Frizzy, poofy, puffy, unruly, messy, crazy.
Well, that’s not very nice. But those are just some of the descriptors I sustained growing up about my curly hair, making it seem quite unsavory to an impressionable young brown girl in America in the 90s and 00’s. A time when my kind of other was not so… en vogue. And while I now wield these curls with the might and sass of all my ancestors, a mental reprogramming was required to fully realize their power, and mine, in claiming space.
You see, I was surrounded by straight haired white girls everywhere I looked — school, TV, teen magazines, regular magazines. At home, my mom and older sister had “smooth” wavy hair, and my dad was a blow dryer addict, coaxing his curls into submission so as to assimilate into white corporate America in the 80s and 90s. Furthermore, the “natural hair” market was exclusively marketed to the Black hair contingent — Which always seemed a bit curious to me, this vocabulary — “natural hair”. My hair was naturally curly, too, but those products weren’t for me. I wasn’t Black nor did I have kinky tight curls. Even the South Asian products always had a picture of beautiful light-skinned models (another vestige of problematic beauty colonization, but I digress) with thick, long, straight, jet black hair. Not me. And we all remember the Pantene Pro-V and Herbal Essences commercials in the States with white blond haired actresses and models with horse mane tresses. Like I said, not me.
In this quite literally black and white hair market, where did I fit in? What part of the beauty market, and accompanying societal space, did my curls and I occupy? Where was my safe space to self express? There was no Google back then to self-educate on my kind of curl maintenance, and my mom was an immigrant with long straight hair trying to keep 4 kids fed and educated whilst navigating white-people treachery and brown patriarchy, 10,000 miles from familiarity of any kind. She had bigger fish to fry than her middle daughter’s hair and self identity. So where in the Sam Hill was I supposed to learn curl care, let alone curl LOVE?? And don’t even get started on brown love. With all these subliminal messages of self-doubt, I was being subconsciously trained to shrink myself.
It seemed that there was just no space for me. While I am the proud owner of curly hair, bronze skin, and a Pakistani Muslim first generation immigrant upbringing, growing up first-gen back then didn’t leave me much space to safely navigate my third culture identity and related beauty identity with open curiosity. To be brown in a white space can be unforgiving. Myself and my curls were teased into palatability. Othered. Resulting in the subconscious suppression of my curls, a proxy for identity. My time was spent clumsily trying to fit into little Model Minority identity boxes afforded to little brown girls like me. Projected unconscious and conscious biases and insecurities imposed the need to shrink myself, and quite literally my hair, to fit into the white spaces I navigated. And so, I straightened my hair.
Thus, mine was a journey of colonized beauty education. Which cuts a little deeper when you add on the extra generational baggage of actual colonization, where my ancestors were policed into physical, emotional, societal, and beauty obedience. And that is exactly what I did to my curls from age 14 to 24. From wild mane to stick straight, every wash day, without fail, learning to master the craft from taking 1.5 hours to 25 minutes, over the course of 10 years.
Until suddenly, after years of aesthetic torture, I realized my grave mistake. Why was I playing into this perpetuation of self-loathing? I didn’t have to fit into the black and white boxes presented to me. I could embrace my curls, learn to understand them, learn to love them, and create the space between the black and white. By casting aside my straightener, and letting the curls live their best life, I could signal to the world that there is, in fact, space for this big hair, brown skin, and Eastern heritage. These curls suddenly became how I took up space. I no longer wanted to shrink myself or my curls to make my existence more digestible for anyone. The revelatory turn was borne from weariness, having grown exhausted by the constant war on my tresses. There was an emotional rehabilitation involved with getting comfortable with the healing mop upon my head, with hundreds of dollars thrown at product experimentation, and some wild hair days. But now, they are my power move.
I work in corporate America. My resume boasts top American tech and entertainment firms. Yet, I am still too often the only person with big hair (also read: person of color) in a conference room or video call. I already have to combat racism and sexism in white corporate America, so I have to claim my space with grace, precision, and exactitude, because my presence is a measure of progress. These curls are powerfully representative. See these curls. Fear these curls. They might come for your job ;).
In a sea of overly processed hair in my community, straightened into submission to fit in with overly imposed western constructs of beauty, I didn’t want to be another brown girl whose most serious relationship is with her straightener. I used to be crippled by this toxic devotion. Extra time to get ready, planning out work outs around wash days, extra baggage (literally) when I traveled to incorporate all my tools. Now I can get ready for a formal event in 15 minutes flat with nothing but a bobby pin. Time saved, and you know I make an entrance.
My curls represent more than what you see. They are my identity. They are my power. They are my rebellion. They are the grounding to my heritage in a rat race of cultural erasure. They are how I gracefully command space. A reminder to myself and to those who benefit from white spaces, that I AM everything my ancestors dreamed of, and I carry those dreams on my shoulders, in these tresses, double-gooding my way into places and spaces we were never meant to be, with this crown of curls. I wear my hair curly to stand out, and to claim our space.
Frizzy, poofy, puffy, unruly, messy, crazy. BEAUTIFUL. SPACE-TAKING.
