If you’re new here, hello and I love you! Let’s talk about hair.
These newsletters are going to come to you monthly. I’ve chosen to publish the last week of every month to give me as much time as possible to procrastinate writing them.
You may find that this essay is cut off for being too long in email format. To experience the whole thing (and I recommend that you do! there is a breathtaking artwork at the end), please go ahead and read it in your browser or in the Substack app.
The Hair of Heartbreak
The truth is: I have been outside of utterance. Here is what it feels like..
Self Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) is the first painting Frida Kahlo’s completed after her divorce from Diego Rivera. Rivera had been unfaithful to her, and her heart was clearly breaking. Here, her hair might moonlight as fragments of her heart.
The text above her autorretrato reads “mira, que si te quise, fué por el pelo, / ahora que estás pelona, ya no te quiero.” Which translates in English to:
Look, if I loved you, it was because of your hair,
now that you’re hairless, I don’t love you anymore.
Before I typed the phrases into Google Translate, and read several translations in art historical texts, I tried translating the words myself, and I read that first line as “look, if I loved you, it left through the hair..” And this is how I fundamentally see this painting: a cleansing ritual to rid oneself of love by cutting one’s hair. Consequently, recasting Frida’s gender, but more on that in another newsletter.
Both translations made me want to hug myself with grief.
Fascinated by this word “pelona,” I dug a little deeper. Turns out, the word pelona, translated here as “a person without hair” is also the name of a popular sandwich, referring to the shiny dome of the bun it is served on. But historically, the term “pelona” was used to refer to women in the 1920s in Mexico who had recently chopped their hair off, deviating from the traditional lengths of Mexico’s feminine Tehuana archetypes, here exemplified in this photograph of Frida Kahlo by Nickolas Murray for her Vogue cover in 1938,
to the popular bob that came to exemplify the “flapper” hairstyles of the 1920s. The term “pelona” was used not only to referred to those who are bald, or who have lost their hair, but to those women who have shortened their hair, therefore challenging the status quo of “acceptable” femininity in Mexican culture at the time.
As with anything related to hair length, it’s a matter of degrees.
In a post-Mexican Revolutionary time, the bob may also have been viewed as an unwelcome marker of Western influence after a time of righteous uprising to reclaim Mexican cultural heritage away from the colonizing European influence exemplified by the ousted dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.
It is fascinating to me that Frida would use the term “pelona” in her painting Self Portrait with Cropped Hair. She must have been aware of the term being used historically as a derogatory marker of women with shorter hair. Yet here, amidst the hair of grief and heartbreak, Frida claims the term in the second person. At first we think she is directly addressing her former love, Diego Rivera, but upon further reflection, the term “pelona” seems self-reflexive, referring to herself, perhaps her own lovability.
Was cutting her hair short meant to be read as an act of defiance? Or a symptom of grief? A genius in the realms of rendering emotional realism in symbolic gesture, Frida uses the act of cutting her hair as emblematic of her heightened emotional state. We often shear our head at times of ritual, or extreme heartbreak.
I teach Art History to young visual artists in an arts magnet Baltimore City public high school. In class last month, we watched a segment of the controversial film Frida (2002) because one thing I think the movie got right was how it worked Frida Kahlo’s paintings, especially the self portraits, into the narrative. When we got to the scene where Frida tells Diego Rivera that she is pregnant, Frida is lovingly bathing Diego in the kitchen of their apartment in New York. My students asked “if she is in pain all the time, why is he getting the bath?” Valid question. “Because patriarchy,” someone replied. I nodded in the dark. Why is anything right now? Because power dynamics. Because [insert unchangeable condition here]. Because war. Because grief and loss. Because rejection.
For the past several months, big hair change has been threatening within me like a storm. In the face of feelings of powerless grief, the relentless dehumanization of Palestinians, the heartbreak watching Israel enacting its own generational trauma upon another undeserving people, I want, I feel, I have this need to enact change over the only thing it feels like I have control over. I want to chop off all my hair.
I remember learning how tears shed in different emotional states have different salt structures: tears of sadness different from tears of necessity or joy. In fact, each tear has its own signature.
I wonder if it’s the same with hair cut under emotional duress.
The breakup haircut is a well-trodden trope in popular culture. Impulsive, emotional, needful of change. As though cutting one’s hair is synonymous with leaving the past physically behind us. And, isn’t it?
