Learning to love

Reminiscing back to when PSE ( personal and social education) classes was first introduced to our public schools, I was 11 years old and our first topic was Our bodies.We had a super long discussion about our body parts and personal hygiene followed by an assignment to draw what we thought we looked like and write about the favourite part of our body.

My favourite body part coincidentally was my hair... I had already started puberty and my face was riddled with pimples, I was tall and shapely but I did not have a thin waist to fit my wide hips ( the ideal woman shape we were being taught women are supposed to fit), my breasts were bigger than the other girls but the associated attention that came with it was the least desirable to a kid who want nothing more than to not stand out. I cannot speak for the others but my favourite body part was in reality the part I disliked the least. And it was not completely my real hair! My least disliked body part was the only altered body part! I cannot quiet understand now how that teacher did not pick up on that? Or recognise the devastating message we were sending ourselves.

I also question her teaching about how puberty was going to turn us all into hour glassed shaped bodies when she herself had a petite and  flat build! I especially question how the syllabus did not include acceptance of our bodies as an integral part of self esteem. In hind sight maybe the fact that the teacher shaved her eyebrows and redrew weirdly shaped, thick black line should have been a red flag to have her teaching self esteem to prepubescent kid!

It has  been brought to my attention that some people prefer chemical straightening to the the social stigma associated with not straightening it. Another round of reminiscing takes me back to when I was 15 or 16 years old and there was a temporary craze of going "natural" at school. The motive however at that time  was to show who had least coarse texture of nappy hair. Somehow having the mixed hair texture was supposed to be cooler or the envy of the others. My own attempt at that stint was an empty gesture since my mother had the final say about when and if she was going to relax my hair. So I was "natural" for the brief period that my mother deemed appropriate to allow my hair to grow before the next straightening.

So why is it considered more beautiful to suppress a natural and significant part of our identity? Why is it acceptable to change your hair, but it is  frowned upon to want to change your skin colour? 

 Yes the media continuously bombards us with black women with straightened hair or with super voluptuous weaves  of flowing cascades of wavy hair but why do we perceive such as more beautiful than to be natural?

Growing up, my view on being a girl was that pretty girls had long hair! So imagine how I felt about the fact that my hair was nice and long when wet, but shrank to half its length when dried! Or imagine my horror when my mother asked for scissors, trying to detangle my hair!

I remember the first haircut I ever had, my mother was trying her hand at layering; which unfortunately ended up reducing my mid-back length hair to barely shoulder length. I cried and sulked for days! And my mother's response was her an annoying saying that goes "seve pa donn manze" (which directly translate to - your hair will not feed you). Her wisdom elapsed me back then but I have since learned to appreciate the lesson and accept that superficiality is not the way to go. Hearing Lupita's speech with a similar saying from her own mother "You can't eat beauty, it doesn't feed you" stirred something in me. 

How many of us say we are proud to be black but are continuously trying to change the very part which makes  makes us black! Being black is skin deep and that is exactly what we are being continuously bombarded to change, our skin colour with whitening creams and our hair with chemical straightening cream. On a personal and human level, what do we achieve when we try to deny our basic and most apparent feature?What message are we sending?

This is a perfect example how to be the change I want to see in the world!If I want the world to stop thinking black is not beautiful, I need to start loving what makes me black! Since skin colour is not an issue for me, I want to battle the demon I know! Can you say the same?

So why do it?

Being in a country that limits my access to hair dressers with experience and products for Nappy hair is not a novelty for me. I have lived in India for over 3 years and most of that time I couldn't regularly relax my hair as often as I would have wanted to. Sometimes I would go over 6 months waiting for a holiday home to care for my hair professionally. So why did I not do it back then under the same climate? Why now?

Firstly I would say because Indians are extremely hair oriented. Long flowing hair is too much of a societal obsession in my beliefs.Fair skin and long silky hair is the epitome of female beauty with your everyday Indian. Watching any television channel for more than an hour, the number of adverts for skin whitening products and how to get longer and flowing hair advertisements is beyond blinding and deafening!

