I Am Not My Hair pt.1

India Arie, Testimony: Vol 1 Life & Relationship. It's a great album, truly. I very rarely listen to the actual words of a song, mainly because they're all the same and sometimes because I get distracted by all the hoopla. But not with this, no, I Am Not My Hair made perfect sense, it was clear, she was clear. I even like Akon on it and I DON'T LIKE AKON; it's nothing personal, I just dislike his voice. She describes the numerous processes her hair went through, all because society decided that afro hair wasn't attractive. She starts off with a presser curl, then a Jheri Curl and finally a relaxer before her hair breaks off. Not a pretty sight, trust me. There's nothing worse than the day you realise that there's a whole chunk of your hair missing all because you liked you hairband a bit too much.

Having lived with an afro all my life because I'm black (applause), I know that there are just some things you can't do to it. It may look tough because it's so bushy but it's actually very brittle. DON'T put too much heat into it, DON'T apply more than one chemical process to it at a time and DO condition like your life depended on it.

Each generation has their own schtick, we don't know when my grandmother was born because for Ghanaians, in those days, there wasn't a need to know. I suspect they were busy trying to live past the age if 5. When we went back for her funeral I saw some pictures of her in her hay-day, she had thick, lush hair and because she was having a special picture taken she wore her hair straight. I asked my mum about it and she said that she had pressed her hair with one of those old school hot combs, probably the ones that you have to heat on the stove, then she curled it with metal rollers.

My mother was born in the late 40's. I found some baby pictures of her when we went to the funeral too, but she didn't think much of her hair back then. She remarked about how tough her hair was (has always been) and how her scalp was chronically sore for one reason or the other. By her late teens she'd started relaxing it because it was an easier way of maintain the highly sort after straight hair. She had few hairstyles in the coming decades, but they revolved around faux afro wigs like the lady in the black and white photo.

She started braiding my hair for me in '95 when my sister and I first came to live with her in England. I had a boys hair cut back then. A 1cm long No.1 haircut, because in Ghana, school girls have boy's hair cuts. Don't ask me why, it's one of those unanswered questions, like why Mariah Carey decided to get a boob job. I think I first relaxed my hair the summer before Sixth Form (College), I was tired of walking around with my afro hair. I didn't know what to do with it and I stood out, mainly because of the way I wore it but partly because I was the only student in my year group that had afro hair that long.

For those who don't know, a relaxer is a chemical treatment used to straighten obstinately curly hair. The first time at the salon was an eye-opener, the hairstylist distributed the relaxer from the root right to the ends because my hair was all afro (virgin hair). I think she took about 15 minutes to get the relaxer in, I don't know the right amount of time but I know now that it's best not to dilly-dally. I hadn't washed my hair for 2 weeks in anticipation; that's not as abnormal as it may seem, not washing afro hair for that long I mean. It began to tingle as soon as she was done applying the relaxer. Several minutes passed and that tingle started to spread enough that it become an itch I wanted to scratch, desperately. I resisted the urge because the hairstylist used gloves as she applied the relaxer and I'll be damned if I was gonna stick my, unprotected, hand in my itchy head. While I was busy thinking about not scratching, the itch started to burn ever so slightly. And then it grew, the burn I mean. It brought heat on top of heat. It spread like a wildfire on my scalp, increase in coverage and intensity simultaneously. It burned like hell.