Curly hair don't care?

In the past when I get sick and tired of my big, unmanageable, curly hair I would just shave it off. The last time I did that I found myself staring longingly at someone on the train with a mop of curly hair and wished that I’d left mine to grow. Right now my hair is long, unruly and annoying sometimes. It’s a lot of work and more pain than I care for, but I also quite like it. I think it suits me.

This wasn’t always the case. In high school my curly hair was one of the most bitterly painful truths of my life. Now, this may not seem like a big deal, because curly hair is cool now. When I was going to high school it certainly wasn’t. My experience of being part of a coloured community on the Cape Flats was that features which were considered white were highly valued. This especially went for naturally straight hair and green or blue eyes. The girls with “real” straight hair seemed to have an aura about them. They didn’t have to go to all that effort that the rest of us had to go through. For me this would be the ritual of blowdrying and straightening my hair for about two hours. Back then hot irons weren’t as popular so often my hair would be put into rollers, which I would wait around for hours to dry, then it was blown out so as to straighten it. The effortlessness of those who naturally had straight hair seemed to indicate that they were just better than me. Also, the best boys, the ones worth having crushes on always had green or blue eyes, just by the way!

I remember once being admonished by a boy in class for having the audacity to wear my hair curly. His words went something along the lines of, “Why don’t you make yourself look descent?”  If his comment hurt my feelings I can’t remember that part maybe because any hurt feelings were trumped by the indignation I felt that this particular person, who I had utterly no respect for, dared to be so rude to me. He wasn’t the only boy who was funny about my hair. I was a very angry teenager and expressed that anger in what I believed were witty retorts. I was actually just really mean. As a result I often enjoyed exchanging insults with some of my male classmates.  No one pulled punches and the fact that I was a girl didn’t seem to matter. Until one day I wore my hair straight. Something strange seemed to overcome my classmates. They looked and talked to me differently.  The animosity in their voices had been replaced with a softer, gently tone.  It was as if they were shocked that this was me, or this is what I could be.  It was like one of those teen movies with Freddie Prince Jr. Where the ugly duckling isn’t actually ugly, she is in fact the very pinnacle of teen beauty. People start treating her with respect and also she is no longer in need of a personality. They were being nice to me and I didn’t like it.

The message I got that day was that it didn’t matter who I was. I had changed my hair not my personality and yet here I was being treated completely differently. This also frustrated me a great deal, because I so badly wanted to be seen and valued, but not for this particular reason. As much as this angered me it wasn’t this incident that made me start to like my hair. It upset me that much of my value seemed to be placed on this one thing, but I also didn’t like my hair myself.  If I could have exchanged my dark, curly locks for straight hair I would have. My inability to naturally conform to that standard of beauty just felt like it was my cross to bear. I didn’t want to pretend to be something I wasn’t although it was something I longed for so badly.  For me there was this sense of being a different person when my hair was straight. A better me. I remember being a child and one of the symptoms of having my hair blown out was this overwhelming desire to constantly twist my head so that my hair would flip, like in the shampoo adverts. I don’t why I did this. It felt so light and freeing.  I guess I knew people would look at me and find me pretty. At the same time being fully aware that I wasn’t pretty just as I was. It felt like a cruel fate to me.

Fast forward to my third year at university where I was obsessed with Karen O and her signature hair. I wanted those dark, heavy bangs that hung just above her eyes. So I cut my hair. In no way did I look like Karen O, BUT for about a week or two I was having, what felt to me, as much fun as she was. My hair was straight, it hung in my face and I loved it. Then it had to be washed.  I had recently moved out of my parents’ house, a place where I had never learnt to straighten my hair, because my sister would do it for me. So, back to curly I went.  Unlike before, my hair that I was just barely able to tie up when straight was impossible to pull back into a ponytail when it was curly. This was new and frightening territory for me. In the past and as I often do now I just tie it up, but back then I had no choice; it would be loose. Then something surprising happened, something very similar to what had happened to me in high school. The girl who had been admonished for her curly hair was receiving compliments. What?! People liked it? Really? This was all too confusing for me, because it didn’t compute with the image I had of myself and how I valued my own hair. After the shock came the high of being considered attractive for once. My lack of self esteem enjoyed the feeling of being praised for something that I had no control over.  Even so having to wear my hair loose forced me to work with what I had and to ultimately enjoy it. I was still baffled that one of the things that made me feel so ashamed of myself was something that others liked.  

It also brought me to another interesting discovery that I will try to illustrate by relating a short story I had to read for my Afrikaans class in high school. The name of this story is Mejevrou Mattrasskop* which translated into English means Miss Mattress Head. The name denotes the nature of the main character's unruly hair which children in her class think looks like an explosion at a mattress factory.  Oh, sweet dear children with their ability to make both ridiculous and hurtful comparisons.  However, at the end of the story this girl starts to value and recognise the beauty of her hair because Miss South Africa at the time is a coloured woman with curly hair. Now I have to be honest and admit that I haven’t read this story since high school and was unable to find it on the internet to reread it, so this is all from memory. But I have never forgotten it and I think writing this has revealed why to me. Let me start by saying I fucking hate that story. Not only is the title the most thinly veiled insult ever! I can’t imagine the working title for Goldilocks being The Girl with the Pee Coloured hair. Don’t forget Goldilocks violated the home of the bears but she still got a lovely nickname. What upsets me is that this girl only considers her natural beauty as beautiful when an outside source has sanctioned that beauty. This is similar to what happened to me in university and it’s really just superficial nonsense. Now I do believe that the people who complimented me were just being nice, so it’s really about how I was affected by that kind of attention and the questions it brought up for me. Like, “Is my hair great because I think so or because other people do?”

Earlier this week I read this great Chris Rock interview. Not only did I forget how much I enjoy him and his humour it also helped me to arrive at a certain conclusion. That just because something, in this instance curly hair, is accepted and considered beautiful now, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t that way before perceptions about it changed.  Anyone should be able to like or dislike something about themselves based on their own preferences and values.  From my own experience I know this isn’t always the case.  It is tempting to derive worth even from untrustworthy sources who I know don’t have my best interests at heart. In this particularly instance I immediately think of the media and whoever it is that decides what’s attractive. I think it appeals to that desire  to be accepted. At least this was the case when I was a teenager when blue eyes and straight hair seemed to be the answer to all my problems. I don’t always love my curly hair and sometimes I imagine having straight hair would simply be more convenient. But since when is being human convenient and why should it be? When I look in the mirror now after having my hair straightened it feels strange, because I look different and I’m not going to lie part of me still likes that because maybe I can finally become part of that club I’ve wanted to be in all my life. Another part thinks it doesn’t suit me the way I feel my curly hair does.  It just looks and feels, well, boring and uninteresting!

*When I was writing this I was pretty certain this story existed, but my friends who went to high school around the same time as me, albeit different schools, don't seem to remember it. I don't imagine that I've made this whole story up in my head. But I just can't seem to find any other proof that it exists, other than me saying  it does. If this is case I am kind of impressed at that title! Even though it is mean. But I'm also sure it is real though.