 I remember once I had worn a head scarf tied up like the Rastafarian women regularly do ( a style I personally find very sexy I might add) and had to spend half of my morning in university explaining WHY I had worn the scarf... If something bad had happened to my hair? Why did I want to cover my hair if I wasn't a Muslim? To be fair, I was just tired of combing my hair, after a few months my natural hair texture was like a helmet of an afro puff , the relaxed longer portion was too tangled and limp to actually do much with and I could not be bothered to try!

Secondly and much more poignantly; it would be because already with relaxed/straightened hair I had too many Indians touching my head without permission. I would be sitting in clinical posting and  suddenly have the weird sensation of having something in my hair. I would try to swat whatever it was away and end up slapping an Indians hand away!!! Apparently they were curious to see if it was real (yes some of them believe that any black person with long hair must be wearing a wig or a weave) or they simply wanted to see what it felt like . Some were polite enough to ask if they could touch after bombarding me with their weird questions.I was once even accused of trying to deceive them about wearing a wig when I once had my hair blow dried and pressed for a party... obviously halfway through the night with the dancing and sweating my hair puffed up and shrank in length ( something my fellow nappy hair comrades have surely experienced)
So imagine what I would have had  to put up with if at one of those times I had actually to cut off the relaxed parts and sport my nappy afro!

But why opt to switch from easily managed, permanently straightened, flat hair to the very difficult to comb on a daily basis, space occupying, gravity defying kinky coils at all?

Any hairdresser or styler who has regularly seen chemically straightened hair will vouched to the damaging effecs it has on the hair. Putting aside the perceived aesthetic attributes, chemical straightening creams in essence dehydrates your hair.Afro-textured hair do not have a specific name but a range of slangs exist with the most common being Nappy hair and Kinky Hair. But whatever the name the hair type is already the driest of all hair types. That is why our hair products are usually more oily and hydrating in texture.And why shampooing  too often is not a healthy practice for us.

So yes, already being the driest, we go ahead and strip it of most of  its remaining moisture by using chemical straightening cream! Leaving our hair more brittle , which is what I grew tired of seeing! Women torturing their hair to acquire a flatter and straighter hair at the cost of seriously damaging their hair and losing most of it. Having people come to me to braid cornrows and have their hair break when I hold it, that consequently breaks my heart because many are doing it to allow their hair to get a time off from the daily trauma and grow healthier! 

The last time I was at a hairdresser back in Seychelles, an elderly lady showed up with her hair missing in patches. She had actually come for another straightening of whatever was remaining on her scalp. She explained that her hair broke when another hairdresser had been colouring her hair ( another experience many of us have gone through I am sure). But my question was why not cut off the few limb patches and grow everything back with your natural texture?  Would that really seem worse than tugging on those sparse patches into the saddest version of a donkey (not a pony in any universe) tail?

Having my own hair shed from simply passing the comb through the straight strands was puzzling.I religiously hydrated my hair with Almond, Carrot and Olive oil products, even my relaxing cream had a moisturising oil addition. What was making my hair so brittle?

 I now spend at least 10-15 mins to detangle my hair (which is what tires my arms, primarily from having those mini hand wrestling matches against my hair and its love to be tangle up) Even using a fine tooth comb, there is barely much hair breaking or shedding. My hair is healthier!! So Mission No.1accomplished

What it means to go "Natural" ?

This should be a straightforward definition in my books, but it seems many people differ on the specifics.

While I define natural hair as being the hair type/texture that God gave you i.e the one you were born with, without any chemical alteration ; it seems some people also consider colouring as unnatural.

To complicate matters even more some people have different phases of going natural.
This was brought to my attention when I posted a photo on Facebook hashtaged as "All Natural" with my bangs half hovering to the sides as they had started doing,  after a morning wash all curly with my previous highlights every so shiny against the rest of my black hair. 
A Facebook friend coincidentally ( I choose to believe because otherwise it would be  very petty gesture) posted a link to another blog about how people who have decided to go natural but have not actually chopped off all their relaxed hair are not in essence actually natural! Rather they are simply transitioning and should instead say that they are transitioning.

Pffftt!!! So it seems that even among women learning to accept themselves for who they are, there is discrimination!  There are stages and different names and the whole issue is simply too political for my liking.
And does it really matter how much relaxed/permed hair is still attached to the newly grown natural hair?
And is colouring really considered as altering your natural hair? 
What about women who wear weaves/wigs? can they claim to be natural if their hair underneath is in fact natural but hiding from view but artificial or hair that is not their own?

