It starts with my mother crying
in the car as rain claws rivers down the windshield and pummels each second
with its deafening fall. She has been crying a lot recently and it is my fault.
My fault for revealing landmines in a territory always mapped as safe and then
helplessly watching them blow up in her face. It is funny how weather tends to
lend itself to sorrow, and as I watched the sky cry with her the world seemed
to look at me with the same derision. It is your fault, it told me. Pour cement
into your cracks and paint yourself as new. Be more modest about your
difference. Do anything but this.
I brush my fingertips over the
gentle coarseness of my newly shaved hair, drawing the blanket of my fringe across
my eyes like a shield. I don’t know whether this is to keep the pain in or out, but I am sure that I cannot let this wall fall. She looks at me through her own
tear mist, clutching at memories of her perfect daughter, and that’s when she
says it: “you were so pretty”.
My body has never been my
property. First it was owned by my parents, and then by a society that made it
clear that I was not good enough. Expectation has a monopoly on what should be
rightfully ours and forces such conformity that we adopt a full disguise just
to hide our truths. There is no such thing as apolitical dress. We are all
statements of our purpose and project our desires through our presentation and
deeds; yet reclaiming one’s self is often harder than finding your voice in the
first place.
The day that I cut my hair came a
while after the day that I told my parents that I was gay. It was the
culmination of a hurricane which had swept away my security and threatened to
destroy the foundations of my home. The support which I had been so sure of had
failed to materialise and I was left floating on a tattered identity which I
was forgetting how to assert. My hair was a way to tether myself to the sense of
community which I so badly needed. It was a statement of my resilience against
those who told me that I could not be, and proved to myself that I was stronger
than my shattered heart believed.
Three years later when it reached
my shoulders again, I looked in the mirror and did not recognise myself. That
identity which I had defended with such conviction was nowhere to be seen, lost
somewhere with the pain of the past. I had tried to hybridise myself into a
form which would please both my parents and I but had only succeeded in a half
truth. Some days I see the way my mother looks at me and I am so proud that she
thinks that I am pretty. Some days I see the way my mother looks at me and I wonder
if I am only dressing up for her. My identity is so inflected by the gaze of others
that my femaleness is frequently other to me.
I take power from the way that my
hair curls and hides my face if I’m feeling shy. It is as much a part of me now
as it was then, yet I still cannot untangle the knots of my past. When I tell
people that I date humans they often dismiss me as curious or confused, but my
truths are as honest as they were when my mother cried over a lost imagining. My
hair can never be just another accessory as it is bound to expectations which
others use to define me without really listening. I’m still working out how I
feel about that.
Now when my mother tells me that
she hopes I meet a nice boy at university, my hair agrees. She can pretend that
her image of a perfect daughter still lives. The problem with hair is that it
grows, grows new meanings and obscures the truth. I want to get an undercut, find
a middle way where our hopes can meet and make peace; yet I know that this is
not possible. In claiming ownership of my hair I reclaim my difference, and
this will always leave my truth far too exposed.
