It starts with water
I am trying to wash the colombian out of my hair The coarseness, it rises five feet from its original length in the morning. I don’t like it when the hairdresser tells me, “your hair isn’t as ethnic as other people’s.” She has no idea. What does that even mean anyway? Why is one ethnicity more ‘ethnic’ than another? I ask her to elaborate. She catches herself: “I mean it’s not as coarse. It has a finer strand.” She has obviously never met my hair in the morning before another soul besides myself has seen it or touched it.
It is usually already soft, curly and “presentable” by the time it greets another person’s eyes. I remember the time I met my ex at the bar and his friend’s date asked me, “is that your natural hair?” He looked at me, having read Ijeoma Oluo’s book “So You Want to Talk About Race” and knew this was microaggression 101. He stayed quiet. He is a white man with a friend group he cannot afford to lose after all. At least this is why white men usually stay quiet…
I am thinking to respond, “is that your natural face?” ‘That’s not nice Julia’ says my inner brown girl. I am tired and in no mood to educate. I am already working fastidiously on finishing my thesis. So I smile and gently reply, “yes, I’m Colombian!” and try to leave it there. She continues to aside to another girl, “omg she’s adorable she’s so cute.” Little does she know this other girl doesn’t like me either based off of a miscommunication that we were never able to resolve. I feel perceived; the white gaze is always objectifying my appearance. So I must “look pretty” which means I must look as “not Colombian and as white as I can.”
It is the morning~ I look ashamed in the mirror.
“Who’s going to hire this? Who’s going to want to be in bed with this? Who’s going to look at my face and not see a monster surrounded by a big nappy messy rat’s nest?” This is what America has taught me to think. That afros are only for a specific woman of color and are only appropriate to be seen in certain spaces…like the cover of Vogue magazine, or in a Motown revival show, or in a movie about ( ) insert name of famous Black musician here.
So it starts with water.
I take two minutes to scrub my body down. I am clean enough. I devote the next nine to this nest on my head. I pray the water pressure is good, that the temperature is just right, so I can wash the heat out of these dry and tangled wires. I take a large pick and start combing. Every traffic cone and road blockage of knots frustrates me. Just another delay. But it is also my arm workout for the day. I start to see the humidity leave my hair as each tumbleweed transforms into a smooth and thick chocolate water wall of curls.
I wrap my chocolate twist cone up in a towel and dry and dress myself. Eight minutes. I am almost ready to start my day. I brush my teeth and hastily apply some eyeliner. As the towel unfolds the moment of truth, I will either smile or sulk at the remainder of damage control I have left to do.
I flip my hair back. I can tell when I have done my job to my standards of satisfaction. If it unfolds in soft wavy ripples that require five swift touches of the hair comb to bind the ripples together, I am happy. Sometimes I spend an extra six minutes combing and binding sections of my hair together until it looks “normal.” I finally look at myself again in the mirror. 40 minutes.
It is “white-looking” enough.
A beautiful wavy triangle with a noticeable part. It is stable. It is tame. I lightly gloss it with Surface setting spray so it won’t rise up when it becomes subject to the heat outside. It is still summer.I step outside thinking ‘I am ready’: for the job interview, for school, to make more white friends because that’s the majority of the student population I attended school with, of colleagues I have worked with, even my adopted family is white. They’ve never seen my hair in locs, dreading together. And they never will see it. Because this society, ruled by white supremacy, instructs me that this kind of hair is only to be seen behind closed doors or on display but not for public everyday.
What if I want to go outside in my fro? What if I want to spend more time outside so people understand this is not my natural skin color? I am much darker.
The troops of people who have assumed I am white, that I am Italian maybe, maybe French, Moroccan, maybe Middle Eastern, that I talk white, that I look white standing next to white people but brown standing next to brown people, who have no knowledge of my identity because they did not come out of my mother. What would they think if they saw me standing next to Gloria and Fabian?
Whenever people take a guess I treat it like a game knowing that I don’t even know the full story. I am adopted. I guess I know that. My mother is Colombian and my father is Brazilian. I guess I know that too. Indeed the slave trade brought so many Africans to the south-American coast that I could be Afro-Colombian as well. But people don’t assume what they can’t see. So I remain…my indigeneity questioned in a land that I’m not even from, surrounded by people who will never know 100% either: claiming their white authority over my body, my ethnicity, my identity, because they are white.
They don’t even know that it starts with water.
About Julia Monica
