Me, My Hair, and I by Elizabeth Benedict

Author:Elizabeth Benedict
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2015-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Glory

RU FREEMAN

A few days ago, all these many years into my adulthood, I posted this on Facebook

Haircut. I.e., morning during which I writhe in agony wondering if I even need a haircut, wanting a change, resisting a change, picking out a different hairstyle, printing out those different hairstyles, and then working myself up into such a state that I plonk on the chair and state emphatically that I LOVE MY LONG HAIR, and coming away after paying a ton of money for a nice chat, shampoo, and ½ an inch off the ends. What is wrong with me, people? What is WRONG with me?

to a chorus of commiserating murmurs. I went for the said haircut and returned to upload a photograph that shows me largely unchanged, albeit slightly buffed.

My obsession with hair is partly cultural (Sri Lankan culture values thick, long hair) and partly personal (the emphasis people placed on my hair as I grew into my teenage years). We inherited great hair genes, my brothers and I, with dark, sweeping locks that seem not to age. My oldest brother grows his down to his waist and when pressured to cut it by our mother, when she was still alive, would invoke Samson. My other older brother, a die-hard Socialist, who sets aside large parts of his salary to help strangers and friends, sees no contrary tendency in purchasing expensive product for his hair.

When I was a very young child, there was never a fuss made about my hair. As a kid, I was marched off to the barber along with the boys, and once, I famously received sideburns because the barber could not distinguish my skinny-boy body from that of my brothers and assumed I was a third son. But once I turned thirteen and my mother decided it was time for me to begin to look like a girl, people outside the house started to express admiration for my hair.

Whether it was because the quality of it was somehow, miraculously, exceptional in a country whose women almost invariably had long hair, or because I did not have much else in the way of notable female assets, it was my hair that people spoke about. Within the extended family, my paternal grandmother, who was never very fond of me (an antipathy carried over from her feelings about my mother), would sometimes stroke my head and bemoan the fact that my hair was not good enough. No curls, she’d say, dejectedly, pronouncing it “kay-rels,” the part I latched onto so I could make a joke of a comment that stung. But she was the exception. At school, in the days before things turned sour between us (and by then I would have learned, in my wicked, adaptive way, to take pride in the fact that their envy was still intact), my classmates would cajole me to audition for the new advertisements that were being broadcast on TV, for a shampoo we’d never heard of, Sunsilk. (TV itself had just arrived in Sri Lanka, gifted by the Japanese along with Japanese television sets.

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