Braidventure!
Braidventure: my weave!, originally uploaded by la vrai nomade.
You know the kind of white girls who go someplace - Jamaica, perhaps, or, say, Ghana - and braid their hair in some misguided attempt at cultural experimentation, and look all stupid and pale and pinched and affected? They all blend together, these girls - you never notice their features, just their alarmingly out of place dirty blonde - and it’s somehow always dirty blonde - braids and their pink pink scalp peeking through, looking all exposed and vulnerable. The archetypal, wince-inducing, White Girl With Braids - surely we’ve all judged them.
So. Um.
I joined their ranks. And….it didn’t look half bad. No, really. It’s kind of interesting. And anyway, it’s about the
Emma has been trying to convince me to braid my hair for ages, and I kept saying No, White People Look Stupid in Braids, Our Hair Wasn’t Made For That - but in Saltpond she dragged me to every wig shop in town looking for the right color weave, determined to overrule my objections.
And then there it was, like a sign from God - a long hank of plaited, henna-red hair hanging from a peg on the wall of a salon. There, she said, you see? You have to do it now, that color is perfect.
Sigh.
It took at least nine people, working in shifts, over 7 hours to finish the job…
Before:
During:
After:
After after:
Tug tug tug. It’s didn’t really hurt, for the most part; in fact, all those fingers on my scalp was actually quite lovely. It was the reverse of my usual salon experience, where I leave with my head feeling lighter, buoyant - this was heavy. And hot. And kind of itchy. And when the breeze blew through my weave - ! An experience. I’d always envied girls with braids their ability to tie their hair in a knot and have it stay put - I got to do that! Whee! The whole thing was kind of fun, stepping inside the experience of another chunk of the population, what a little slice of their norm feels like.
I was feeling majorly ambivalent about the results (and was sure everyone was judging me - who do you think you are? Why are you trying to be something you’re not? ) but all the Ghanaians were delighted by the result. Hey, you look sweet, o! If I thought the adults were placating me, the reaction of the friendly neighborhood school children proved otherwise. The normal chorus of Obruni bye bye turned to, Oh! Obruni, âyâ fâ! It’s pretty!
I took it out after less than a week, much to Emma’s dismay. The itching just got to be too much - plus, Ghanaian compliments and assurance that I looked better than the average white girl in braids notwithstanding, I was not about to attend Passover dinner last Saturday in a room full of other Obrunis (who undoubtedly share my chagrined ambivalence to the archetypal White Girl With Braids) with my scalp peeking through. Problematize that all you want, tell me I’m just projecting; there are limits.