Today I went to a
job interview with an afro wig on.
Little did I know
that it would be such a thought-provoking experience. I am mixed race argentinan-brazilian. My mother is white and my father is
black, both from two white and two
black progenitors. But like many
latin-americans, they both have in their genetic patrimonies elements of
Aboriginal, Asian, Caucasian and African descent. Afroindiolatina, that’s how I like to describe myself . It makes me daydream about strong women with big hair in the wind with a
baby in one hand and a gun in the other.
Basically I am brown and curveaceous (ye baby) and my hair is straight.
When I dressed up
like a secretary to pretend I was a model citizen to go and get a job to pay for my addictions, I
couldn’t help but notice my hair wasn’t gonna do it. Shaved patches in the back, long patches in the front and
some green locks in it- maybe I could pull it up in an social worker-esque
do ?
Not really.
So I grabbed
this afro wig my cousin gave to
me. Put it on, FUCK YEAH, looks
like it belongs there.
Lemme tell you all
the implications of wearing an afro wig.
Judith Butler talks about the performative quality of gender[1],
and as a woman I know what power of transformation an ensemble of different
techniques (make up), practices (shaving) and body modifications (piercings,
wigs) can have on one’s (re)presentation in the outside world.
First of all, go to the nearest PAK’S,
Wal-Mart Wigs, or Pozzi and try and find a nice looking afro wig. You are lucky if you find one. The reason for this is simple: the
whole market of weaves and wigs for afro hair lays on the promise of providing
straight, at the most curly or frizzy, manageable hair. Which brings me to the fact that the Fro’s visibility
amongst female populations of black african descent is meager. Why do sistas do not wanna have afro
hair, it’s a whole other problem, but we can talk about it later.
So you’re basically
wearing a relique of the 70’s blaxploitation imagery, Pam Grier and Huey P.
Newton going tribal all over your
head, but this retro vibe hasn’t quite hit neither the catwalks or the
streets yet. Nobody goes for the fro! Mental candy for the
attention-seeking femme-inist ho that I am.
As I said, the wig
looks like it’s my real hair, which is the whole point of it. I go out dressed with a little black
dress, big glasses and my new do. The whole
blaxploitation/roots woman thing is broken down by my sober black
outfit and the huge Napoleon Dynamite glasses. I feel amazing, it’s like a mask, a new identity that is still to be
affirmed and tried out new in the real world. And it’s funny right,
because once in the street I realize I've gone from being a dark-skinned white citizen
to a light-skinned black one. And not a dirty hippie
or a bamboula, but a working-girl that
has a fro. So a more or less
emancipated, wanting-to-fit-into-the sistem black young bio-woman, that chooses
to cultivate the bodily manifestations of her genetic inheritance, with an
obvious second degree to it.
I live in Paris, where I am perceived as
« exotic » but I can look (or so I’ve been told) like
millions of people in Latin-America, South-East Asia, and the Maghreb,
depending on what techniques, practices and body modifications I use. I kindda know what effect they have on
people : the latin-american intelectual, the booty-shaker, the white
anthropology student. They all
generate different reactions and interactions, and even though my friend
Ophélie says she’s never met racism, I can say that race classification is
definitely on the plate when it comes to relate to one another. Not in an
openly hostile way -luckily I haven’t met those sickos either- but as way of
identifying otherness. Like dogs meet and
smell their asses for a while, so do we humans with accents, general
appearance, lexical fields, gender and race.
I jut took the metro there, went to the job interview, took the metro back home. A bunch of 15
year old black girls laughed at me. A black man asked me where I come from and
another gave me his phone number. At least four middle-aged white men in suits stared at me and quickly gazed away when I met
their eyes. Hobos did not ask me
for money. Generally, there was a
certain tension of curiosity and -let's call thing by its name- desire in the air. Without wanting to push it too far, I feel like I somehow embodied the
two polarities Eldridge Cleaver defined in The
Allegory of Black Eunuchs[2] :
"The myth of the strong black woman is
the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde. The white
man turned the white woman into a weak-minded, weak bodied, delicate freak, a
sex pot, and placed her on a pedestal; he turned the black woman into a strong
self reliant amazon and desposited her in his kitchen...The white man turned
himself into the Omnipotent Administrator and established himself in the front
office"[3]
That is, in the new cyberdelic era when the insane amount of informations and references we handle, technological and even endocrinological advances let us play with our identities as we speak. Beware, State, System, Heteronormative Order, there is a on growing mass of us playing with your bipolar standardisation grill, white/black, male/female, natural/artificial, the lines are blurring, and you can't keep the pace. We are using the same tools you use to control us: Candy (drugs and hormones, legal and illegal) and Porno. Ok but this is a whole other story. We can talk about it later.
I go, do my job interview, will know about it
Friday. I think I got it.
[1] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble,
Feminisn and the subversion of identity, Routledge, 1990.
[2] Concept that Germaine Greer reused in The Female Eunuch. « The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to
describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat similar
position. Blacks had been emancipated from slavery but never given any kind of
meaningful freedom, while women were given the vote but denied sexual freedom.
In the final analysis, women aren't really free until their libidos are
recognized as separate entities. Some of the suffragettes understood this. They
could see the connection among the vote, political power, independence and
being able to express their sexuality according to their own experience,
instead of in reference to a demand by somebody else. But they were regarded as
crazy and were virtually crucified. Thinking about them, I suddenly realized,
Christ, we've been castrated and that's what it's all about. You see, it's all
very well to let a bullock out into the field when you've already cut his balls
off, because you know he's not going to do anything. That's exactly what
happened to women. »
[3] Eldridge Cleaver, The Allegory
of the Black Eunuchs, Soul on Ice, Delta, 1968.