What does natural hair mean for you? 

Maintenance

It has been a little over a fortnight since the big chop aannnd..... my arms hurt! 

Yes , I most definitely have the highest level of empathy to my mother for the years she had to care of my hair before she finally reverted to chemical straightening as a solution.Washing and drying my hair is a breeze at the moment! It is the styling the day after that feels like successive arm wrestling matches. 

Following the many advice I have found online from natural hair advocates, I have ceased to use shampoo. All after learning about how "African hair" is already thin, brittle and dry.... and about how shampoo just strips the hair strands of the moisture emphasising its "Kinkiness" as it it left over dry.
So I have been co-washing my hair for the past 6 months. Co-washing means that I use hair conditioner only instead of shampooing! I was skeptical when I first read about the practice but so many people were swearing by it so I decided to give it a try.

 The  result has been amazing, my hair is much more supple and manageable since the transition. Once in a while, if my hair feels extra greasy I still use a little glob of shampoo before my conditioner wash. Since I also use the usual Nappy Hair products eg.  Hair Mayonnaise, Hair lotion/ Balm etc... I do not get any smell issues... those products smell wonderful on their own.

I am now washing my hair more often and at times instead of just trying to comb and style my hair I actually prefer washing it again and have the condition tame my mane! And using the wider tooth combs and not obsessing about getting my gravity defying hair to stay flat, means less breakage surprisingly.

How it all began...

 So! Being a Creole Islander with mixed ancestry I look like your everyday Seychellois,which in itself doesn't say much since we are as diverse as a nation as we  can be. To paint a clearer picture, consider my mother and my 2 sisters ; despite having similar facial structures ( depending on you ask of course) we differ in skin tone and hair textures quite vastly.

Growing up, in a community that valued the fairer skin and straighter/wavier hair to the darker skins and coarser hair, I was always proud of my "mixed" hair! It grew faster and had much more volume and definition than my cousin's and sister's who had the more "Nappy Hair" texture just as they were prouder of their lighter skin tone than my own dark skin.

Needless to say it has taken me a quarter of a century, travelling, meeting so many people and immense personal growth to make me review my principles when it comes to skin and hair. To cut a long story short , I started meeting people who did not chemically straighten their hair and were rocking their natural hair texture, being proud of their skin and hair and not being ashamed. To defy stereotypes and refuse to fit into the world's perception that dark skin need "whitening creams" or that their kinky hair needed "relaxing" inspiring me in my journey of Self love!

And so began my journey when my husband and I moved to Australia... Despite having toyed with the idea of growing back my natural hair texture, it wasn't until i reached our countryside town and I realised how difficult it would be to maintain my hair in a town with less than a dozen black people that I began to seriously contemplate taking the plunge and doing some research on how to proceed.

3 months in, my hair was getting bushier and the the long relaxed part just kept getting tangled up, so hence came the first chop! And this is where it got tricky , because despite my descriptive instructions on what i wanted, the poor hairdresser only had style catalogues of straight and wavy short hair styles.... so I chose a nice bob style that would allow me to have bangs in the front but rid me of the mass of tangled up hair in the middle and back.

3 months after that, the bangs were now just levitating to the sides of my face over the space occupying and fast growing "nappy hair", so the another more drastic chop was due! This time I showed up with my tablet and Google searches of what I wanted my hair to look like...( mostly photos of Solange  Knowles in her earlier stages of growing her fro) And a lighter headed me walked home that day, excited to wash my hair and crunch it into sexy hairstyles I had been admiring.

The experience has indeed been a first ever... washing such short hair and having it air dry in minutes is in stark contrast to what I had grown up to. I quiet clearly remember my mother washing my hair every fortnight as a child and well into puberty when I started doing it myself. Her excuse was that it took way too much time and effort to detangle the tangled up "lion mane" I sported for a few days after.and the pain that usually accompanied such experiences left me with a dislike and reluctance to wash my hair more than twice a week even as an adult. Now to pass my finger through few inches of hair .... Pure Bliss!!