Seeing the hair strewn about Frida above, some discarded bits woven into braids, it feels like the detritus of a past life fallen, flung in shambles all around her. And yet, newly shorn, she sits resolute, serious, her own person.
We know that hair is ejected proteins leaving the body, it is itself detritus, unwanted and unneeded. We know that hair records that which we ingest, and can tell stories beyond the mere physicality or shape of it. I wonder what stories Frida’s chopped hair would tell, and what she hoped her newly cropped hair would say about her.
In the Muslim faith, hair is often shorn at the beginning of a religious pilgrimage, or at the conclusion, as a form or marker of grief.
The grief haircut is maybe a different animal. In movies we see the tear-streaked face of the protagonist looking at themselves in the mirror, hopelessness and anger coursing through them somehow visibly. They grab a clump of their own hair, and they take the scissors to it, chopping in enormous clumps, the sound of the scissors hacking through the fibrous hair makes sinew of them, turns them briefly back to flesh. Sometimes the character takes a clippers to their head and shaves everything entirely off.
For the past several months, I’ve wondered wildly when I would feel good about returning to this space. I speculated on all the essays I could write, and wrote many of them, but I couldn’t re-enter this space. I couldn’t make myself take up space while the world seemed to burn around me. I told myself in these months away—I am a body, not a capitalist machine. I do not need to produce all the time.
The truth is that I needed some time away while I brought a few projects to completion, and while I submitted my yearly round of applications, proposals, entreaties, wishes, so that I could weather the onslaught of stock rejections, heartfelt personal rejections, and near-misses (the life of the artist). Heartbreak season amplified by the loss of a key figure in my life, the top of my own family tree, our matriarch, my Grandma Bobbie. Devastated, we carried on into the New Year amidst illness and missed connections, far away from one another and drifting further out of reach.
Sarah Ahmed, writer, Feminist theorist, cultural historian and author of Feminist Killjoys, has been addressing the many ways in which the pervasive grief of this moment has impacted those of us who think about culture, history, and injustice holistically, aka writers of cultural history. Her words express far better what I have been feeling in her most recent post entitled “Find Other Killjoys,” written on December 31, 2023:
I have been struck, and feel deeply seen, by other writers I so admire, who in finding their ways back to professional pursuits post October 7, have found ways to acknowledge the devastation that daily, hourly mounts to a fever pitch that is all-consuming and overwhelming, in the face of no real change.
In the February 11, 2024 newsletter I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later from
, the artist pauses to acknowledge both personal and global heartbreak after a brief pause in getting her newsletter out to her readers:On the global front, we are now entering the fourth month of watching Gaza and watching our elected officials and heads of state do nothing. We are now entering the fourth month of what no one should hesitate to call a genocide. I did wake up with a bit more joy this morning in knowing that while we are still fighting for the bare minimum (a ceasefire), it seems that there are more and more people who, in defiance of their political leadership’s stance, are acknowledging at the very least, something ain't right.1
Friend, writer, curator, and cultural worker Alex Santana recently sent out her professional newsletter announcing the many incredible projects she is currently working on in NYC and beyond, and included (in smaller font) a caveat at the top of her email, which I think captured with honesty and beauty what it feels like to be an artist deeply feeling the events in Palestine, and the disconnect of trying to continue to make moves in the simultaneous present.
She generously gave me permission to share it here.
As a creative / arts freelancer in NYC, it is difficult to stay afloat sometimes. Each win comes along with 2-3 setbacks, and every day is a struggle to maintain balance. Very often, this city does not feel hospitable to creative and experimental pursuits, especially those orchestrated by folks who are questioning the chokeholds of neoliberal capitalism. I live everyday in a dissociative state knowing that my taxes support the U.S.'s incessant violence locally and abroad, and I imagine ways of defecting, or sometimes just escaping. But I don't think escaping is the answer. I think working at being present is an answer, one of many. I deleted my Instagram in this call to stay present, and will be sharing info in email newsletters in the meantime. It's a puzzling thing to pursue creativity and inspiration in the face of so many organized obstacles pummeled against us.
So, in the spirit of presentness and presence, we continue.
I’ve been thinking about the many ways that hair is an insistent a call back to our humanity, to the flesh of us, and while it sometimes feels insane that we should need proof that we all share the same basic human DNA, I often look to hair as a tangible thread of connection.
I was raised in a household steeped in Zionist ideology. My maternal grandparents often spoke with gleams in their eyes of making “aliyah,” and moving to Israel. Israel was, to them, a beautiful dream.
