The world of weave
NICOLA SHULMAN Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair by Emma Tarlo Oneworld £16.99
When I was at school, you could get out of games by volunteering to do community work in the locality. The locality in this case was Shepherd’s Bush in the late Seventies; and the community work was painting the nicotine-glazed council flat of an old widower called Alf. Every Friday afternoon we would turn up and slap cream paint on the Anaglypta, while Alf, enraged by feebleness and baffled by a changing city, would shout at us from his chair. His opinions were reliably racist and often singular. He had a particular interest in West Indian people’s hair. His view of the matter was that ‘they’ had got it curly like that from carrying pots on their heads. Then they come to London, they get running water and carriers. The hair goes straight. They don’t like that. So they buy big frizzy wigs, down Shepherd’s Bush market.
How we giggled on our way to the bus stop. Pots, indeed! Those aren’t wigs. Black hair doesn’t go straight! But now, having read Emma Tarlo’s wonderful book about false hair, it strikes me that this was probably Alf trying to make sense of black women’s intense and various relationship with their own and other people’s hair. Black women are the most enthusiastic consumers of false hair on the planet. By false hair I mean human hair, made up as wigs (Diana Ross’s and Aretha Franklin’s Sixties Afros were indeed wigs) or, more often, packaged up into tresses and sewed or ‘bonded’ onto a tightly braided foundation of natural hair. This is called a weave. It takes about a day to put on, is a non-negotiable priority for many black women and costs a fortune, much of it in the price of the hair itself. Its visible superstructure can indeed be an Afro style, or a fountain of braids, or the waistlength mermaid ringlets sported by Beyoncé Knowles. Often it forms the smooth, straight dark locks we see on the heads of, for instance, the TV host Tyra Banks or many professional black women who, depressingly, find it is expected of them. This flexible resource may be at the bottom of Alf’s confusion.
Tarlo is an attentive but unafraid cultural commentator who has already written about Islamic dress, and is fully apprised of the sensitivities around a thing like a weave. However, one of the many delights of this book is her tendency to give women more credit for their own choices than is often the case. She interviews black activists and cites critics (often male) who deplore what they see as an imposition of white standards of beauty on black women. But a week at a hair fair in Jackson, Mississippi, persuades her that the participants are neither fools nor victims and the ‘natural’ hair debate more nuanced than it appears. Are ‘natural’ hairstyles themselves a credo arising out of conflict with white racism? What about evidence that Africans were straightening hair long before Western contact? Is it not more about ‘endless possibilities of transformation’?
In Entanglement, women often seem to be getting what they want. The chapter on the sheitel – the paradoxical wig of conservative or ‘frum’ Jewish women, worn over their own hair – is a particularly fascinating case in point. Here we have a parable concerning two preoccupations of our times: religious orthodoxy and cosmetic enhancement. As with other forms of strict religious observance, sheitel-wearing has increased in the present generation. At the same time, advances in sheitel fashion mean they no longer look like the flammable thing atop a British Home Stores window dummy, but like a better, glossier, thicker (and extremely expensive) version of the
wearer’s own hair. This adds to the moral complication.
Recently there was a crisis in the sheitel world. We learn from Entanglement that most good-quality wigs are made with the hair of Indian pilgrims, the profitable by-product of tonsure practices at Hindu temples like Tirumala in Andhra Pradesh. That included sheitels – until 2004, when a 94-year-old Lithuanian rabbi declared that these were ‘tainted with idol worship’. In London and New York, women wrapped their heads in scarfs and burned their luxuriant hair in the street. What happened next was a triumph of human ingenuity, such as can occur when an unregulated industry like the hair trade combines with a woman’s determination to have the hair she wants. Suddenly, the world’s hair was no longer from India. It was from Russia, Brazil, Peru, the US, Italy, Colombia. Yes, there were cases of hair traders slicing certificated pigtails from the heads of Ukrainian blondes; more often though, it was a case of repackaging the hair to be what the none-too-curious buyer wanted it to be. In Xuchang, in China’s Henan Province, Tarlo sees a single consignment of hair being converted into supposedly different ‘ethnic’ types for different markets; in Lewisham, a shop-owner cheerfully brings out the same sample when she is asked for Brazilian, Mongolian, Peruvian. Hair origins, Tarlo concludes, are essentially collaborative fantasies: ‘invented between and across continents’ and colluded in by all participants.
This was an expensive book to write. The wig trade throws a net around the world and begins where people are poorest. The hair in the lustrous Medusan maypole called a ‘Senegalese twist’ could have been scavenged from a gutter in Hyderabad, washed and combed in Mandalay, braided and sewn in Korea or China , then bonded to the head of an African woman who has bought it on a time-share basis with a club of likeminded enthusiasts. Well done, then, to the Leverhulme Trust for funding a writer as intrepid as she is intelligent; who has interrogated traders, collectors, makers, users of hair in every post of its fragmented and secretive itinerary. It’s not often you want to thank a funding body, but it’s not often a book gives you new eyes for your everyday world. Putting down
Entanglement, I sallied to King’s Cross station and suddenly false hair was everywhere: weaves, sheitels, toupees, extensions, all formerly invisible to me, paraded past, connecting the wearers to other lives, far beyond the head of the line. Hatchards price: £15.29