Rachael Es­pinet

It al­ways per­turbs me that in the 21st Cen­tu­ry in the Caribbean many women are still neg­a­tive­ly crit­i­cised about their hair. I am par­tic­u­lar­ly as­tound­ed by the way peo­ple treat women who have tight curly hair that is not chem­i­cal­ly straight­ened.

Some women have been told that nat­ur­al hair is not pro­fes­sion­al. Some have been told that they do not have "good hair," and some forms of hair­styles have been out­right banned in in­sti­tu­tions.

While I can­not re­call a re­cent re­port­ed in­ci­dent in Trinidad of women be­ing shamed for their nat­ur­al hair, there was an in­ci­dent last year in Bar­ba­dos which made re­gion­al news of a school that for­bid nat­ur­al hair­styles and told a se­nior stu­dent that her hair­style was too "un­set­tling and flam­boy­ant" for school.

The con­stant polic­ing of women's nat­ur­al hair has be­come such a point of con­cern that I won­der why women are taught to hate the hair that they are born with. How­ev­er, one au­thor is at­tempt­ing to cel­e­brate women's nat­ur­al hair by link­ing nat­ur­al hair to the ma­jes­tic beau­ty of trees.

When I first picked up Tami­ka Phillip's book My Hair Grows Like a Tree, I was tru­ly ex­cit­ed. Fi­nal­ly, I thought, a book that aims to em­pow­er young girls to love their hair.

My Hair Grows Like a Tree is a work­book-styled chil­dren's book that helps teach young girls how to love their nat­ur­al hair. In her note to the read­ers, Phillip says the book se­ries is "for young girls and women to learn about them­selves and the Earth."

The book is print­ed back to front, and I sus­pect it is her at­tempt to in­vert the way nat­ur­al hair is per­ceived in so­ci­ety. Each page has a pic­ture of a young girl with her hair grow­ing like a tree.

One pic­ture shows a girl de­pict­ed as a tree, com­par­ing the girl's body to the dif­fer­ent prop­er­ties of a tree.

It reads, "Like the pipelines of a tree trunk my cells feed en­er­gy from my body to my hair. The Earth in and around you, the out­er lay­er of a trunk is to a tree as your skin is to your body."

The body pos­i­tive per­spec­tive of Phillip's book is very ad­mirable as she deals with both the many dif­fer­ent types of hair and an­ces­tral her­itage many women with nat­u­ral­ly curly hair come from.

One pic­ture shows a girl whose hair is de­pict­ed as Africa and in­side of the con­ti­nent there are pic­tures of dif­fer­ent women, both sculp­tures of women and women from dif­fer­ent tribes.

Phillip asks the read­ers what they have in com­mon with the women in the pic­ture in an at­tempt to get girls to ap­pre­ci­ate their cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal an­ces­try. "Like trees, our hair grows from our roots."

How­ev­er, while Phillip's ideas around body pos­i­tive im­agery were bril­liant, her ex­e­cu­tion left much to be de­sired. The work­book lit­er­al­ly felt like an es­say-type ques­tion on each page, and I won­der if chil­dren look for­ward to ex­tra work af­ter they come home from school? As a child the last thing I would want is more home­work in my leisure read­ing.

I al­so won­der if young girls are able to ap­pre­ci­ate her work. While the lay­out of the book may ap­peal to young chil­dren, the lev­el of ques­tions and metaphors in the book may be too ad­vanced for chil­dren and some young adults.

I al­so do not think Phillip gave much thought in­to her read­er­ship and the im­pact her book would have on them. In the pre­am­ble of the book, Phillip said the book was writ­ten with moth­ers and daugh­ters in mind so that the adults could help young girls learn about them­selves and the Earth.

While it is great to have a book that helps moth­ers en­cour­age their daugh­ters to love their hair, I think she ne­glects to ac­knowl­edge that some of these women may have gone through decades of self-loathing to­wards their own hair and thus found it dif­fi­cult to help their daugh­ters along. I hope par­ents, par­tic­u­lar­ly moth­ers, pick up the book and to­geth­er dis­cov­er the love of their own hair, but we do live in a so­ci­ety where old­er women fre­quent­ly tell younger women to main­tain the sta­tus quo when it comes to their hair.

De­spite the short­com­ings, I hope peo­ple read and ap­pre­ci­ate My Hair Grows Like a Tree. I grew up on books that de­pict­ed on­ly white girls with blue or pur­ple eyes who have straight hair that was ei­ther red or blond. I nev­er saw my­self in a lit­er­ary char­ac­ter as a child, and still rarely see the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of women with dif­fer­ent shades and hair tex­tures as an adult, es­pe­cial­ly in pop lit­er­a­ture. Rep­re­sen­ta­tion mat­ters and I hope that more au­thors fol­low Phillip's ex­am­ple and write more sto­ries cel­e­brat­ing the nat­ur­al beau­ty of all dif­fer­ent types of women.

My Hair Grows Like a Tree is avail­able in Trinidad at all Cher-Mere lo­ca­tions, Body Beau­ti­ful on Ari­api­ta Av­enue and RIK Book­stores from April.