Not without a sharp measure of heartbreak, I confide that I no longer believe that Israel should be a reality. Not like this, not after the nakba, and the subsequent continuous violent ousting of the Palestinian people from their native homeland. Not without a sustainable and respectful pathway to peace that acknowledges the history of the land itself.
If you ask someone who was raised with Zionist indoctrination “why, why is this happening?” They will tell you some version of what I was told: “because they attacked us on our highest of holy days”/”because we were outnumbered”/”because we belong here.” All dangerously one-sided stories that tell nothing of the powerlessness of the Palestinian people post-1948. Listening to historic recordings of Hamas, they state explicitly that their quarrel is not with Jewish people because they are Jewish, but rather with the project of Zionism as a nationalist ideology, a settler-colonial project backed by the UK and the US.
It is difficult to understand how this region became recast in the Western imagination as a place devoid of indigenous cultural heritage. But then of course, it isn’t so difficult. We live within the constructs of late-stage capitalism made possible by centuries of violent colonial expansion. This erasure is unacceptable, and yet, I know that this cognitive dissonance is a lived reality for many who have not yet healed from Zionist ideologies, and who have come to conflate their Judaism with the project of Israel. In reality, and historically, Jewish identity hasn’t had a national locus; it was held together by the thread of tradition and belief and community, scattered. And it was a strong thread, woven tightly.
Dear one, incredible writer, storyteller, and human being, Temim Fruchter, wrote a beautiful book, City of Laughter (Grove Atlantic, 2024), which came out in January of this year and found me at a time when I needed a firm handhold on what it means to be Jewish and queer. You may recognize the title from many NYT recommended lists and subsequent rave reviews!
In her book, Temim’s protagonist Shiva plunges herself deep within the voids of her own Jewish family history—a frustratingly fragmented history—in the hopes of finding wholeness. What she finds is so much more than that, and the question of “wholeness” remains a question.
City of Laughter gave me permission to celebrate the searching/finding, the diasporic nature of that Judaism, which felt so nourishing. The book celebrates the transitory nature of Judaism at every level.
At a recent book event in Baltimore, Temim taught me a word that I will be eternally grateful for, a word that comes from deep within Yiddish wisdom, before Israel and at least a century into the systemic project of annihilating Jews across Russia and Eastern Europe via pogroms, ghettoization, and the lead up to World War II.
The word is: doykeit, or “hereness.”
Strength in the scatter.
The term “doykeit” was coined by a socialist labor group formed in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century called The Bund. Their motto was:
“There, where we live, that is our country”
Queer Jewish Diaspora Studies scholar Shelby Handler writes of the movement: “in the face of burgeoning Zionism, [the Bund] offered a vision of secular Jewish cultural autonomy that did not rely on nationalism.”2
When I came across the article with this image, and read the caption “Members of the Bund on a picnic, Minsk, 1910,” I remembered that my grandfather used to say our ancestors were from Minsk and Pinsk, regions of modern-day Belarus. These seemed like made-up lands to me at the time, fairytales. Like the protagonist of Temim’s City of Laughter, I let myself begin to imagine into my own ancestry. I imagined that my ancestors may have been part of the Bund, or at least encountered the Bund, as it was a very popular secular Jewish political movement at the time.
I looked deeply into the faces of each person in this photograph from 1910, and searched wildly for recognition, for some belonging. The Jewish ability to establish communities rich in care and tradition wherever they were forced to go is a strength to be celebrated. Which is why it feels so disproportionately wrong to me to focus Jewish identity into this frozen mass of statehood. It is mindboggling that believers in Zionism cannot see the correlation here—the same sorrows they are enacting upon the Palestinian people. Every Jewish value in me screaming “Never Again. Not to Anyone.”
I recently wrote to Temim that the moment I came into solidarity with the movement of a free Palestine (many years ago), it wasn’t difficult. In fact, it was easy to acknowledge the selfsame humanity in others—it was a beautiful relief, after so many years of queasy feelings around my own indoctrination. Of course we share a basic humanity. Of course we must recognize the humanity of those who claim rightful, generational ownership of the lands and region. It shocked me that people with the same beating heart, the same shiny dark hair, the same proud tall foreheads and strong hairlines, could look across the chainlink fences at their Palestinian siblings in humanity and not understand how even killing a 300 year old olive tree would be an act of violence, let alone an entire grove of trees, let alone a person, a child.
Whole family lines have been wiped from the planet. How does this not wrench us, sicken us into action?
