The Other Black Girl. I just finished reading The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris, which was both a ‘propulsive’ read (as one of the blurbs calls it, and which I took to mean ‘fast moving and un-put-down-able, but kind of despite yourself’), and a strange experience. The book is about a whole host of things (working women! race! books! chemistry! fembots (well, not really, but also kind of?)), but at its core is the emotional and professional toll exacted on women of color by the constant grind of micro-aggressions, systemic racism, and, as it turns out, internal competition for scarce resources (attentional, financial, prestige, and so on). One of those grinds is what Katie Orenstein called one of the five shifts women are required to do: maintenance of body, face, and in this case, hair.
Black hair and its quirks is a quiet protagonist in this book, and the axis around which the plot resolves itself (and not, I should say, as one would expect): scarfs, locs, braids, hair grease, and curls are all woven through the action. At first, this seems an almost cliched revision of the politics of natural hair. Nella, the conflicted heroine, is trying to grow out a ‘fro, and regrets all the time she spent with relaxed hair, and how big her ‘fro would now have been had she kept her 4C curls natural this whole time. Her hair journey parallels the formation of her Black identity, becoming more natural as she reads more Black literature and dreams of making more space for Black authors in the notoriously white publishing industry. Things are never quite that simple, though, because Nella is from a white suburb of Connecticut, and her relaxed hair past is entwined in memories of her mother, and of spending time together tending to their ‘unnatural’ hair. In the end, Nella is caught in a kaleidoscope of Black identities, feeling called out by both her white colleagues and her new Black colleague (the ‘other black girl’ of the title) for being too Black or not Black enough - and in the end, not being able to distinguish one from the other. And her hair is a reflection of her driving anxiety: what is she giving up to claim either identity.
As the possessor of unruly Jewish curls, Nella’s hair problems resonated. The eponymous Other Black Girl, Hazel, knows all the secrets of hair maintenance (which are , as in the immortal words of Elle Woods, ‘simple and finite’), while Nella, tired and overworked, has her hair in a bun. If you know me in real life, you’ll know that my hair too, is constantly in a bun, and you’ve probably also said something complimentary about my curls - for which I thank you, truly. But I’ll also note that the curls are the absolute worst. They are impossible to maintain, and can hurt your career, especially if you are a Black woman wearing natural hair, but also if you’re jus run-of-the-mill curly. Not only that, but curls are less represented in the media (pace Barbara Streisand and Carrie Bradshaw, who outgrew her own curls pretty quickly), and have far less options at the hair salon, too. And straightening them is hot, damages your hair, and hurts your arms. Curls are work.
But that got me thinking (‘I couldn’t help but wonder’…) : Black hair, while suffering all the indignities of racism, can at least be a metaphor for Black liberation and empowerment. Now, I am aware that the place of curly white women in the natural hair movement is questionable at best, and offensive at worse, and I don’t want to encroach on a story that isn’t mind. But Jewish hair, to the extent that such a thing exists, since Jews come in all forms and types, has not really been for me a token of identity. So what are my curls, then, other than a genetic quirk? What would claiming my curls as part of some bigger identity politics look like? Would it require me to do the work of coming to love my hair, or would it be just another way of locating difference in bodily attributes that are in fact shared across the full human experience? The (ok, one of the) lesson(s) of The Other Black Girl is that hair, like any token of identity, is a traitor. Quislings everywhere.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. So when you think hair in ancient literature, you typically think Ovid, and with good reason. He was fairly obsessed with the stuff, in the creepy way in which he was obsessed with most things. The place to go for hair in Ovid is, typically, the elegies (either the Amores or Ars Amatoria 3), where Ovid by and large professes a marked favoritism towards what he calls ‘natural’ hair, but is actually hair that either hasn’t been styled or curled, or, more often, hair that has been styled, but then made disheveled, usually by Ovid’s own amorous hands. Hair that’s all done up is the enemy, symbolizing female control and resistance, while hair flowing and loose signifies either the maenad’s frenzy, sometimes because of unrequited love, or because that woman has succumbed to Ovid’s charms and is no longer in control of herself, or her coiffure. I’m simplifying, of course, but Ovid is a good place to think about the politics of hair (as Nandini Pandey does here), ‘natural,’ gendered, and otherwise.
But since hair is a big part of identity, I think a interesting companion to The Other Black Girl would be the Metamorphoses instead, because that epic is all about change and transformation (i.e. metamorphosis) as a matter of survival and evolution. One of the things that bothered me as I was reading The Other Black Girl is how timid Nella is: she fears speaking her truth to power, though as it turns out with good reason, and ends up wavering between registers. Dreadlocked Hazel, on the other hand, is a walking advertisement for code-switching instead: she can ‘fit in’ with the white people at the office, while lifting up Black people in her spare time. Success at both work and at social justice come to her seemingly with little effort, having perfected a skill that Nella, with her Connecticut upbringing, might have mastered as her birthright.
The reason for that is too big a spoiler to share here, but it does have to do with both hair and with the constant push for Nella to transform herself into something else, better, more complete, more successful. Hazel has already been through this transformation, and it has made her both more and less Black; Nella, on the other hand, is instead in the midst of her own emergent transformation, growing out her hair and trying to come into a Black tradition she doesn’t feel she has fully earned yet. As she works harder and harder for survival in the cut-throat publishing world, Nella’s story is one of growing trauma, and by necessity, or choosing how her transformation story will end.
As Ovid would have told her, however, transformation is crucial, indeed necessary for survival. It is the mechanism on which the entire mythical (and historical) world of the Metamorphoses stands, and it operates on the principle that metamorphoses can change only the body. There is always a core of consistent identity that remains unchanged. Io still thinks in language even when she is transformed into a cow, and the various birds that women turn into continue to trill a memorial to the trauma that prompted the transformation. I think Nella would have been comforted by that, to a degree, concerned as she is about being ‘Black enough’, but both books, I think, are about how the changes we make on the surface affect the soul beneath. Even more specifically, they are about how forces outside of ourselves work on our (usually female) bodies, the choices we make to survive, and the physical and social changes those choices entail.
The Shirley Temple. Well, now we need a drink. Almost anything can be improved with a lemon twist, but this month’s cocktail is the beloved Shirley Temple, a curly icon and one of the few people I knew to have curls like mine as a child. It’s a mocktail, strictly speaking, but you can always add some vodka to spice things up. This recipe is from Good to Know.
Ingredients
Ice
4 to 6oz ginger ale
1oz grenadine (pomegranate syrup)
1oz lime juice
Maraschino cherry
Orange slice (or preferred garnish)
Method
Pour ingredients over ice in a tall glass.
Decorate with cherry and orange slice.