- Photo by Tanya Batson-Savage
Fabian Thomas, director of 'Hairpeace', adds a healthy dose of humour as 'Mrs. Williams'.
Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance Writer
IN TODAY'S world hair is often just another kind of accessory, one that you can grow yourself or buy if you want to. However, for something that is largely dead cells, hair is complicated business. It has often been used as a political symbol, a way or asserting self or of asserting dominance over someone else.
For many women, hair takes up many hours of their lives. When one adds up all those hours spent in salon chairs and all the others spent before the dresser mirror, the number might be staggering. Between the washing, shampooing, styling, hot curling and blow-drying and some things beyond imagination, hairstyling is an all-consuming passion.
POLITICAL ISSUES
With its very name alone, Janice Lee Liddell's Hairpeace connotes all the political issues that get wrapped up in hair. The play, recently staged by the Montego Bay Little Theatre Movement (MLTM), is about black women and their hair. However, the play takes in today's more relaxed approach to the crowning glory. Hairpeace presents four women who represent the ways in which hair is used to define womanhood.
The four friends in the production, though close, are four different types of women. Each has a hairstyle which speaks to her personality. As such Stephanie, the sexy one, has a weave as long as her skirt is short. Aisha, who spouts black consciousness, sports dreadlocks, and Deborah has made the radical move of shaving most of her hair off and dying the rest blonde, which shows how separated she is from the other women.
Carmen, a victim of cancer, has no hair and that is shown to be the most cruel of fates.
It may seem to many that the mop one's wears on one's head is the least of things about which to get political. However, hair is a large part of the race argument. An Afro can pack a punch of equal power as a black-gloved raised fist. The hair issue gets even more twisted, because black people's hair has often been the target of much racial denigration, being 'wool' to the more 'desirable' silk.
Hairpeace begins its hair talk from the opening scene, as Deborah criticises Stephanie by asking "Where did you get that mop of hair?" Indeed, that marks one of the most sensitive issues at the root of hair politics. It has often been argued that the need to straighten the unruly curliness of black hair or simply to get a weave or wig to cover it is an attempt to become whiter.
Stephanie, therefore, has to constantly defend her weave against this kind of attack. She goes to great pains to differentiate it from a wig and, even then, she is asked if she has a 'white girl' complex.
BLACK PRIDE
On the opposite side, wearing ones hair in its natural state often symbolises Black pride. This aspect, too, has been the subject of literature. A noted feminist writer celebrates the freedom and beauty of loving one's hair in the children's book Happy To Be Nappy. The text's name is particularly important because the 'nappy' head usually has such negative connotations.
In Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, Beneathea trades in her 'pressed' tresses for an Afro once she begins to accept herself as a Black woman. Indeed, though fashion moved away from 'natural' hair and fashions such as 'jherri curl' hustled their way on the scene, leaving a trail of bad hairstyles in their wake, the 'natural' look has returned.
Black hairstyles like the cane row, as sported by such reggae stars as Sean Paul, are now quite fashionable. Shaggy also now weaves between a canerowed coiffure or simply letting his hair breathe free. Dreadlocks are equally popular in entertainment and seem to be as much for style as purporting a particular ideology.
Indeed, the dreadlock issue has become a case of national identity. When Hollywood wants to mark a Jamaican, they simply add dreadlocks and one is created in the global imagination. The same works for animation, as have appeared in Shark Tale and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
DREADLOCKS
When it comes to politics and hair, the dreadlocks are quite eloquent. While the contention between Rastafari and Christians first made 'locks a social barrier, they are now a way of embracing Afrocentricity or simply for the style of it. Indeed, whereas having braids used to mean looking more European, now women and men can weave in locks to affect a Rasta look. Such behaviour generally negates the impression that weaving means whitening. As such, it is not very surprising that locks have also made their movie debuts without Blacks or Jamaicans, as in The Matrix Reloaded.
Even so, hair is still a sore point for many women. So, though attitudes to this perception have become more relaxed, the politics of hair is not out of place. Hair, for white or black women, is a symbol and measurement of beauty. As Rapunzel can attest, many headache pills later, hair is an important part of sex appeal for all women. Hair's symbolism therefore cannot only be found in black literature.
In From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers Marina Warner points to the relevance of hair in fairytales. Of particular significance is the value of blonde hair. "Blonde hair shares with gold many mythopoeic properties: gold does not tarnish, it can be beaten and hammered, annealed and spun and still will not diminish or fade," she says.
LESS THAN PERFECT
The children's classic Anne of Green Gables beautifully deals with the trauma having less than perfect hair. Plagued by her red hair, the main character perceives it as her 'lifelong sorrow'. In her overly dramatic and completely endearing manner, Anne laments: "I think to myself, 'Now my hair is a glorious black, black as the raven's wing.' But all the time I know it is just plain red and it breaks my heart."
While most persons may not be brokenhearted about their hair colour, it is a sentiment that can easily be recognised. The colour question is a lot less important in today's world, but not insignificant. Nicole Kidman, with her hallmark blonde beauty, has recently wished that she were a brunette. Listening to any blonde joke can tell one why.
Hair colour is also a way to establish oneself as different, hip or cutting edge. Following on the heels of Gwen Stefani, who had pink highlights, Pink made her mark by using her trademark colour. Elephant Man's hair has proven to be a kaleidoscope of colour, though it seems to have settled on a variant of yellow.
The simple truth is that no matter how we cut it, whether or not we get political about it, hair is never just hair.
