Why it’s a problem I have to cut my own hair
To many Black Canadians, trimming their own hair or letting it curl naturally is a declaration of pride in their roots
I remember the tears that would roll down my cheeks as my mother combed through my ragged knots. She’d use “grease” to braid my dense coils into two plaits that were so tight they felt like tiny fingertips pulling each individual hair on my head.
That hair distress — a nest of confusion, tears and pain — would follow me into my adult life.
When my family moved to this country from Trinidad and Tobago, hair was the last thing on our mind. But it didn’t take long for11-year-old me to figure out it would be an issue.
There had been no shortage of options in Trinidad — a historically cosmopolitan island with multiculturalism institutionalized as a policy — to get a trim, style or blowout (a word used to describe blow drying curly hair straight).
But within a week of arriving in the townhouse-lined streets of North Delta, about 45 minutes out of downtown Vancouver, I was crossing the street after school, when a white child in her father’s arms reached out to touch my hair.
She pointed and asked her dad why my skin was “so” dirty and my hair so messy.
He answered: “Because she’s Negro.”
Totally confused, I sprinted home to breathlessly ask my mother if I was, indeed, Black.
You see, I’m mixed race; a mishmash of Black, Indian, Spanish, Chinese and Scottish. In Trinidad, I would never be called Black.
But, inevitably, perception becomes reality. The next day at my elementary school, I keenly observed the faces of my classmates. I was the only Black one. I had an unmistakable sense that I had moved to a land where nobody looked like me.
Even at home, my hair didn’t look like my mother’s, which she calls wavy.
Over the next few years, my mom would go to excruciating lengths to get my hair done. First, it was chemical straighteners, which would cost $150 and need to be reapplied every six weeks.
We would trek about an hour out to Burnaby where one salon was located. There were days I would wait hours just to get in the chair, as the scent of chemicals, peroxide and burnt hair wafted through the neon-lit room.
When it shut down, I saw a stylist in Surrey who ran a pseudo-salon out of her basement.
I began to resent my mom for traipsing me around town only to end up with styles that made me look like there was a wet mop on my head. Looking back, I know she just wanted me to be presentable. After all, I was a reflection of her choices — to come here, to start a new life. I wanted her to be proud. Every morning, I would force my curls downward with a flat iron so my strawlike hair could hang down my back. But it was time-consuming and I was convinced it made my already big head look larger.
So I went natural — meaning I wore a stoic bun wrapped on top of my head daily. By Grade 9, my nickname was “the librarian.” (It took a lot of pins and it didn’t help that I wore thick glasses.)
We would drive to Shoppers Drug Mart in the city where there was a lone, dusty shelf of olive-oil creams and shea butter.
To fill this product void, my mom would create all sorts of home concoctions: Her go-to, a recommendation from a friend in Trinidad, was a fetid mix of raw eggs, coconut oil, rosemary and sometimes mayonnaise. It would sit in my hair, wrapped in a scarf overnight.
I hated it.
After trying to “find myself” during a yearlong stint postgraduation in Southeast Asia (yes I was that person), I returned with dreadlocks — to my mother’s chagrin. When I cut those off, I tried a weave. At the time, it cost me $400.
Then, I simply gave up. I’ve been natural — and cutting my own hair ever since.
Turns out, I’m not the only one. While it does help some pinch pennies, I spoke with more than 10 Black people who named a lack of services as the No. 1 reason they cut their own hair.
A private Facebook group called Meanwhile Black in Vancouver has almost 4,000 members. One of the most frequently asked questions is: Where can I get my hair done?
That group is where I found Kiomi Pyke. Pyke moved to Vancouver five years ago from Edmonton to pursue a career in acting.
“Vancouver was a huge culture shock for me,” she explains. “I’d ask around to find stylists and found there’s a huge lack of education.” There were some people online catering to Black hair. But, they worked out of their homes at least an hour away and focused mostly on weaves and extensions — not natural curl cuts. Depending on the length of your hair, a weave or full head of braids can range from $300 to $1,000 (human hair is expensive.) Plus, chemically straightening your hair strips it of any life as you know it. Pyke had gone between straight and natural — until moving to Vancouver. That’s when she went natural fulltime. After exhausting her research on stylists, one day in a frustrated whim, she took scissors to her locks.
And hasn’t looked back since. There are some downsides: She can’t see the back of her head and getting at the length between her shoulders is “near impossible.”
She says she misses the communal options in Edmonton.
“I knew if I went to one place, there would be so many generations under one roof. I would see aunties,” she explains. “Vancouver doesn’t have that. … There’s something to be said about that sense of home and family and community.”
There’s a pervasive idea — both within Vancouver’s Black community and outside of it — that there are essentially no Black people in this province. But according to author and poet Wayde Compton, whom I asked about this as a student journalist, that’s a “myth of absence.”
Between 1996 and 2016, the Black population in British Columbia almost doubled in size, with roughly 44,000 people who checked off Black on the census. And there are more than the numbers let on. “Black” has only been listed as a population group on the census since 1996.
B.C. has a fertile history of Black migration. Guyaneseborn James Douglas became the governor of Vancouver Island in 1851 and invited San Francisco’s Black community to settle in 1858. Several hundred moved.
Hogan’s Alley was a vibrant Black neighbourhood in the heart of Vancouver’s downtown from the 1930s to ’70s, filled with Black-owned businesses such as cafés and live music.
Jimi Hendrix’s grandmother lived and worked there. The community was displaced when the city decided to tear the viaducts down as the first phase of an inter-urban freeway that would run between Chinatown and Gastown, historic neighbourhoods on the East side of the city. Many fled to the suburbs or other provinces.
I remember learning about Hogan’s Alley in my 20s — it certainly wasn’t taught in high school — and being genuinely surprised. I also wondered if perhaps there would have been someplace to do my hair back then.
Now, there are about four Black salons in Metro Vancouver, with a handful more sparsely spread in the suburbs. And for men at least, more options are starting to pop up.
Pearl Low, 24, grew up with a single Chinese mother in Vancouver.
The multi-disciplinary artist and graphic novelist says her mom would cut her curls to save money.
Low distinctly remembers the bowl cut. At times, her mother would visit cheap Chinese barbers hoping to find someone who manage her tight curls.
Being half Black but immersed in Chinese culture, Low says there wasn’t really anywhere she could learn about her locks. Her half-siblings, who shared the same Jamaican father, would occasionally visit her and braid her hair.
It wasn’t until she was eight that she started to actively treat her hair as curly. Her spiral coils used to be something that she felt isolated her from everyone else. But her relationship to her locks has since changed, she says.
“Hair is now a reminder of my journey and how unique I am. It’s no longer a burden, but something that is comforting,” she explains.
Low says Vancouverites commonly say, “There aren’t really Black people in Vancouver.” And it’s a myth.
I no longer look for faces that look like mine. I see them. Though dealing with my hair sparked my own personal identity crisis, I’ve learned that experience is shared.
“Hair is now a reminder of my journey and how unique I am. It’s no longer a burden, but something that is comforting.”
PEARL LOW, 24 VANCOUVER ARTIST