Happy to Be Nappy

As an woman of African descent, I am working to combat the world view that we are ugly women.  I am born in America so I call myself African American.  My mother instilled in me the beauty of our darker brown skin (crazy thing is that my mother was considered very light for an African American...*chuckle*...she was black and proud, though).  She also instilled in me the beauty of our African hair. My mother sported the popular Afro of the 1960's and 70's.  She would put my hair in Afro-puffs and cornrows, which I LOVED as a girl.

But she was adventurous, too.  She would straighten our hair with the hot comb, which I hated.  And eventually, she decided we would try perms  such as the jerri-curl as well as the kind of perm that straightens curly hair.  It was at this time that all of my hair started falling out and then it became a vicious cycle of trying to get my hair back to health and growing again and it falling out. All due to the perms.

My mother eventually abandoned all of the perms though I was at a point where I made all decisions about my hair and continued to perm my hair. She went back to her  natural hair, which proved to be a good thing when she developed cancer and had to go through chemo.  She didn't lose all of her hair and attributes it to being natural.

At my graduation from Spelman College, my mother sported her  natural, which was just so beautiful and perfect because SO MANY of the professional women of Spelman College, including then president, Johnetta Cole, were sporting their naturals. I still had not felt the urge to go natural but looked at how beautiful my mother and the other women looked sporting their natural African hair.

At some point I got fed up with going to get my hair done by stylists and so decided to follow my mother's lead and go natural. That was at age 23 and I have never looked back.  I love having natural hair.

The kicker is that though we go natural, we still try to have neat looking hair.  It is like we have the same mentality we have with permed hair though it is a totally different ball of wax when you have natural hair. With perms we are very product driven and it is all to create a very nice and put together style. With natural African hair this is not going to happen.  There is always some level of "frizz" or poof waiting to happen.

After 22 years of natural hair, I am just now coming to accept the beauty of "unkempt" looking African hair. We are not always in the mood to pick out our hair or twist our locks.  When we don't deliberately style our hair it looks almost wild but I am realizing that there is a lie that has been put in the world that our hair is ugly and untamed and we have gone full out trying to tame that which may or may not want or need taming.

I love it when I see a woman of African descent who you can tell got up and just did the finger fluff with her hair. Some of the hair is sticking up and some is matted it down. It looks beautiful and fun to me.  I take the time to write this because I am excited whenever I find bias within me, especially when it is a bias against my own self.

I am dreadlocking my hair.  I have always taken time to keep my locks neat whenever I dreadlock my hair. This time I am more free than I ever have been because I don't feel that neat locks look better than locks that are freely locking and so are more wild in appearance. In the end, it all locks.  lol  This wild and free hair that I am sporting is FUN! I love not feeling  stressed.  I love looking like Medusa from Greek mythology except I call myself OYA from the Nigerian spiritual pantheon of goddesses.

I have been  happy to be nappy from the beginning of going back natural but I have felt fear of being judged for having super short natural hair or having dreadlocks. I hear from other women of African descent how they have to get a perm to get rid of all the naps and think...dang! What is this person saying about our hair because I have a head full of naps? LOL   It has been somewhat frustrating and not fun.

As I continue to embrace the truth of who I am on all levels, I get to reject the lies.  African hair is BEAUTIFUL in all of its various patterns:  zig zag, curly, afro-eruo curly.  I embrace its wildness because people can't even pay enough money to get the  kind of hair that I have but I can get a hot comb and have hair that is as straight as some Euro hair.  I hope and pray that more of us with African hair will reject the lie that our hair is ugly.  I hope that more with African hair will embrace a new way of relating to our hair that doesn't require it to be neat all of the time like the world says it should be.  I pray that those of us with African hair will make our own choices and decision about what we think about our hair.  Doing so will lead us to more happiness and freedom to do other things and make other contributions to the world.