Hey friends,
We’re back after a month away ! I’ve been working hard on a book project I’ve had on my desk for a while now, a project that always takes up my whole brain. But I’m really glad to be returning to this space to think more (and forevermore!) about hair.
This month brought lots of joy in the form of Arlo learning how to dance, old friends visiting, sun breaking through layers of leaves in the morning and walking those leaf shapes across the ceiling of our bedroom. The days of our early morning snuggles are numbered: Arlo is almost a year old and her sleeping patterns are changing!
August also brought news of illness. A friend started chemotherapy this week, another one left the hospital.
For all the gauzy lightness of summer, these last few weeks the writing has felt very heavy. I usually fly, skimming from the surface of the thought the words I need to convey it. But these weeks I’ve felt the full trudge of wading through a soup of ideas. I am distracted by worry, the health of friends, and fleeting change. I need a haircut. Even my hair feels heavy.
If there was anything real I could do for either of them. If there was something I could do.
So this reentry is something of a swirl, thinking about health and storytelling, thinking about gestures of faith, and planting memory in a bed of words. Before you go forward this week, please know this newsletter trods into the territory of illness and healing. You get to decide if that’s the story you need for today.
Either Way, You’re Covered
Hair falls out for every reason, and for no reason. Hormonal shiftiness, stress, healing, illness, change. Losing one’s hair is like losing track of oneself just a little bit, or little by little. But what if in losing track of yourself a bit, you make just enough space for others to support you?
My friend is going through chemo. She will lose her hair soon. It’s not my story to tell, but it is a familiar story, a story I have held of many others’ over many years of holding hair stories. Hair and our health. Inextricably tied.
When embodied, hair might tell the story of your health for you.
It’s no surprise then that biblically, mythically, epically, hair is often tied to power. Across many cultures and belief systems, hair is emblematic of that special vitality, of virility, of miraculous life, of danger, and of strength. This stunning read by Safiya Sinclair which I read recently in the New Yorker gives gorgeous prose to some of these beliefs within the spirituality of Rastafarianism, for example.
A few weeks ago the poem “Baby Brother Shape-Up” by Donna Weaver landed in my inbox. If there’s anything I can’t recommend enough it’s the entire archive of Recommended Reading by Electric Literature, and their online short forms missive The Commuter. I’ve been getting it for years and it’s the one thing I can remember consistently opening.
July 26th’s email called out to me from the sea of false advertisements crowding my inbox. “Real Family Grows Your Hair For you” read the subject line. I blinked. At first, it really seemed like an ad, an ad for something I wanted.
I clicked, and realized it was poetry.
When we speak of hair and caring, what could be more beautiful than this whole complete gesture? “I’m growing my hair for you.”
This past weekend I had the pleasure of getting to see a friend’s film at the New/Next Film Festival in Baltimore, MD. The film is called De Lo Mio (2019), written and directed by the absolutely luminous Diana Peralta, and it centers the story of two sisters and a brother who are reunited, having to sell their grandparents’ house in the Dominican Republic, a house their family had lived in for generations.
They meet up, the sisters from New York and the brother having stayed in the DR all these years, to clean out the house. The film maps a mountain of memories and tensions rising against the lush backdrop of the Dominican Republic. It is a film about family and a film about place.
There are a number of hair scenes in the film; Diana said she had a “whole hair plan” going into the filming, and has agreed to chat with me about all of it in a future newsletter (!!). But the one that comes to mind this week is a scene where one of the sisters, Carolina (played by Darlene Demorizi), is cleaning out her abuela’s closet, and she begins trying on her clothes. Finally, she finds her old wig and puts that on, transforming into the image of her abuela, at least, according to her sister Rita (played by Sasha Merci Medina), who walks into the room at that moment while Carolina is miming glamorous airs in the bedroom mirror.
