I Am My Hair Phase One: The Chiskop Chick

I love India.Arie. She speaks to me in ways which conversations with people I'm closest to, haven’t at times. Her wisdom and insights shows me truths that I’m sometimes to caught up in living in my own head to feel. When she sang: 'My mama told me a lady ain't what she wears but what she knows,' in Video Girl, I knew that, even though I wasn't the 'pantyhose-wearing type' of lady, I was a woman worth knowing. When she serenaded her Brown Skinned man in the park, asking him where his people are from, I traced the origins of my brown skinned man on the kinky hair that curled his chest. When she lamented being ready for love and it not being ready for her, I accepted that it’s OK for you to love someone who's not ready to love you…and let them go. Finally, most recently, when she flew in the Wings of Forgiveness for a man who had given her everything to her and then heart achingly tore it all away, it dawned me that just like she croons: 'If Nelson Mandela can forgive his oppressors then surely I can forgive you for your passions.'

But there's one song that I've always sung along to, 'inside knowing it wasn't true (for me). I Am Not My Hair. Having been brought up to believe that hair is a woman's crown, I spent years trying to live up to this ideal – relaxing my hair when I could finally tell my mom: ‘No, I would not like to do the perm and have gel dripping from my ears and forehead!’ In my early teens I sported the ‘Toni Braxton’ (relax, cut and tong) because I really wanted to look like her and the guy who was the master of the Toni Braxton cut at Le Curl hair salon was ultra-cute. Back then, I exuded what Ms India.Arie would sing about later - I wasn’t my hair, my hairstyles were just that – styles – they came and went.

But when I came back from a coming of age holiday in Cape Town in 1998, I cut off all my hair as a symbol of new beginnings. I’d finally plucked up the courage to get out of a relationship that had passed its’ sell-by date. In that year I was also to discover the rebel in me – signaled in school by promptly being sent to detention for my shocking and attention-grabbing hairstyle; signaled in my life by my showing norm and societal expectations the middle finger in every way; signaled in my growth by learning the other side of me – the exciting but dangerously destructive side that gets off on treading way too closely to the edge. Over the years, my chiskop has always been a metaphor for change in my life…. the thing I did to give me courage to do something new … or say goodbye to something old. For guys, the chiskopped me showed off my ghetto-ness – the girl you didn’t dare mess with but asked her friends for her number.

What happens when a deep sister sheds her fro for a weave? Find out in I Am My Hair Phase 2: Getting Beweaved