It’s that time of night when you can be alone without having to hate yourself. The air feels summery, passes over you without violence. If you’re in a city, you can only hear the hum of electricity and its many loyal conduits—the fridge, the humidifier, the flickering of light. You might be able to meld into it all if you try.
I am thinking about my hair right now because it’s often the first thing I think about when I wake up. This is because when I take it out of my bonnet, if I’m wearing one, I am often concerned about what state it’s in. How it’s going to be today. By the way, since I haven’t written in a while, I’d like to fill you in on something. I’ve gained a terrible habit of giving myself what’s often called among us erratic girls “trims to even it out.” This typically happens in the months directly after you’ve given yourself a big chop in the middle of a mental breakdown.
What happens when you do this is that, overtime, you collect so many dozens of patches of hair at so many different lengths that it does, in a way, even itself out. But in a Lord Farquad type of way. The difference is between drawing a ball and rolling one. At the same time, you can kinda get away with it.
There’s always the hair thing, the body thing. My hair looks different based on humidity and weather and the products I use and whether I choose to style it or leave it alone; it looks different based on what sections I’ve toyed with that day, what strands I’ve been tugging at and breaking off in order to keep myself sane; it takes on so many different shapes and dimensions and lengths and curl patterns that I imagine it’s dizzying to my white neighbors, who I love and hang out with all the time, but who frequently ask me if I’ve had a haircut. And to be fair to them, they can be referring at any point to one of my trims-to-even-it-out, which give me, in many lightings, the appearance of a fresh bang.
And to be even fairer to them, their polite confusion is nothing compared to other sources of input. The Moroccan equivalent to TSA, for example, of my own mother. Just the other day, my mother whom I love and have been repairing a relationship with for over a year looked me with concern and asked if she could take me to a lady under a bridge in Sunnyside who braids hair. A lady under a bridge in Queens? Is it really that bad? She says things like: “it’s longer over here, but shorter over there,” completely ignoring that this often comes with trims-to-even-it-out, and things like “it’s coarser over here, but softer over here,” as if that wasn’t a perfectly reasonable reaction to the world, even from a collection of dead cells.
I thought the other day that maybe I should get a Kamala Harris type sew-in. Not that Kamala Harris has a sew-in, but like, a sew-in that looks like Kamala Harris’s hair. The type of hair that firmly says: don’t ask me what I think of the police. Or maybe a stiffer, less polished version of that, with some leave-out, that a Black bachelor contestant might have. Then I found out that it would run me back hundreds of dollars, so I woke up the next day and picked my hair into an Angela Davis and decided to choose acceptance.
Have there been any afros on The Bachelor? Surely there have been, but there’s something about competing for an athletic, clueless white man with green gecko eyes that attracts Black women who do not wear their hair naturally, and who say things like I’ve never met a man like Joey in my whole life. And we have to be OK with admitting that as a society.
It’s true that curly hair left alone is inherently subversive and unpredictable, and therefore antithetical to the values of white Christian America and its beauty. Perhaps even to all beauty, which is about symmetry and regularity and being perceived as clean and kept. And again, I’m not talking about the curly hair that has become popular on Instagram, predicated on the use of a denman brush, a curl diffuser, at least 50 dollars worth of product and a half Caucasian lineage, with the ironic goal of producing hair that is in the end as long and uniform looking as possible.
The hair I’m referring to, the subversive curly hair, is the I woke up like this curly hair. The I can’t do this anymore curly hair, the I just woke up for suhoor and God doesn’t care curly hair. Anyway. Today, right now, I’m ok with it. And more than anything I am so happy to be happy for a moment, in this time of great pain; to have found this reprieve before dawn, to be updating this again in any capacity.
Thank you for sitting with me this morning —
🙏🏻❤️ thank you for coming back here. Love this. Ramadan Kareem