In my matriarchal childhood household in Trinidad and Tobago, none of the women—neither my two great-aunts nor my mother—wore their hair natural. In those days, African-Trinbagonian women were ashamed of their natural hair. Even after the lowering of the Union Jack in 1962 ending British rule, and the hoisting of the red, white and black flag signaling the birth of a new nation, women still had to be white, or as close as humanly possible to being white, to gain employment in an office or bank. Since skin bleaching was unheard of, the next best option for African-Trinbagonian women to secure a “respectable” job was to straighten their hair.
Growing up in the 1960s and belonging to a London Baptist family, I prayed to God every night. Every night the prayer was the same: “God, please give me long, straight hair. Amen.” I yearned for the hair the white, East Indian, and Chinese girls in my class had. How I wished I could flick long, flowing, straight hair from the nape of my neck with both hands as they did! My hair never seemed to grow, instead shrinking to half its wet length when dry. Why, I asked God, was I born with kinky hair that defied gravity?
African-Trinbagonian Women’s Savior: The Heavy Hot-Iron Comb
God’s answer to my prayer was a heavy, hot-iron comb. Back then, it was the norm among women of African descent, regardless of skin tone or social class, to “press” their hair—to straighten it with a stove-heated iron comb. No dwelling where there were African-Trinbagonian women was without this comb, an essential tool in a woman’s beauty arsenal.
On special occasions, the women in my family visited the hairdresser to have their hair “pressed.” For everyday use, they did the job themselves. Whenever I saw an old toothbrush, a pair of thick rubber gloves, and a bottle of black Inecto hair dye on the kitchen counter, I knew it was Natural Hair Disguise Day for my great-aunts. Kinky roots, worse yet grey ones, should be covered up at all costs. Once dyed, the jet-black tight coils were pressed and curled before being tucked under a black hairnet. To ten-year-old me, the elderly duo’s hair looked like a mop head of fried spring rolls. My mother, a young widow, had no need for Inecto, but like my great-aunts, she pressed her hair, although her curl pattern was looser, less kinky than theirs. She had “sorf” (soft) hair. Sorf hair was good hair, nice hair: the preferred hair type.
In Trinidad and Tobago and other British Caribbean colonies, people of African slave ancestry were obsessed with having children with sorf hair. Sorf-hair children fared better in the color-based hierarchy of Caribbean societies than those with picky, nappy, hard, or bad hair—all derogatory terms used to describe African hair. Plus, who wanted late-for-school children? Combing “hard” hair was time-consuming, requiring powerful forearms. In the hours it took parents to remove knots from kinky hair, the school bell would have long since rang. And getting an education was critical since African-Caribbeans saw it as a route to upward social mobility.
Skin tone and hair texture were also essential criteria when choosing a mate. My mother was the offspring of a dark-skinned woman with prominent African features and a Chinese-looking man with straight-ish hair, handpicked by her grandmother to produce grandchildren of a lighter hue with sorf hair. Regardless, it is doubtful my mother would have been employed as a stenographer at her white male-owned company, where all other female office workers were white, had she exposed her natural hair.
On Sunday nights, my mother washed her coiled locks and sectioned them into several tiny Bantu knots. I watched as she, seated in front of a mirror positioned on the wooden dinner wagon in the kitchen, heated the iron comb on the stove. She then passed the hot comb, several times, through each unrolled Bantu knot, plastered with hair pomade. Reheating the comb between strokes, she ensured each strand from root to tip was bone straight. The smell of barbequed hair filled the kitchen as her hair sizzled from the mixture of heat and hair grease. Not even an occasional burned scalp, finger, or singed tuft of hair deterred my mother from her mission: to start the work week feeling beautiful.
I observed this Sunday night ritual throughout my childhood, knowing when my sister and I came of age, we’d follow suit. And we did. At first, we pressed our hair. Later, we straightened it with chemicals when straighteners (or relaxers) superseded the hot-iron comb. Women needed to “look good,” my mother said, and looking good meant adopting white features, like straight hair.
Black is NOT Beautiful
My mother suffered from low self-esteem, typical of “barrel children.” Barrel children, still common in the Caribbean, are those whose parents migrate for economic reasons, leaving their children in the care of relatives, usually the grandmother. From time to time, parents ship a barrel containing clothes, books, toys, toiletries, non-perishable food, and household items back home to compensate for their absence. Growing up with a grandmother who often made derogatory remarks about her broad nose and thick lips, my mother thought she was the ugliest person alive. Like her predecessors, she had internalized the myth of African inferiority and ugliness—a legacy my sister and I were next in line to inherit.
