Suburban Afro

Some Woman Called Claire Worthington Moaning About Her Hair

I DON’T HAVE TO LOVE EVERY LAST INCH

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For those of you in a hurry I’ll condense this post into the following sentence: Disliking my hair doesn’t mean that I don’t love myself.

For those of you with the time and inclination to indulge my ramblings here’s the longer version:

There are certain aspects of my physical being that I like and some that I don’t. I also have certain physical aspects that I feel completely neutral about. As I’ve got older certain things have moved from one list to another, but despite disliking various individual parts of me, I like myself. Why wouldn’t I? In the grand scheme of things I’m pretty alright. I don’t have any festering self loathing issues that need to be dealt with. I’m fine.

Since I started this blog I’ve become increasingly conscious that there are people out there who have decided how I feel about myself and I’m not impressed.

I’m a fan of the natural hair movement. Your natural hair is nothing to be ashamed of and I wholeheartly feel that the beauty and diversity of afro hair should be celebrated. The part I’m not so impressed with is the weird notion that any black woman wearing a weave or using hair relaxer hates themselves. Other variations on this theme are that we hate or reject our heritage and / or wish we were white. That’s a pretty big leap.

Problems always occur when people start making global assumptions about people they have never met. It’s also undesirable, in my personal opinion, to start lecturing people on what they should and shouldn’t do with their own bodies.

I’m an educated woman and I’m well aware of the various factors that have resulted in some black women feeling that they have to alter their appearance. I also understand the commercial and media influences, which have affected the visibility of black people over the years. I know and understand about the “othering” of people of colour and I am well aware that these things influence what any society would view as “normal” All this aside, my experiences as a black woman born and raised in the UK does not automatically mean that I have issues and I would appreciate it if people would stop assuming that I do.

As a little girl I always wanted to have long blonde hair. I’ve never had any interest in having white skin, but I spent much of my youth daydreaming about waking up one morning with long blonde hair.

The crux of the matter is that when my mum did my hair, it hurt. There’s the problem right there. 5 year olds don’t like having their hair done if it hurts and little girls with active imaginations have the capacity to resolve their fake problems in creative ways. I’ve always been a pragmatic individual. There were two possible solutions to my problem.

  1. Get my mum to stop doing my hair – indefinitely
  2. Change my hair to something that doesn’t require an afro comb

I was a little girl in the 1970s and there was definitely a lack of diversity on the three available television channels. The straight haired blonde models on the adverts certainly didn’t look as though they regularly cried at the prospect of having their hair done. They were very smiley and spent a disproportionate amount of time shaking their heads for no reason. Their exaggerated head movements showed off their lovely long hair. When I copied them nothing happened, and I mean nothing. Short afro hair doesn’t move, no matter how much you try.

I was quite imaginative as a kid and would regularly improvise the long hair I wanted with an assortment of props, the most popular ones being a pair of tights or a long woollen cape, presumably from somebody’s christening outfit. The important thing was that I could wear it on my head and that they’d move when I twirled, unlike my afro which didn’t.

As the years went by I discarded the props and buried my afro under an assortment of shop bought hair, in every imaginable colour and when it wasn’t hidden it was chemically treated it to within an inch of it’s life. My hair has been, Toni Braxton in the 90s, short and other times so long that it tries to strangle me in my sleep. It has been braided, permed, relaxed, cornrowed, beaded, weaved and on occasion left entirely to its own devices. Throughout all of this nonsense, at no point have I wished that my skin was a different colour. I’ve wished I was taller, slimmer, curvier, quieter and occasionally smarter but never whiter.

The days of changing my hair will probably never stop, but the one thing that definitely should, is other people projecting their ideas onto people like me. I’m lucky enough to exist in a place and time where I have the freedom to be whoever I choose. The little brown girl recreating the Harmony hairspray advert didn’t need your approval and the grown woman version doesn’t either.

Don’t look at my shop bought hair and make assumptions about me or how I perceive my identity. My hair, my choice.

FAREWELL, PARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW – SAYING GOODBYE TO YOUR HAIR EXTENSIONS

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No matter how happy you were, the day your stylist put them in, eventually you reach a stage where it’s time to remove your hair extensions. If you are one of those well behaved types this will be at the appropriate time, as suggested by your hairdresser. Many of you will have taken a small detour via the delay zone and then there are some of you, whose hair extensions have been there so long that they’ve been taken hostage by your own hair! I’m not going to judge, you know who you are and I’m sure there was a good reason.