I didn’t know how to reenter this space without an acknowledgement of the present we’re all experiencing. The daily heartbreak of live updates now from Rafah and the starvation in Gaza, the ongoing devastation and genocide, families cut off at the top, children caring for their younger siblings (infants) amidst a constant barrage of bombings, snipers, and persistent grief. I couldn’t find a way back into this space without telling you that I am fighting through these constant thickets of heartbreak, and losing hair to show for it.
On December 15, 2023, day 70 of the ongoing violence in Gaza, brave filmmaker and reporter Bisan Owda (@wizard_bisan1 is her account in English on instagram) posted a photograph of her hair held lovingly in her hand after chopping it off. The caption reads:
I love my hair so much! I love the gorgeous curls on my head but I couldn’t keep them! Today I cut a lot of my hair because it was damaged due to the lack of clean water and hair care products that I could not carry from my beautiful room!
My wonderful hair, which I always tried to leave long and take care of and refused all chemical treatments to make it straight...it’s ok.. if I survived this, I will definitely get you back.
Bisan’s hair looks like my hair. Every child in Gaza could be my child. When are we going to stop letting a colonial agenda cancel out basic human dignity? How many ways can we draw this idea closer so that we all feel it in the same way and take action to put a stop to this violence?
A few weeks before cutting her hair, on November 26, 2023, Bisan posted a video that she had discovered an “Early Gray hair :)” as the caption reads. “Hey everyone, welcome with me the GRAY HAIR!” She is smiling, her vitality bursting through the clear and present danger and grief of daily life. “This was not here before the war,” she says. A small but meaningful moment to acknowledge the impact of stress on the body. When I think of the trauma these children are already experiencing. There are no words.
In the video, Bisan laughs off the gray hair and proudly shows us her hair beautifully braided like a crown around her head. In later videos, showcasing the camps with temporary tents to house the refugees fleeing bombings and strafing further north, she stops at a single chair between several tents. “This is where the barber cuts our hair.” In the midst of everything, we find and fight for our basic human needs. Maintenance. Care for the body and for each other.
I became obsessed with figuring out how to explain to you that I’ve felt moved by my own hair’s keep-growingness, even as I froze in horror and grief, even as I wished for all people to taste freedom. How can a body just keep going, keep growing, keep producing these unlikely pigments gathered into mass, matter, and fiber?
Whatever unspeakable horrors are going on outside the body, the body continues its wisdom of functioning wildly, miraculously, even in the face of deadly change and never-ending loss. In the first months of the onslaught in Palestine I stumbled into the bathroom one morning and was astonished that, as my mind, my entire being, was glued to the events unfolding in real time before our eyes in Gaza, this one hair on my chin kept growing unnoticed. My first reaction was shock, and then admiration at the resilience of this hair.
It just keeps growing.
There is small comfort in remembering that hair itself is a caretaker. Quick to rewild the smoother areas of the body left vulnerable, under-protected. Where some experience unprecedented loss of hair due to bodily and environmental trauma, others grow hair more thickly in response. Whether growing, or being cut short, hair is ever a marker of our experiences, our collective storytelling, what we value and hold dear, and how we present ourselves to the world.
If we’re lucky, it can be a locus of connection.
This past week, a dear friend sent me this gorgeous artwork by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, which I have not been able to get out of my head.
I want to let it grow roots there, in my mind.
Hair is woven into the fabric of both collective and individual identity. And yet it is something we (mostly) all share. Experienced in degrees of shorn-ness, “pelona” or not, hair is a fundamental state of human beingness. We mustn’t forget what we share.
I’ll leave these images with you for today, but I’m excited to delve deeper into Mona Hatoum’s incredible multi-media work—including lots of hair work—in the coming weeks.
Yours in solidarity, yours in peace,
May all beings be free,
xo
Suzanne
Rasheed, K. [11 February 2024]: "Primitive Hypertext" — severance; reanimating spider corpses - "necrobotics"; penelope the platypus fakes a pregnancy; "and it's legal"; techno in palestine. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later, accessed February 21, 2024.
Handler, Shelby. “Activist ancestors: Reaching towards the Jewish Labour Bund’s strategies for cultural organizing,” University of Washington: Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, June 1st, 2022, accessed February 9, 2024. https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/jewish-history-and-thought/jewish-labour-bund-socialist-cultural-organizing/
So beautiful, thank you ♥️
I bear witness to the courage it takes to approach the blank page under the circumstances. Thank you for powering through to deliver these words.