I am not my hair....

“I am not my hair,
I am not this skin,
I am not your expectations, no
I am not my hair,
I am not this skin
I am the soul that lives within…”

“I hate to say it cause it seems so flawed
But success didn’t come till I cut it all off.” Akon featured with India.Arie on the track “I am not my hair”

India.Arie

Living in a place like Seronga, spending most my time not passing anything resembling a mirror and knowing only from pictures that I generally look like a constant fashion “don’t”, not to mention the obvious unfamiliarity to myself of having really short hair and being regarded by strangers for having white strange skin, this lyric goes through my head quite often.


It seems like a dumb and insignificant thing, hair. It's dead cells after all. And yet when Buddha became Buddha, he cut off all his hair and he took a new name. I get why he did it now. (I'm still working on the enlightenment bit.)

Amongst the other factors of life that have made my time here in Africa unique is my appearance, namely cutting my hair off. I will admit that the idea of shaving my head was always synonymous with joining the Peace Corps, but I never could have predicted the ways in which in which it would influence both the ways I am perceived and the ways I perceive myself.

After a bout of frustration with bathing over a basin during training and being tired of how much water I had to carry to feel "clean" (my how that definition has changed...) I went after my midback length of hair with a pocket knife and sent the remains home as a joke. When I found out I would be coming to Seronga and the water conditions there I knew the rest had to go. I had my friend buzz it off the day I took the oath that committed me to this new place and this new way of life for the next two years.

I think in the past I tended to perceive myself as someone very defined by my looks, I was "the girl with the hair". I had friends that I met in high school who had remembered me growing up, playing softball, I was that girl who played catcher and had all that long hair. I had had it cut short a few times, but never shorter than a bob, and it always grew out quickly. As an attention grabbing stunt in high school I grew my hair out for the whole year and then cut it off the morning of graduation. I've planned on donating the proceeds of the drastic haircuts I usually get to locks of love but it seemed my cat usually got it first.

In foreign countries, strangers would grab at my hair. Hell it even happened in the States. I've been petted more than I care to admit. People have preconceived notions about hair. I didn't understand it completely until now, having had them myself. It was something else I had considered in coming here, I knew I wanted to cut it off because I wanted to be taken seriously, I didn't want to have the stupid distraction of my hair. Nor did I want all the attention from men around here (that aspect of it didn't seem to matter).

When I first cut off my hair it was empowering, watching as another symbol of the life I had lived before this fell to the African soil. I quickly acquired a clippers from the China shop and when I broke those I had someone send me another set. When I blew out the charger on that (before I even used the damn things!) I resorted to heading down the road to “the box”.
I had my hair buzzed by men in small netted structures, frightened to put the clippers too close to my scalp, as they have never cut a white person’s hair before, much less a white lady. The ever present children giggled and shrieked, chanting my name as they do in the way they would never dare to do with any other adult, who would likely swat at them. I usually ended up just grabbing the clippers and finishing myself, usually ending up with long pieces here and there that I would inevitably try to cut myself and screw up later.

During this time I was often mistaken for a lesbian, a cancer patient, or a guy. None of these bothered me in an "omigod" sort of way, and I usually thought it was funny. After a while though this type of mistake gives a person reason for pause. Who am I, again?

Although it’s common for woman here to wear their hair cut very closely, apparently it was entirely unexpected that a white chick would do this. I've read about women of African descent and the political and other implications of the way in which they choose to wear their hair, be it chemically straightened, with extensions, cut closely, or in an Afro, and it's impact on the way they both perceive themselves and are perceived. I never had any idea of what this would be like until now. It seems that between the "hair thing" and the "white skin thing" and the whole "Peace corps" and "living in the bush thing" people perceived me (and thus treated me) as someone other than the person I've always thought myself to be. And I began to act it. No longer in my mind was I this girly girl who cared about her appearance or wore make-up (although really, any time I got anywhere near a town I did what I could to find some make-up or something to make me feel a little more like the person I remember myself to be), and I acted like I cared even less than I pretended to before about what people thought of me. I carried myself differently, and often found myself reacting more defensively and aggressively to stuff. Where did the old me end and the new me begin? Which parts were gone for good, and which were just on vacation?

I went about making style decisions as I seem to go about most things here, by waiting to “see what happens” and “making a plan”. I thought at one point it would be easier to keep it short, but then I realized that between taking pc prescribed pre-natal vitamins and the heat that this would mean getting a hair cut about every two weeks.

Then I decided to perhaps grow it out, thinking that at least it would be an interesting process to watch how many phases of craziness could be achieved by my mop top (it turns out there are many). Finding hair products in Botswana to tame the wild white beast was another fun challenge, and I can assure you that hair wax means something different here than there.

On the way to vacation in Mozambique, as we traveled through the booming metropolis of Jo-burg, I decided that this was not the week I felt like having one of the three weeks out of the month that I enjoy a bad hair phase (I’ve gotten it down to a scientific formula that every three weeks of growth produce one week of awesome hair, followed again of course by three more weeks of fugly in-between weirdness). I went to an actual salon and got a real hair cut. I was so happy I actually hugged the shampoo lady, who was not expecting that kind of behavior from a mop topped white chick. She was startled but then laughed and clasped me to her ample bosom. Having a proper hair cut rather than just a clipping from the box has helped immensely with the proper growing out process.

Since then I have resorted to covering it with a scarf, a hat, and again going after the stuff with a pocketknife (this was an emergency- I was developing a mullet). I've sat at the tuck shop down the road where I always see women getting their hair woven and demanded that someone corn row me (it didn't work, it was too short, and although they wanted to give me a weave with black wool, that was more than even I could handle). I have found myself fantasizing about highlights, and sometimes I offer to give my friends french braids just to feel the weight of long hair again. I guess I now know my natural color- and I was right with all those color jobs over the years, it's a severely boring brown. My gray streak is present on a daily basis and the cowlick in the front presents interesting challenges to creating all those cute short hair styles I remember from magazines (and which created a collage out of on the back of my door). I've also just run around looking nappy headed. In the end most days I decide that it just doesn't matter.


I still haven't decided what the future holds for this head of mine. In some ways short hair is so easy, in other ways it's a pain in the ass. I just know that I'm glad I've done it, and tried to figure out who exactly the girl behind the ponytail is...And I'm still not completely certain. The one thing I do know is that no matter what I end up doing with it, I am not my hair.