It is instantly funny and sweet and poignant, and something complicated passes between the sisters seeing one of them in their grandmother’s wig. The wig itself is styled like “early Whitney” and changes the character’s whole vibe. I wonder what it feels like to wear someone else’s hair, someone you knew. Is it like putting on an old hat of theirs? Or their clothes? Or is it somehow more alchemizing? Part of you merges with them; maybe you become them somehow. Closer.
The guiding principle behind this newsletter has always been to find the many metaphoric possibilities of hair in art and culture. Metaphor as a way to describe the multitude of forms and symbolic resonances hair can have across creative media, throughout cultures, and by extension, in life. I’m interested in the difference between the narratives that hair transmits as hair itself, rather as image, rather as description. I know there is a difference. But what is the texture of that difference?
Sandra Cisnero’s “Hairs” (or “Pelitos”) from her story collection The House on Mango Street (1983) is one of my favorites. Here, hair is drawn as one long line of descriptions: different shapes and different textures of hair adorn each member of the family. The way hair is described—“like a broom,” “lazy,” “slippery,” “like fur”—is some of my favorite cascading metaphors and descriptors of hair, each one surprising. How many ways there are to describe hair, the specialness of hair, as unique to each person as their smell.
When we started HAIR CLUB back in 2014, Hair Myth and Cautionary Tales was one of my first research vectors. Samson I knew of, Rapunzel naturally, and the frightening locks of Medusa were all already in my hair story lexicon. I have spent the years since gathering as many hair stories in literature that I can find. I read re-tellings and re-appropriations of older tales, like Anne Sexton’s “The Letting Down of the Hair” (1972). I devoured any story that referenced hair or the power of hair from the story “Pigtails” in Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School to the more recent and very thrilling The Other Black Girl by Zakiyah Dalila Harris, the adaptation of which is coming out on Hulu this fall.
In 2015, I drew together a growing library of hair stories, myths, and paper ephemera from my graduate school’s special collections library—the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection—and curated a reading of peers whose work featured hair, creating a small interactive installation of works on paper from the library’s archives, inviting folks to thumb through on their own.
One of my favorite hair artifacts was a clip-in streak of white hair modeled after Susan Sontag called “Feminist Hair Wear.”
What are some of your favorite hair stories or hair-based ephemera? I’ve had students over the years make books with their hair pasted to the front and back covers, use hair as embroidery floss, and write gorgeous stories of loss and profiling and queer longing centered on their hair. The stuff of hair always holds a magical, irreplaceable property, but the way hair exists in stories, in the written word, always astonishes me with its resonant power.
A digital hair parcel fell into my inbox recently, forwarded to me by one of you wonderful folks in this hair community: a story by a wig maker (@high.definition.hair on instagram) who works with clients preparing to begin healing therapies that will inevitably result in the loss of their hair.
In the video, a woman’s mane of long red hair is prepared, cut, mapped, and meticulously labeled in preparation for making a wig of her own hair. The video flashes by in a familiar internet reel of tiktok flash cuts—a mode of storytelling that we are by now all pretty adept at reading.
Flash: a woman sits in the salon chair in the nylon black robe, her hair is set in carefully apportioned tufts, gathered by tiny rubber bands. Flash: the stylist cuts each lock above the gathered band and places it in a plastic bag that is labeled according to the placement on the head.
Flash: a map of the woman’s swirl pattern, the direction her hairs grow drawn out to guide the wig making. Flash: the woman returns mid-treatment, having lost the hair she had left, to try on her new wig. Flash: she flips her hair back and examines herself in the mirror with a look of overwhelming joy.
I smile because she gets to wear her own hair until her own hair regrows in miraculous health. As I watch, I think of propagating plants; making a cutting above the node to make way for new growth. The wig maker’s gesture is replete with optimism and care.
I hope this newsletter finds you feeling good, maybe your fingers are sticky with ice cream. I hope it finds you by a window, letting the light shine onto closed eyes, just for a second, finding pause in these last moments of summer. If you or a loved one are going through a health process, or an ongoing one, I hope it’s a good day.
Sending love to you all.
Until next !! xo
Fascinating. All of it. Thank you.