Melissa Prunty Kemp

 

After two years of twining ten to twelve packs of synthetic hair into my own, I tired of this cosmetically pleasing but ultimately useless activity and considered dreadlocks as an alternative.  Dreads seemed a sort of natural “braid;” permanent; no twelve-hour sessions (at least) of pulling hair only to pay sums from $25 (in the hood) to $200 in top salons. 

And for me—an English professor and writer—dreadlocks could be widely politically useful.  While my natural hair interlocked, I could tell my colleagues that this new style was my personal effort to negate the white capitalist notions of beauty daily thrust upon me.  I could tell my spiritualistic type friends my hair was an outward sign of my denial of materialism, my effort at connection to the spirit world through my growing tentacles.  I would then describe my hair swinging out in all directions, captured by psychic waves and temporal anomalies.  

For those progressive inquirers, I could tell them I was riding the wave of trend. It’s trendy to be visibly Afrocentric.  Presumed “ghetto hairdos” are even becoming media-respectable.  Doctors, nurses, and for quite some time, lawyers and professorial types, have all adorned their heads in dreads on our television sets. I had an answer for any inquiry.  But for what reasons was I actually deciding to grow dread locks?  Was it peer pressure linked to trendiness, a mark of political and spiritual freedom?  Or a mark of true mental decolonization?

It occurred to me that I must examine the presuppositions behind my occasionally affected list of responses above.  The most insidious and pervasive one of these is rooted in the idea that what I considered to be my natural hair—jet black, well below shoulder length, relaxed and buoyant with curls—was a representation of the lengths to which I had assimilated.  I had never worn any sort of natural style in the past, not even during the seventies Afro generation. 

In the late sixties and early seventies, my southern parents believed such hair was an unwelcome, rebellious chord resounding against the recent conciliatory efforts for Civil Rights and equality between blacks and whites.  If one wanted to “make it” in the white world, one had to be proficient in passing regardless of complexion, a part of which encompassed fashion and cosmetic assimilation.  

I have grown to intellectually comprehend the reasons why I now question the above statements as I have grown to appreciate the positive results one can achieve through rebellion against the status quo, despite the resulting upset it causes.  My natural hair is that which grows from my head in its most unmanipulated state.  The manipulation and cosmetification of hair is much like what we do to our food.  Because of our misguided hedonistic urges, we make food poisonous and impotent in its ability to nourish our bodies.  I decided to refuse to make my hair impotent any longer.

A second presupposition which plagued me was this false mandate: in order to achieve some realistic modicum of economic and material success, I must assimilate in the strictest social sense as well as in the broadest possible sense.  I had all sorts of experiential evidence to suggest that in the nineties this mandate was still true.  I have felt the impact being a six foot tall, large, black woman has had on my employment and marriage prospects.  Yet, I had more experiential evidence to suggest that whether I assimilated or not would ultimately matter little.

Mine, and human success in its simplest sense, is, was and has always been inexorably tied to the ability to reach goals in spite of ever-present opposition.  Knowledge of this fact is for me a part and gift of my ancestral legacy.  Those of the African diaspora are a resilient people, like dread locks are resilient, often growing in places where no hair grew before.  

My understanding that assimilationist efforts have no valuable result has been fictionalized in the character of Miss Maple, a transvestite in Gloria Naylor’s novel Bailey’s Cafe (1992). As a masculine attired college graduate, Miss Maple, whose name is actually Stanley Beckwourth Booker Taliaferro Washington Carver, sought employment in an accounting office around 1945, a time when blacks weren’t hired for such positions.  Yet Miss Maple would not accept that people refused to hire him because of racial discrimination.  Instead he turned the laws of mathematical probability on himself and his situation.  In his mind, wearing a dress to a perspective employer’s office would have no numerically significant effect on the probability of his being hired.  Indeed, as long as he was a black man in the white supremacist capitalist system, evidence clearly demonstrated that his efforts at fashion assimilation would have no effect at all.  So he wore dresses.

And I will wear dread locks.  I, like Miss Maple, am properly educated, qualified and trained for any position to which I apply.  My hair is no measure of my intelligence, despite what culturally insensitive and uninformed nay-sayers might posit.  Ultimately my dread locks will be no impediment to my progress.  And were I to buckle to conformity and assimilate, I would ultimately never gain the most coveted of rights and privileges in the inner sanctums of white society which I must surely be seeking as a would-be yet misdirected assimilationist.  There aren’t any of those for black people, anyway.

 

In the minds of many, the result of the pattern of reasoning presented above is that I have effectively marginalized myself.  Perhaps.  Yet, even on the margin I still have room for one more hegemonic presupposition which erupts from the last perennial remnants within my own slowly decolonizing perception:  wearing dread locks, the woman looking back from the mirror is no longer beautiful in her own estimation.  Her hair is nappy!  Sticking up everywhere!  Unmanageable!  Uncontrollable!  She will need a new wardrobe because her hair no longer goes with anything in her closet!

But change is good, right? Not in this capitalist society where change is only beneficial if it increases the bourgeoisie’s capital base.  If I stop lending my economic support, i.e. giving away my capital  to businesses that exploit my hegemonic weaknesses, businesses who prey on my unfortunate internalization of the sources and roots of my oppression—those sources being white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, a diseased yet fully functional capitalist superstructure, and the misrepresentations and misinterpretations of my ancestral roots in the slave south, the Cherokee Carolinas and ultimately in Africa—then I will eventually free my mind from the false notions of beauty, and to some extent, my pocketbook from capitalist pillaging.  Ultimately, I can  more easily free my hair from the same.

Freedom lives in and on the margin; the two words are for me synonymous connotatively.  I have learned to add to these two abstractions, a third—beauty.  It, too, exists on the margin.  The existentialist nature of most humans requires an “other” against which to define the self.  As such, there is inherently very little “otherness” in the center as opposed to on the margin.  Those who collect themselves around a centralized, standardized notion of beauty lose their ability to see difference or otherness because within their limited view from the center, there is none. Beauty, therefore, can only be found by distancing oneself from the center so as to gain perspective.  It should follow, then, that the more marginalized and individualized I am, the more beautiful I may become.

Knowing these ideas, which have their genesis in a meta-intellectuality, I can rattle off my list of reasons for my locks, knowing the truth behind them, recognizing their uses in “wearing the mask.”   I can grow locks as my symbol of freedom from all hegemonic oppression.  The demons of presuppositions destroyed, I can envision and create mental and spiritual health and renewal with my locks.  I can celebrate a part of my AFRICAN culture because in it is a freer place.  And in that place, I’m twisting away.

 

 

Previously Published in Uhuru Magazine, Kent State University, 1997.