FAY­OLA K J FRAS­ER

Au­gust is an im­por­tant month in T&T, a month flanked by the cel­e­bra­tions of our Eman­ci­pa­tion and In­de­pen­dence. It is an op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­flect on how far we have come from the struc­tur­al op­pres­sions of en­slave­ment and col­o­niza­tion, and how far we have left to go.

Some in­stances in T&T should of­fer up fod­der for ex­tra re­flec­tion, as they in­di­cate that the work to re­lease our­selves from the Eu­ro­pean ideals that were foist­ed up­on us is not near­ly fin­ished.

Re­cent­ly, a group of young boys from Trin­i­ty Col­lege Mo­ka were not al­lowed to walk at their grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny be­cause their nat­ur­al hair, styled in canerows, small afros and braids, was con­sid­ered in­ap­pro­pri­ate and against the school’s reg­u­la­tions. This ar­cha­ic pol­i­cy has been repli­cat­ed through­out the Caribbean for many years, dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly af­fect­ing one group of peo­ple, in par­tic­u­lar. In 2020, the Supreme Court of Ja­maica ruled that it was per­mit­ted for a school to ban a five-year-old child from at­tend­ing be­cause of her locs.

The is­sue ex­tends be­yond schools to en­com­pass the work­place as well, where nat­ur­al hair has, too of­ten, been scru­ti­nized and judged as in­ap­pro­pri­ate and un­pro­fes­sion­al in a work en­vi­ron­ment.

In Trinidad, many pri­vate or gov­ern­ment-as­sist­ed school rules con­tain some it­er­a­tion of the lan­guage that stu­dents’ hair should be “neat”, “clean”, and “ap­pro­pri­ate” for school, as de­ter­mined by the school it­self. It is im­por­tant to ex­am­ine the gen­e­sis of these no­tions. In pre-colo­nial African so­ci­ety, hair was al­ways seen as sym­bol­ic. Dur­ing that time, ac­cord­ing to Pro­fes­sor Lori Tharpe, in her book “Hair Sto­ry”, “there was a hair­style for every­one and every oc­ca­sion: whether you were roy­al­ty, a sol­dier go­ing off to war, or a moth­er about to give birth.”

Hair­styles al­so in­di­cat­ed a per­son’s back­ground, tribe and so­cial sta­tus. There­fore, African hair was not on­ly aes­thet­ic but sym­bol­ic. Men and women found both com­mu­ni­ty and pride in cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful hair­styles, which amount to a di­rect ex­pres­sion of iden­ti­ty.

Canerows re­fer to a hair­style where the hair is fash­ioned in neat lin­ear rows or in­tri­cate geo­met­ric and curv­ing de­signs. What may be un­known to many, is that canerows were not in­vent­ed dur­ing the pe­ri­od of en­slave­ment, and have a long, rich his­to­ry. It is be­lieved that they date back to 3000 BC, and de­rive from Stone Age paint­ings in the Tas­sili Plateau, lo­cat­ed in the Sa­hara re­gion. There are al­so mod­ern de­pic­tions of war­riors and kings of Ethiopia, such as Tewodros II and Yohannes IV, wear­ing canerows in the 19th cen­tu­ry.

It is this well-re­spect­ed Afro­cen­tric hair­style that the ad­min­is­tra­tion at Trin­i­ty Mo­ka used as the rea­son­ing to ban these young men from walk­ing in their grad­u­a­tion and cel­e­brat­ing their hard-earned aca­d­e­m­ic achieve­ments.

At the point of trans­port from West Africa to the Caribbean, slave traders en­sured that men’s and women’s heads were shaved, their first de­par­ture from their own iden­ti­ty as a means of cul­tur­al era­sure. Dur­ing the pe­ri­od of en­slave­ment, when their hair grew back, many men and women wore their hair in canerows, to keep the hair neat and tidy and pre­vent tan­gling. There is even some re­search show­ing that the in­tri­cate plait­ing of canerows in­to cer­tain pat­terns was a tool of re­sis­tance, used to cre­ate maps for the en­slaved to fol­low to flee the plan­ta­tion.

Post en­slave­ment, in ef­forts to as­sim­i­late, women be­gan to chem­i­cal­ly straight­en their hair. As­sim­i­la­tion was an un­spo­ken re­quire­ment of so­cio-eco­nom­ic ad­vance­ment in a so­ci­ety still dom­i­nat­ed by Eu­ro­pean ideals and ex­pec­ta­tions.

At that time, African hair was deemed “wool­ly”, “un­sight­ly”, “un­kempt”, and in ef­forts to mim­ic Eu­ro­pean hair, Black women used a mix­ture of lye, pota­to, and egg to straight­en hair, of­ten caus­ing se­vere burn­ing of the scalp. Lye is a high­ly cor­ro­sive chem­i­cal com­pound, used in many clean­ing so­lu­tions, the fre­quent use of which has been proven to have a di­rect causal link to in­stances of breast can­cer in Black women.

