Victoria Olayiwola Blog #4: Forget our Americanness, what about our Blackness? Pt1

 

 This is us.

                                           

 This is NOT us. Goes without saying really.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery.

“If you don’t look like me then there’s a problem.”-Dess

So I walked into Sadler one day and saw a male friend, so I went over to hello. Mind you, today was the day I decided I would show my hair which was in plaits. So I said hello, he was sitting amongst a group of mutual friends. Our mutual friend saw me first and said hello to me first. He noticed my hair and said oh you’re showing your hair. Then the friend I had actually gone over to say hello to me said saw my hair and was like Bu/Hon your hair is a mess, you need to go sort out your hair! Incredibly shocked I decided to  take it as a joke and pretend I wasn’t offended. Seriously? A mess? Really? Because none of the white people who saw it thought it was a mess. No sir. Even an Asian friend of mine alongside another white friend said it looks different. Funky. Nice, but different. 

I later learnt that it was the norm for girls in America, of African descent to prefer to look like “Barbie dolls dipped in chocolate” than accept their God-given natural hair. In London, England such notions of how a black women’s hair should look and whether ones hair is in a “mess” is non-existent. Is it the case that African-American girls are disproportionately influenced by advertisements of white girls flicking their hair and letting the wind blowing from side to side? Or is it because Beyoncé, Michelle Obama and other African-American female actors all of a sudden are blest with European looking hair? And so if the ordinary black African-American girl is not naturally “blest” with such hair, they devise ways to bless themselves with such things. Why?

Whatever the case may be , I am not ashamed of my hair. On the contrary I look at it sometimes and think WoW, we (black) really do have the best hair. If only it was longer so we could flick up and down and toss it from side to side like our non-black counterparts. So we can show its beauty. Because it really is beautiful. Straightening our hair or relaxing it or donning those odd horse-hair wigs and those tracks and so on and so forth only helps destroy its true beauty. If only our ideas on what true beauty weren’t so warped, so perverse, we would see it for ourselves.

Dess is right to say that most if not all African-American products are owned by African-Americans interested after the welfare of African-American women’s hair. If this is the case in America, I can confirm that it is even more the case in London where most, if not all, the Afro hair shops are owned Asians. One springs here and another there, all of them competing for loyal customers. As good shop owners they know the brands well and are of the greatest help. But do they know “our” hair? Do they even care? Rather do they stock up on what is selling fast, because they know it is best for black hair or because they can make a quick buck or two? Sadly, with great regret I think is the latter. For like any shop owner or company, they seek profit, regardless of what is happening to those who use it. 

This point brings me to the wonderful collage of black culture “The College Museum” by George C Wolfe.  Questions are raised about identity, aim and purpose. This questions are raised aptly in Exhibit 6, which brings up the question of hair. Note that the lady no longer had hair because she had been changing her hairstyle like the changing seasons of the year, now she was deciding whether she choose between an Afro wig from Taiwan or straight white woman looking hair wig. In the end she doesn’t choose a hairstyle, but choosing the straightened hair would have been a denouncement of true black people’s hair because true black people’s hair ISN’T straight. My theory is every time we as black people give in by bleaching ourselves and relaxing our hair in order to pursue to “imitation” we are in fact helping bolster and support the process of a lost identity.