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Essay: Oppressed Hair by Alice Walker

OPPRESSED HAIR
OPPRESSED HAIR PUTS A CEILING ON THE BRAIN

This is from "Living By The Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987" by Alice

Walker.
As some of you no doubt know, I myself was a student here once, many moons
ago. I used to sit in these very seats (sometimes still in pajamas, underneath
my coat) and gaze up at the light streaming through these very windows. I
listened to dozens of encouraging speakers and sang, and listened to, wonderful
music. I believe I sensed I would one day return, to be on this side of the
podium. I think that, all those years ago, when I was a student here and still in
my teens, I was thinking about what I would say to you now.

It may surprise you that I do not intend (until the question-and-answer period
perhaps) to speak of war and peace, the economy, racism or sexism, or the triumphs and
tribulations of black people or of women. Or even about movies. Though the discerning ear
may hear my concern for some of these things in what I am about to say, I am going to talk
about an issue even closer to home. I am going to talk to you about hair. Don't give
a thought to the state of yours at the moment. Don't be at all alarmed. This is not an
appraisal. I simply want to share with you some of my own experiences with our
friend hair, and at the most hope to entertain and amuse you.

For a long time, from babyhood through young adulthood mainly, we grow, physically and
spiritually (including the intellectual with the spiritual), without being deeply aware of it. In
fact, some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize that growth is
what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel
depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or person who explained
it to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually,
than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the
weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a
plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not
knowing what is happening. I remember the waves of anxiety that used to engulf me at
different periods in my life, always manifesting itself in physical disorders (sleeplessness, for
instance) and how frightened I was because I did not understand how this was possible.

With age and experience, you will be happy to know, growth becomes a
conscious, recognized process. Still somewhat frightening, but at least
understood for what it is. Those long periods when something inside
ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the
next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in
those periods that we realize we are being prepared for the next phase of
our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to
be revealed.

A few years ago I experienced one such long period of restlessness disguised as stillness. That
is to say, I pretty much withdrew from the larger world in favor of the peace of my personal,
smaller one. I unplugged myself from television and newspapers (a great relief!), from the
more disturbing members of my extended family, and from most of my friends. I seemed to
have reached a ceiling in my brain. And under this ceiling my mind was very restless,
although all else about me was calm.

As one does in these periods of introspection, I counted the beads of my progress in this
world. In my relationship to my family and the ancestors, I felt I had behaved respectfully
(not all of them would agree, no doubt); in my work I felt I had done, to the best of my
ability, all that was required of me; in my relationship to the persons with whom I daily shared
my life I had acted with all the love I could possibly locate within myself. I was also at least
beginning to acknowledge my huge responsibility to the Earth and my adoration of the
Universe. What else, then, was required? Why was it that, when I mediated and sought the
escape hatch at the top of my brain, which, at an earlier stage of growth, I had been
fortunate enough to find, I now encountered a ceiling, as it the route to merge with the
infinite I had become used to was plastered over?

One day, after I had asked this question earnestly for half a year, it
occurred to me that in my physical self there remained one last barrier to
my spiritual liberation, at least in the present phase: my hair. Not my
friend hair itself, for I quickly understood that it was innocent. It was the
way I related to it that was the problem. I was always thinking about it. So
much so that if my spirit had been a balloon eager to soar away and merge
with the infinite, my hair would be the rock that anchored it to Earth. I realized that there was
no hope of continuing my spiritual development, no hope of future growth of my soul, no hope
of really being able to stare at the Universe and forget myself entirely in the staring (one of
the purest joys!) if I still remained chained to thoughts about my hair. I suddenly understood
why nuns and monks shaved their heads!

I looked at myself in the mirror and I laughed with happiness! I had broken through the seed
skin, and was on my way upward through the earth. Now I began to experiment: For several
months I wore long braids (a fashion among black women at the time) made from the hair of
Korean women. I loved this. It fulfilled my fantasy of having very long hair and it gave my
short, mildly processed (oppressed) hair a chance to grow out.

The young woman who braided my hair was someone I grew to love--a struggling young
mother, she and her daughter would arrive at my house at seven in the evening and we would
talk, listen to music, and eat pizza or burritos while she worked, until one or two o'clock in the
morning. I loved the craft involved in the designs she created for my head. (Basket making! a
friend once cried on feeling the intricate weaving atop my head.) I loved sitting between her
knees the way I used to sit between my mother's and sister's knees while they braided my
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hair when I was a child. I loved the fact that my own hair grew out and grew healthy under
the "extensions," as the lengths of hair were called. I loved paying a young sister for work
that was truly original and very much a part of the black hair-styling tradition. I loved the fact
that I did not have to deal with my hair except once every two or three months (for the first
time in my life I could wash it every day if I wanted to and not have to do anything further).

Still, eventually the braids would have to be taken down (a four- to-seven-
hour job) and redone (another seven to eight hours), nor did I ever quite
forget the Korean women, who, according to my young hairdresser, grew
their hair expressly to be sold. Naturally this information caused me to
wonder (and, yes, worry) about all other areas of their lives.

When my hair was four inches long, I dispensed with the hair of my Korean
sisters and braided my own. It was only then that I became reacquainted with its natural
character. I found it to be springy, soft, almost sensually responsive to moisture. As the little
braids spun off in all directions but the ones I tried to encourage them to go, I discovered my
hair's willfulness, so like my own! I saw that my friend hair, given its own life, had a sense of
humor. I discovered I liked it.

Again I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself and laughed. My hair was one of
those odd, amazing, unbelievable, stop-you-in-your-tracks creations--not unlike a zebra's
stripes, an armadillo's ears, or the feet of the electric-blue-footed boobie--that the Universe
makes for no reason other than to express its own limitless imagination. I realized I had never
been given the opportunity to appreciate hair for its true self. That it did, in fact, have one. I
remembered years of enduring hairdressers -- from my mother onward--doing missionary
work on my hair. They dominated, suppressed, controlled. Now, more or less free, it stood
this way and that. I would call up my friends around the country to report on its antics. It
never thought of lying down. Flatness, the missionary position, did not interest it. Being short,
cropped off near the root, another missionary "solution," did not interest it either. It sought
more and more space, more light, more of itself. It loved to be washed; but that was it.

Eventually I knew precisely what hair wanted: it wanted to grow, to be itself,

to attract lint, if that was its destiny, but to be left alone by anyone, including
me, who did not love it as it was. What do you think happened? (Other than
that I was now able, as an added bonus, to comprehend Bob Marley as the
mystic his music always indicated he was.) The ceiling at the top of my brain
lifted; once again my mind (and spirit) could get outside myself. I would not
be stuck in restless stillness, but would continue to grow. The plant was
above the ground!

This was the gift of my growth during my fortieth year. This and the
realization that as long as there is joy in creation there will always be new
creations to discover, or to rediscover, and that a prime place to look is within and about the
self. That even death, being part of life, must offer at least one moment of delight.

(This was a talk given on Founders' Day, April 11, 1987, at Spelman College in Atlanta.)

Source: http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Falls/8860/ceiling.html

Alice Walker is the author of "The Color Purple"

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