I AM MY HAIR

Dedicated to the memory of Maya Angelou - Poet, Educator, Author, Human rights activist. 

Dear India Arie, sorry to differ with your analogy that we aren’t our hairs, but the soul that lives within. Fact is, we are both our hair, and our souls. I am a Black African and I have a black, wooly, dense hair, so does that mean my hair isn’t an extension of my race and personality? Or is it possible to be 100% white Caucasian and then have the wooly hair of an African? 

I understand the concept of the song as being an enunciation of one's belief that how we carry our hair isn’t who we are made of psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually and that is most admirable if only it was so for everyone. But more often than not, Africans, African-Americans and African-British are disenchanted with their hair. 

We are quick to celebrate and claim kinship with the likes of Lupita Nyong'o, and super models like Grace Jones, Alek Wek for their brazen courage of flaunting their “Africanness” and or Blackness in the way they carry their hair. However, most of us wouldn’t be caught dead carrying ours like that. We associate beauty only with long, straight, wavy, curly lax hairs of the Americas, Bohemia and Asia.

And India Arie a picture of a strong black woman croons “I am not my hair… I am the soul that lives within”, seriously? Doesn't that scream of self-consciousness and low esteem? That you have to explain to anyone that you aren't your hair, sounds as though you are apologizing to some superior being for who you are, and just teeming of insecurity.  

You know, our tough black hair is an extension of our physical and psychological toughness. I believe there isn't a woman as strong as a black woman. So it pains me that today many women in Nigeria now only rate a person’s importance and status by the quality of weave that they fix. The longer or curlier or straighter the better. A large number of us are getting dumber and more snobbish by the day. Basking in the luxuriant feel of foreign hair and forgetting that the one we were born with is equally beautiful. As God is a God of variety, this makes me wonder. Why it is hard for us to believe that Black is very much as beautiful as white if not more so?

In fact, in time past, my friends and I were guilty of this. Anytime we had to carry our natural hairs we refer to that as our ‘bad hair day’ using the dogma “I am not my hair”. What’s more ironic than that? A bad hair day is when you forget to wash, comb, and pack or style your hair neatly not when we have to carry our natural hair in public.

It is true that the African hair is stubborn and hard to comb. But that doesn’t mean that when you manage to tame it it wouldn’t come out beautifully. Africans are blessed with a scalp that will make most hair styles look gorgeous. You can rock the low cut or corn rows weaving, the Afro and even go brazen and rock the close to skin cut. Because neat and well styled almost always does the trick.
 

Let’s see our own hair as a reflection of the sexy, empowered, black woman that we are. Wear your black hair proudly, you owe it to your race.

As in the words of one amazing, strong and markedly black woman “I am a woman phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, that’s me”.

Rest on Maya..