When I started writing this post I was in the process of trying to say goodbye to a weave, by that I mean that I kept looking at my hair in the mirror and shaking my head in mild despair. Whilst Barbara my hairdresser was working her magic, I was happily sitting there watching television and chatting away. I had no interest whatsoever in how I was going to get it out again.

Then came the the day I stepped away from the delay zone and decided to remove my weave. When I started that afternoon’s mission it all seemed quite straight forward. My hair was cornrowed and the shop bought hair was stitched to it. All I had to do was remove the stitches. Technically all of that remained true but the straight lines of my imagination were nowhere to be seen, well felt. I faced a maze of hair with occasional stitches. The same stitches and ends of thread that were 100% visible the day before, when I wanted to hide them, were now secret ninjas hiding deftly in the undergrowth. I spotted one and by the time I’d picked up the scissors (or seam ripper from my sewing kit) it’d disappeared again.

There was a time when I didn’t care as much as I do now. I would simply tug my hair and hack away at whatever looked like a piece of thread until I extracted the fake hair, but these days I care about what’s underneath. I finally appreciate my own hair, not enough to stop writing a blog about how it’s ruining my life, but enough to respect my home grown hair and stop butchering it whilst removing shop bought hair.

I’m trapped in a perpetual hair cycle of my own making.

  • Stage One: Sulk about my natural hair
  • Stage Two: Plan new hairdo
  • Stage Three: Book hair appointment and buy copious amounts of shiny new hair
  • Stage Four: Visit my stylist and leave with a fabulous new hairdo
  • Stage Five: Strut about for a couple of weeks like somebody in a L’Oreal advert
  • Stage Six: Notice that my shop bought hair is starting to free style
  • Stage Seven: Enter The Delay Zone 
  • Stage Eight: Fall under the curse of the Double Hair Do
  • Stage Nine: Recognise that I need to leave the delay zone but feel overwhelmed at the size of the task
  • Stage Ten: Finally remove the shop bought hair and have an extended deep conditioning treatment
  • Stage Eleven: Remember what shrinkage is
  • Stage Twelve: Return to Stage One

Sometimes I have a thirteenth stage, where I get over myself and make it past the concept of my shoulder length hair disappearing into a three inch fro and make do with my head grown hair for a while.

Despite my endless obsessing, it’s really not that bad. The only person who thinks I’m any different is me and I know that I’m being an idiot. I’m getting better at reducing my obsessive hair thoughts and being self employed my current lack of regular income means that sometimes I have no choice. Hair extensions and stylists cost money that I don’t always have.

I occasionally get a confused look from people who don’t know me that well and experience two totally different hair styles in the same week, but it’s hardly life changing and most of them recognise that I’m always me, but the hair comes and goes.

IT’S ANOTHER ME – MY SCARY BROWN DOLL

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One of my most treasured possessions is a baby doll. By modern standards she’s not the prettiest of dolls, but she means a lot to me because I’ve had her since I was very small.

My doll is made of hard, dark brown plastic, her straight hair is molded into her mainly bald head and for some reason her eyes are orange and they close noisily when you lie her on her back. My children think she’s scary and one in particular regards her as the sort of thing more at home in a horror film than a children’s playroom.

Although my doll is now wearing a pink fluffy romper, that wasn’t her original outfit, she inherited that after three decades or more of being naked. At some point in the gap between playing with dollies  and becoming sentimental and middle aged, her clothes along with lots of my other toys will have been given away. When she arrived on Christmas morning she was wearing a hand knitted orange and white dress with a matching hat. That retro number has long since disappeared and the fact that she had no other clothes, suggests that she probably didn’t come with an outfit.

As a little girl, although she was always there I don’t remember playing with her very much, but I was always very fond of her. I definitely didn’t like her as much as my Tiny Tears. Tiny Tears was the must have toy of 1970 whatever, because she weed herself if you fed her water and squeezed hard enough, which was quite impressive in those days.

So why do I have this weird attachment for her? There are two main reasons.

The first reason is that she’s a connection with my childhood. I’m increasingly fascinated with things that remind me of being a little girl. I have an entire Pinterest board dedicated to things from my childhood including television programmes I watched, Ladybird books, toys I owned, and sweets they no longer make. My doll reminds me of being a little girl and keeping her is a way to remember those days.

The second reason I’m so attached to my doll is because as the only brown doll I owned at the time, she was one of the few toys that actually reflected how I looked. I allegedly exclaimed that she was another me when I received her. All my other dolls were white and usually had blonde hair and although Tiny Tears, Sindy and Barbie were always my favourites, they didn’t look like me. To be honest “Little Claire” with her straight molded hair and orange eyes didn’t either but I knew that she was like me. It was a poor imitation but at least she was supposed to look like me and for whatever reason her hard plastic skin and noisy orange eyeballs never bothered me.