A 25-year-long study per­formed by Boston Uni­ver­si­ty showed that Black women who used hair prod­ucts con­tain­ing lye at least sev­en times a year for 15 or more years had an ap­prox­i­mate­ly 30 per cent in­creased risk of es­tro­gen re­cep­tor-pos­i­tive breast can­cer com­pared with more in­fre­quent users. An­oth­er study, per­formed by the US Black Women’s Health Study (1997), linked the use of hair-re­lax­ing agents to in­stances of uter­ine fi­broids.

Al­though there are many new­er op­tions for “no-lye” straight­en­ers, these sta­tis­tics are ex­treme­ly star­tling, and prove that the im­pact of en­slave­ment is not just lin­ger­ing as a men­tal con­struct, but has caused many Black women the debt of their phys­i­cal health.

Dur­ing the Civ­il Rights Move­ment in the 1960s in the Unit­ed States (and even­tu­al­ly in the Black Pow­er Move­ment in T&T in the 1970s), two promi­nent im­ages arose as sym­bols of re­sis­tance - the up­held fist and the Afro.

Tharpe not­ed: “It wasn’t about a style, it was a form of protest to say, I am not go­ing to straight­en my hair any­more.”

Afros be­came tied to ac­tivists such as An­gela Davis. Short­ly af­ter, dur­ing the 90s and ear­ly 2000s, the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the Afro waned, and women be­gan to em­u­late pop­u­lar icons - like Aaliyah and Be­y­once - wear­ing their hair pin straight once more.

As the tides be­gan to change in the ear­ly 2010s and the nat­ur­al hair move­ment had a resur­gence, many women, some of who had for­got­ten what their nat­ur­al hair looked or felt like, made the brave de­ci­sion to grow their nat­ur­al hair, cut­ting off the straight­ened parts in a process that be­came known as the “big chop.” A de­ci­sion to em­brace the hair grow­ing out of the head re­quired brav­ery.

Patrice Grell Yur­sik, a Trinida­di­an, and the founder and cre­ator of the award-win­ning blog Afro­bel­la, was one of the first dig­i­tal cre­ators in the Black beau­ty space. She cre­at­ed her blog in 2006 to “fill the void and to cel­e­brate the in­ner and out­er beau­ty of women of all shades of beau­ti­ful,” in a time when no plat­form cel­e­brat­ing nat­ur­al Black beau­ty ex­ist­ed.

The ex­plo­sion of so­cial me­dia dur­ing the 2010s led to more peo­ple not on­ly see­ing oth­ers grow­ing out their nat­ur­al hair, but be­ing able to con­nect and re­ceive tips from oth­er Black women and ad­vice on how to learn and re­learn our hair, and our­selves.

This un­learn­ing has not come eas­i­ly. Many women de­scribe the dis­com­fort of wear­ing their nat­ur­al hair in the work­place, with one woman say­ing that, as a Black lawyer and a pro­fes­sion­al, “wear­ing your nat­ur­al hair re­quires you to nav­i­gate dis­com­fort in the work­place,” de­scrib­ing the mi­croag­gres­sions she re­ceived, be­ing told that her “twists look un­pro­fes­sion­al” and be­ing asked if she would be wear­ing her hair out again. An­oth­er woman de­scribes the ten­sion that ex­ists even with­in the nat­ur­al hair com­mu­ni­ty, with loos­er curls and coils be­ing far less po­liced and scru­ti­nized than more tight­ly coiled hair.

This is in­dica­tive of the clear and di­rect link that can be drawn from the pe­ri­od of slav­ery, where the women who were mixed, lighter skinned, and had loos­er curls were con­sid­ered the “good” house slaves, where­as the dark­er skinned women were dis­card­ed to per­form ex­treme­ly stren­u­ous field labour.

Amer­i­can neo-soul singer, In­dia Arie, in one of her most pop­u­lar songs, says: “I am not my hair, I am not this skin, I am not your ex­pec­ta­tions.”

She had passed through an ar­ray of hair­styles and re­fused to be de­fined any­more by her hair. How­ev­er, in so many ways, hair is in­trin­sic to each in­di­vid­ual and in­ti­mate­ly in­ter­twined with the ex­pe­ri­ence of Black­ness. It is a source of pride, beau­ty and ex­pres­sion, and part of who we are. As Black peo­ple, hair is at the core, and the right to wear it in schools, in the work­place, and in the me­dia in all its glo­ry, with joy and pride, should al­ways be cel­e­brat­ed rather than po­liced or de­bat­ed.

Fay­ola K J Fras­er is a pro­fes­sion­al in the in­ter­na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment are­na. She has a BA in In­ter­na­tion­al (Mid­dle East­ern) Stud­ies and an MSc in In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions and Diplo­ma­cy from the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics.