.
It certainly didn’t help that on occasions when I had been a little lax with letting stray hair strands fly about for a messy-ish look, I got the ‘isi yi yaga a yaga’ (your hair is so untidy) side remark from my grandmother as an adult.
Sometimes, I still hear a voice sometimes that I have to suppress saying that to me when I look in the mirror with my afro or any other style I put my natural hair in.
Now I have argued before about how relaxing your hair didn’t mean you were selling out. I still don’t think it does. People of other races have different versions of getting a perm done. No one judges them for that. It’s a way to switch things up. Sometimes I still want a good pin-straight hairstyle and relaxing your hair is one way to get there.
However, I think you need to go back to the drawing board the moment you start feeling like you need it to make your hair more ‘presentable’ and you’re constantly struggling with loving your natural hair in its curly state when it is ‘due’.
I have done that and this is where I am at right now. I love my unequal afro and all its flyaways. I love wearing it out and how it switches up my look every time. I might switch it up again sometime in the future with a perm but right now, this is it for me.