Finding dolls with brown skin is much easier to do now and they are no less attractive than their paler counterparts, although strangely enough they are sometimes referred to as “ethnic”, presumably to avoid the whole “should we call it brown?” question. If you’re buying a doll in 2018 you have a wider set of choices. Large companies are offering a range of different skin tones. Skinny and blonde may still be the default, but at least other options exist. There are also lots of small companies who are creating beautiful dolls in every skin shade.

Showing children that they are unique, but not unusual, is important. The images they see on television and in magazines matters. The characters they read about in books and the physical attributes of the toys they play with matters. My orange eyed scary doll was a part of my childhood and although we didn’t look alike she was and will forever be, another me.

 

BLACK HISTORY MONTH

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October is Black History Month here in the United Kingdom and so far I have spent it all with my natural hair. It isn’t a deliberate statement but the timing does seem to work.

I still scowl at my reflection in the mirror first thing in the morning, but I’m OK with it. My hair looks the same as it did when I was eleven, but the main difference is that I now bother combing it properly and putting a bobble in it.

As per usual there are people wanting to know when we’ll be celebrating white history month and wondering why black history needs it’s own place in the calendar. The short version is that if I, as a black woman, have made it into my mid 40s without knowing anything about the history of black people in the United Kingdom then there is a problem in which stories are being shared. I shouldn’t have to go and seek out this knowledge, it should already be there alongside the rest of things I was taught at school. There is no way for my children to understand their ancestry if I don’t.

As American television programming takes over more of the UK schedules, there is a danger that Black history will only ever be seen through the lens of how things were / are in the United States and the stories of black Britons will be lost. I know about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but how many black British men and women do I know the stories of? Not enough. If nothing else Black History Month is an annual reminder of how much I don’t know and a prompt to find out more.

By the end of the month my afro will almost certainly be buried under a new set of hair extensions, but hopefully I’ll have some new knowledge to go alongside the new hairdo.

 

SEEING DOUBLE. THE CURSE OF THE DOUBLE HAIRDO

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There are lots of ways to have hair extensions. Quite often my go to solution is to bury my natural hair under my shop bought hair. There are various methods, but the end result is that you only see my new (and allegedly improved) hair.

This period of equilibrium exists for a brief time until eventually we witness the return of the original hair, peeking out from under the shop bought hair, giving rise to the dreaded Double Hair Do

The good news is that for a while I’m the only person who knows that there is a problem. The circle of awareness then widens to include people that are in close proximity and know about hair extensions. If the matter is not resolved, it will eventually become obvious to almost everybody, or at least that’s how it feels.

I’m currently at the relatively early stages of the Double Hair Do, but my shop bought hair is fighting to reveal my secret. At first it was quite subtle and could be resolved fairly easily on a daily basis. We were at stage one of the big reveal. As long as I parted my hair the right way there wasn’t a problem. Stage two is a slight increase, a little more work is required but it’s doable. By stage three I’m wearing a headband on a daily basis – whether I like it or not.

It’s no secret that I’m a regular user of hair extensions. I have no intention of trying to convince people that my long luscious locks grew from my scalp, but despite my honesty and openness, I draw the line at people being able to see the stitching!

Once you reach stage three things speed up and if you don’t sort things out you eventually end up sporting a short afro, whilst wearing your expensive weave like a hat on top.

If you’re a regular follower of this blog, you’ll know that I’m generally guilty of drifting and sometimes hurtling into the Delay Zone. The curse of the Double Hair Do is one of the consequences of spending time in that zone and it reduces the time I get to enjoy my hair and makes me feel self conscious. I have a reasonable level of self esteem for somebody that looks as ordinary as I do and whilst I don’t mind not looking like Tyra Banks, Gabrielle Union or whichever gorgeous black woman springs to mind, I’d like to spend most of my time looking like a half decent version of me. Feeling self conscious about the Double Hairdo is time I don’t really want to waste.

The vast majority of the people I come across in my daily life have no idea that I’m fighting these imaginary battles and it’s probably for the best. Spending this much time thinking about my hair isn’t productive (or in any way logical) so the answer seems to be that I need to pay more attention to what my hair is telling me. Who knows maybe one day I’ll grow up to be one of those women that schedules their next visit to the hairdressers before their hair needs redoing and I’ll finally be able to banish the Curse of the Double Hair Do once and for all.