In terms of my early attempts at decolonization, the freedom demonstrated by the Equiano project was sadly not to be repeated. I think it was permitted on this occasion primarily because it kept me out of the way. Until the late 1990s, being black and Irish in Ireland was to have almost unicorn status.
Except everybody loves unicorns.
There has not been a significant black population in Ireland for very long. When I was growing up, there were very few of us indeed. Many mixed-race people I met, certainly those who were any older than me, had grown up in institutions. They were often the “illegitimate” offspring of Irish women and African students. Not to put too fine a point on it, unmarried mothers were generally, in Ireland, treated like scum. Add the disgrace of a black child and, sure, you couldn’t really sink much lower. Commenting on the mixed-race children unfortunate enough to be placed in Ireland’s now-infamous industrial schools, a report submitted to the Irish Department of Education had this to say in 1966:
A certain number of coloured children were seen in several schools. Their future especially in the case of girls presents a problem difficult of any satisfactory solution. Their prospects of marriage in this country are practically nil and their future happiness and welfare can only be assured in a country with a fair multi-racial population, since they are not well received by either ‘black or white.’
The result is that these girls on leaving the schools mostly go to large city centers in Great Britain . . . It was quite apparent that the nuns give special attention to these unfortunate children, who are frequently found hot-tempered and difficult to control. The coloured boys do not present quite the same problem. It would seem that they also got special attention and that they were popular with the other boys.2 [my italics]
According to alumnae of these abhorrent facilities, this “special attention” seems to have extended to racist assaults that served to compound the physical, sexual, emotional, and mental abuse many of the children were subject to. During my own schooldays twenty plus years later, attitudes didn’t seem to have changed that much. Yet the Ireland emerging on the horizon today seems almost unrecognizable to me. There is now a visible black Irish population and, in terms of social progress, in 2015 we became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote; and in 2018, following another referendum, the draconian Eighth Amendment that criminalized abortion was repealed. This seemingly kinder, more diverse Ireland is a far cry from that which defined my miserable years at school, days when the smallest indiscretion—real or, usually, imagined—invoked punishment far disproportionate to the crime. And just like “our tempers,” my hair, too, was “difficult to control.”
From my earliest memories, my hair was presented as a problem that needed to be managed. The deeply entrenched idea of “managing” black women’s hair operates as a powerful metaphor for societal control over our bodies at both the micro and macro levels. Whether it’s historic bondage during the transatlantic slave trade, or indeed the attitude of the education system, the thousands of black women held in immigration detention centers today or the disproportionate number of black women in prison (in the US, black women are incarcerated at four times the rate of white women), our bodily autonomy cannot be assumed. Barely a month seems to go by without there being another news report about a black child excluded from school for wearing their hair natural. The 2016 case in Pretoria High School in South Africa was particularly shocking, not only for the violence of the altercation but also because of the geographic location. This didn’t happen in Britain or Ireland or America but on the African continent! Protests broke out because little girls wanted to leave their hair alone, yet Pretoria High maintained that natural hair was “messy.” The administration claimed that by not straightening their hair black female students were not conforming to the rules regarding “appropriate” presentation, and protests broke out when schoolgirls simply refused to straighten their hair.
Pretoria High School, August 2016. Zulaikha Patel, 13, refused to “tame” (chemically straighten) her hair and started a silent protest, insisting that black girls be allowed to go to school with their natural hair. I would like to point out that Patel’s hair is well combed and oiled, certainly not “messy.” Despite Patel’s bravery, the emotional costs of such efforts are high for children. The second picture shows a weeping Patel being comforted by a schoolfriend (who, interestingly, has straightened hair). It reminds me all too keenly of the many incidents in my childhood where I was subjected to the rage of incensed white adults who felt, I assume, that I did not know my place.
Photographs: Twitter
As a black child with tightly coiled hair, growing up in an incredibly white, homogeneous, socially conservative Ireland, I certainly wasn’t considered pretty, but that started to change in my midteens. I remember being told that I was “lucky I was pretty,” which meant I could “almost get away with being black.” However, there remained the unquestioned expectation that certain measures would be taken to keep my affliction at bay. Needless to say, the most offensive manifestations of my threatening blackness had to be rigorously policed.
As I got older, my skin color could almost correspond to the “tan” my peers were all obsessed with achieving. I still got the jokes about needing a flash to take a photograph of me, or the classic likening of my complexion to dirt, but it was my hair that remained unforgivable. Anything that could be done to disguise it, to manipulate and mutilate it, was up for consideration. The concept of leaving it the way it grew from my head was simply inconceivable.
There is long evidence of both weaving attachments as well as the use of wigs throughout Africa. In most black cultures the frequent and radical transformation of hair is typical, and the wearing of artificial hair, including wigs, is not traditionally stigmatized in the same way it is in mainstream—no, let me dispense with polite euphemisms, I mean “white”—culture.
Considering the great diversity of styles available, it is worth noting that throughout the twentieth century and until recently (with the exception of the Black Power period and immediately afterward) very few included working with Afro hair texture. Personally, I was trying to get as far away from my own texture as possible. Today, I’m much freer and, now that I’ve embraced my natural texture, I’m also happy to rock a pink body-wave wig, although I’m more likely not to. There is untold fun to be had experimenting with hair. But when I was in school it was emphatically not about fun. My actions were a bid for assimilation, by way of disguise. My efforts stemmed from a cardinal terror that people would catch sight of my real hair. From weaves, to extensions, Jheri curls, curly perms, straight perms, and straighteners, my hair was hidden, misunderstood, damaged, broken, and completely unloved. It is hardly surprising. I never saw anybody with hair like mine. Afro hair was—and in many places still is—stigmatized to the point of taboo.
Growing up, I was made to feel terribly conspicuous; always under scrutiny, an object to be examined. When people saw me, they did not see me, they saw a symbol, a poorly cobbled together approximation of an African. In the famous train passage in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon, the renowned Martinican psychiatrist and postcolonial icon, explores the psychological effects of the white gaze upon the black subject: “Look, a Negro . . . Look at the nigger! . . . Mama, a Negro!”3