Little did my mother know that sending my sister to London, England, and me to Winnipeg, Canada, to further our education would undo years of socialization. In Winnipeg, I felt free—free to wear my hair in its natural state. I can’t speak for my sister, but I suspect she felt free too, so much that on her first visit back home, she shocked my mother and it was enough to make the flabbergasted widow pen an urgent letter to me in Winnipeg.
“Your sister had her hair in an afro, a burgundy afro!” I could sense the anguish in her words. Four years later, an Air Canada plane touched down in Trinidad with a twenty-three-year-old Bachelor of Science graduate on board. After four glorious years of freedom, enjoyment, and many firsts, a reluctant me returned home. My mother’s anguish on seeing my sister’s burgundy afro was no match for the horrified expression on her face when she saw my out-there hairdo. At least the color was natural brown, not burgundy.
Who was this creature posing as her younger daughter? I had another two ear piercings and wore a gold box chain anklet, which she insisted made me resemble “a whore.” Still, the sin of all sins was the massive Angela Davis-esque afro, about six inches in diameter, the whorish creature sported on her head! It was too much for my mother. The beauty lessons she had dutifully taught her daughters had come to naught. She broke down: “What have you done to your hair?”
I smiled. “Nothing, can’t you tell?
“I don’t know why my two children don’t like to look good,” she lamented.
My hairstyle caused a stir, as expected. My mother and I clashed. I didn’t care because this was the newly empowered, Black-conscious me, not ashamed to expose my kinky roots.
Winnipeg: The Great Liberator
My cultural awakening was gradual. When I started university life, I had lugged my inherited natural hair shame to Winnipeg, often traveling miles across the city by bus to straighten my hair at a Caribbean hairdresser. God forbid my white Canadian friends should see my hair in its natural state.
One day I was in a department store downtown. The white store clerk mistook me for a Black Jamaican-Canadian beauty pageant contestant. How could she make such a mistake? I was offended, not flattered. I had to write home about this travesty.
“How could she mix us up? That girl’s about three shades darker than me, with picky hair. It’s straightened, but I can tell those roots are picky!”
For people of African slave ancestry in the Caribbean, there are different shades and grades of black. I soon realized that for white people in many northern countries, “black” comes in one shade only, despite the nuances of skin tone (light brown, brown, dark brown, black, very black) and hair type (3c,4a,4b,4c) we Caribbean people see. Labeled “a minority,” subjected to uncomfortable stares on public transport, and cursed at (“You Fuck of a Nigger!”) while walking the streets downtown, I became aware of my otherness in predominantly white 1970s Winnipeg.
Back then, I was dating a university graduate who subscribed to the teachings of the Black Panther Party in the neighboring US. Messages promoting Black pride, Black self-determination, and Black solidarity in the face of injustices caught my attention. Who could ignore the inimitable, outspoken, intelligent, articulate, full-of-spunk Angela Davis and her eye-catching signature hairstyle? I sat up, listened, and imitated, styling my hair in an afro which I wore with pride and pizzazz as Angela Davis did.
Family Opposition To My Natural Hairstyles
Over the years, I’ve rocked various natural hairstyles—afros, braids, and cornrows (“cane rows” to us in the Caribbean). My mother never warmed to what she considered my radical behavior. When told her views were outdated and times had changed, she had a standard reply: “There are still twenty-four hours in a day.” Before she died in 1998, at age 77, I returned home to be with her. I wore my natural hair in tiny corkscrew twists. She was as horrified, just as when I landed from Winnipeg decades earlier sporting an afro. Once more, she said (this time in a feeble voice), “What have you done to your hair? You look like a nigger!”
Hearing my mother say the N-word was jarring, since I had never heard her say that word before. I composed myself before responding. After all, she was old, ailing, and I loved her. ”Mom, take a good look at me.” She did, with a blank stare characteristic of Parkinson’s Disease. “That’s who I am. A nigger!” Old beliefs die hard. What would she have said if she had lived to see her granddaughter’s dreadlocks? Death spared her that trauma.
