Culture+Society
Hair-story of Naturalistas By Elizabeth Oloidi
The journey to self-love begins with one step. For the black woman that step may begin with loving our natural hair. For the love of our hair in its natural state. For the love of ourselves.
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here are many journeys we take on the path to self-love and although the paths may differ, the end is often the same. For black women, this is the journey of knowing and loving our natural hair. Women return to their natural hair for many different reasons. If you’re like me, it was because your hair was dying at the roots. If you are like Qweens’ cover model and co-chair and founder of UTSC student group Future Black Physicians, Dominic Stephenson, it was because of circumstance. Having grown up in Jamaica perming and straightening her hair, Stephenson says she didn’t know what her natural hair looked like. “I was young, I never made the decision to get my hair permed, I never grew up wanting straight hair, it was just decided for me,” she says. But, why is the black community conditioned to think that perming is the only option for natural? “In Jamaica, perms are so common so it didn’t seem like that big of a deal,” Stephenson says. And for a lot of women perms were the normal treatment for their hair, along with other styles such as weaves, wigs and braids. Styles that I, and many others, believed were necessities for healthy hair. However,
Cheryl Thompson, University of Toronto visual arts professor and author of “Black Women and Identity: What’s Hair Got to Do with It”, doesn’t agree with this. “I push back on that being a protective hairstyle because we know long-term weave wearing will thin your hair, because (your hair) isn’t able to breathe,” Thompson says. “So, it’s protective for a little bit, but years and years of it, it stops working.” That’s what happened with my perming experience, and I am not the only one. Nana Frimpong, UTSC Student’s Union VP Equity, grew up perming her hair but in 2015 she realized how damaging perming was for her hair. “My relaxed hair was not cute by any means, it was very unhealthy and I didn’t know how to manage it,” Frimpong says, which is one of the reasons she decided to go natural. Stephenson says she never had the “a-ha” moment with perming her hair. Her journey to natural hair came after a move from New York to Toronto, and was not so much an abrupt choice, but a slow realization. “I didn’t know any hairdressers, stylists or salons to go here, so I thought it would be easier to put some braids in,” she says.
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Winter 2018