I picked this book from my NetGalley pile as being one of the older books there and because I’m committed to reading books by authors of colour around my 20BooksofSummer project. As usual when reading a book on my Kindle, I started to highlight important or pertinent passages … then I realised I was highlighting the whole book! So what I will just say first is go and get and read this book. It’s fascinating, shocking and amusing, and is a very positive book while highlighting massive injustices and systemic abuses of power and cultural appropriation (it also has one of the best explanations of cultural appropriation I’ve read). So read my review, but do go and read the whole of this book, too. It’s important.
Emma Dabiri – “Don’t Touch My Hair”
(1 May 2019, NetGalley)
As a black Irish woman growing up in a monoculture and having to make trips over to England to have various chemical and hot treatments applied to hair that was always being described as ‘difficult’ at best, with some times in Atlanta, Georgia where she actually managed to find some other black girls to hang out with (and be rivals with, about hair), Dabiri grew up feeling an outsider, fair game for comments about her hair and even for people touching it. In this book, which is ostensibly about black women’s hair but which takes in history, culture, politics and mathematics, she explains the power systems that have controlled black women’s hair over the centuries and perceptions and definitions of what is ‘natural’, and celebrates the powerful legacy of the mathematically sophisticated elaborate classical African hair styles which have lasted unchanged for centuries.
Dabiri discusses various periods of black culture in the US, from the Harlem Renaissance through to Black Power, and also the black hair-care industry at length, which makes for fascinating but occasionally wincing reading, explaining the powerful characters who made their fortunes through trying to “help” women have “good hair” (defined throughout three or four centuries as straight or curly, shiny, effectively white people’s hair). She moves to a fascinating history of African hairstyles as arising from complex cultural analyses and messages and a way with mathematics that was celebrated by early explorers then exploited out of slaves until just the odd person became celebrated as some kind of naive genius. Her analysis of why discussions of colourism (the promotion of lighter-skinned people as more “attractive”) misses the definition of (unacceptable) blackness through hair texture is powerful and has made me look at media representations of black women in a new light, especially after being educated about the mixed-heritage women with “good” hair who have been presented to us on the TV as the outputs of two black parents.
She discusses white people’s, black women’s and black men’s attitudes to black women’s hair in separate sections, unpicking peer group and cultural pressure and then the double bind she faces herself that can never fully condone her actions however she presents herself. I found the stream of commentary she has attracted to be shocking, to be honest, and heart-breaking, although it’s refreshing and cheering to read how her own attitudes to her appearance have developed and matured, making her a great role model, I would think, for other women facing the same battles. She’s certainly a very engaging guide to the topics she presents and a great example of how to include the personal and the universal in a readable book that teaches so many lessons.
The book finishes with a call to embrace the fluidity and gentle entrepreneurship of traditional (classical) African culture, while recognising the achievements and sophistication of that culture, which has been lost under the weight of colonialist narratives of the savage they had to tame (much as they had to tame people’s hair). A great and worthwhile read that taught me a lot.
Thank you to Penguin for making this book available for me to read via NetGalley in return for an honest review.
I’m currently reading books 1 and 2 in my 20BooksofSummer, so I’m spending some weeks in the 1950s on Tahiti in, well, “Tahiti” and birdwatching around (mainly) the UK in “Birdwatchingwatching”, both of which are proving highly readable.
Jun 05, 2020 @ 08:53:43
Sounds vital and fascinating. I’ve often wondered about the advertising trying to sell the image of women of colour with what is patently hair modelled on the white styling, and I think back to people like Angela Davis celebrating her ‘fro. Since then things do seem to have changed and since we are so multi-racial nowadays it seems ridiculous to have some kind of standard to which all women are expected to aspire. And that kind of reflects the bigger picture of oppression, not only of women of colour but of all women expected to fit in to some pre-defined mould. It shocks me to think that people imagine they have the right to comment on someone’s appearance and hair like this.
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Jun 06, 2020 @ 17:15:10
Yes, indeed, and then also the afro itself isn’t particularly African apparently, while intricate message-filled mathematical braiding patterns are. I did learn a lot, and indeed there are parallels to the feminist struggle here as well, so a lot of intersectionality. And yes, lots of horrific commenting which shocked me.
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Jun 05, 2020 @ 14:45:04
Such a great book isn’t it? Dabiri is great and I look forward to what she does next.
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Jun 06, 2020 @ 17:15:54
Yes, completely, I can’t wait to read whatever she produces next. Such a good and engaging writer.
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Jun 06, 2020 @ 00:22:01
The whole idea of being “good looking” needs to be done away with (There goes all my romance novel reading). But for northern European women to be held up as the standard for Black women must be particularly difficult.
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Jun 06, 2020 @ 17:16:45
Yes, indeed. I have enough trouble conforming to Northern European beauty standards myself (but then at least I can look shabby and unkempt if I want to, not an option for many black people, which really shocked me as another example of white privilege).
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Jun 06, 2020 @ 09:31:39
I hesitated over this on NetGalley and decided against it because I felt I’d read a lot of similar books – but the history of African hairstyles sounds fascinating so I may check it out after all.
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Jun 06, 2020 @ 17:17:19
There’s a lot on that so it might well be worth your while. What else have you read on the topic or have you told me that elsewhere?
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Jun 06, 2020 @ 18:13:54
A lot of it is blog posts etc that I can no longer trace, but there’s a great chapter on blackness and beauty norms in Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish).
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Jun 06, 2020 @ 18:51:38
Ah great I have that on my wishlist although it’s sold out at the moment
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Jun 08, 2020 @ 08:25:07
This sounds like a fascinating book, and this this just the time to read it. The standards applied to how women look has been deeply problematic of course, but clearly that experience is rather different and more uncomfortable for women of colour. It’s shocking that things haven’t really changed.
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Jun 15, 2020 @ 04:57:20
It really is fascinating and opened my eyes to a lot of things that still happen now.
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Jun 14, 2020 @ 22:06:31
I love this thorough and thoughtful review, Liz! I feel like we need so many more people to read and to care about this topic especially given the colonialism and white supremacy that negatively impacts Black women’s hair, both how it’s viewed as inferior within the racist hierarchy as well as how people feel entitled to touch it. Great work highlighting such an important book.
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Jun 15, 2020 @ 04:58:49
I was really shocked by the fact people would think it OK to touch someone else’s hair and the loudness of the commentary on black women’s hair. It’s such an important book and has really changed the way I look at the portrayal of black women in the media.
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Jun 15, 2020 @ 18:29:27
This sounds fascinating. I first came across the topic when a Zimbabwean acquaintance told me how appalling it was that Dutch children kept touching her hair. She assumed it was that they were being brought up racist, but I suspect they were just the sort of curious children who asked me why I had such a big stomach when I helped out at school! My book club also read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book Americanah which also talks a lot about hair. It sparked a fascinating conversation with the only black woman in the room and her struggles with hair and the sheer amount of time it takes to get it styled.
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Jun 16, 2020 @ 09:28:32
That’s very interesting, and yes, it could really have been either, couldn’t it. One major point that came out of the book was that the traditional care of black women’s hair, and even the processes now that the author has moved away from, can be seen as time-consuming from one point of view but are also about community and cultural belonging and passing on tradition, so the time taken can also be celebrated. I’ve certainly been looking at the portrayal of black women and their hair on the media a lot more closely since I read it.
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Dec 30, 2020 @ 19:47:24
I notice Afro hairstyles now on tv more than I used to! Great review…
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Dec 31, 2020 @ 09:27:53
Yes, indeed, and on the street as well around here as we have a pretty diverse population. It was fascinating and I loved reading your take oni it, too.
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