At my mother’s repast, a relative who hadn’t seen me in years chose to criticize my corkscrew twists instead of offering words of comfort that I very much needed. “That hairstyle doesn’t suit you,” she said, while looking at my hair with scorn. How callous! Here was another African-Tobagonian woman who, for her entire life, had straightened her hair to distance herself from her African roots. Her freshly straightened hair, styled in a Swiss roll was acceptable, but not my natural African corkscrew twists.
Competing Standards of Beauty
Now, natural (African) hairstyles are so popular that for 27 years, Trinidad and Tobago has held a Natural Hair Exhibition with the motto “Accept, Embrace, Love Your Natural Hair.” The exhibition attracts hundreds of patrons, from hairdressers and local product manufacturers to retailers and wholesalers. It offers a smorgasbord of hair goodies and hair care information to seasoned and fledgling natural sistas alike.
Still, alongside the growing natural hair movement is the equally burgeoning false hair industry. In stores across the Island (and elsewhere with substantial populations of Black women), there’s an array of wigs, weave and extension bundles to satisfy the demand for straight hair among African-Trinbagonians.
Unfortunately, there are still many women whose beauty standards are shaped by white features, often to their detriment. Consider the lengths to which my family members and other Trinbagonian women of African heritage went to look white. If they burned their scalp, fingers, or hair, it didn’t matter as long as they didn’t expose their kinky roots. It even goes beyond hair. I am aghast at the plethora of bleaching creams competing for shelf space nowadays.
In order to heal, it is important to acknowledge the centuries of damage done by European colonialism. Women of African slave heritage have historically not had much freedom in making choices about their appearance. Skin bleaching and hair straightening are about the belonging, recognition, and self-worth that they have been told is largely conferred by “being white.” These practices are a cry as if to say, “Hey, look at me! I’m somebody too!” (An African-Caribbean publisher, living in England, once told me, “Don’t you see how we dress, in bright colors? That’s drawing attention to ourselves; to make us visible to others.”)
For centuries, Black women sought to be recognized as someone in society. Sadly, too often they did this by absorbing white culture while rejecting their own. Even still, Black men and women who, like me, have stuck to their roots still deal with persecution and punishment for wearing their natural hair in African hairstyles.
Black Hair Discrimination In The 21st Century
Similar to the CROWN Movement (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) in the US, hair naturalists in Trinidad and Tobago are battling for the right to wear their natural hair in a country where approximately 40% of the population are of African descent.
Newspaper articles such as A Black Man’s At-Work Reprimand Has Trinidad & Tobago Wondering, ’Natural Hair Not Accepted Here’?, Education Ministry is Allowing Discrimination Against African hair, Schoolgirl Hairstyle Row: Kinks not Ironed Out, and Student Told Fix Hair or Stay Home are shocking and disturbing.
As noted in reports like The Decriminalization of Black Hair, some employers, administrators, and managers describe natural hairstyles as unprofessional, improper, unkempt, unhygienic, and messy. They claim that while natural African hairstyles are suitable for home, they are not appropriate for formal settings such as work and school.
But even at home, natural hair shaming is ongoing. The 2017 documentary “Sorf Hair” revealed the disparaging comments of family and friends toward African hair. African-Trinbagonian Millennials and Gen Z members say their hair has been likened to “goat shit” and “channa grains.”
How shameful that in the 21st century, new labels have emerged to describe African natural hair, and they are as pejorative as when I was a child during the Baby Boom. Such is the power of centuries of indoctrination that is deeply embedded in the psyche of Black people: the notion that Africanness is a liability. The road to self-acceptance is long and winding, and not everyone makes it to the end.
None But Ourselves Can Free Our Minds
Trinidad and Tobago celebrated 60 years of independence on August 31, 2022. Trinbagonians at home and in the diaspora partied in style. For 30 minutes, the national colors, red, white, and black, illuminated Niagara Falls, Canada. The first Prime Minister’s words in 1962, ”Massa Day Done,” reverberated as fireworks exploded in the sky.
While Massa no longer rules the country, Massa still controls our minds, since the myth of African inferiority and ugliness has endured from generation to generation, and signs of it abating are still paired with new insults. The Black Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey urged us to remove the kinks from our minds, not our hair. In Garvey’s time, the heavy, hot-iron comb reigned supreme. Perhaps in this digital age, we need to invent a similar tool that will effectively remove, in one fell swoop, the kinks and coils from our centuries-long brainwashed minds.
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