Bad Hair Days

By Patricia Dunn

When I was eight, I prayed every night for months that my hair would be long enough for banana curls, the hairstyle that was a must for every girl in my neighborhood to have on her first Holy Communion. The hair style that was going to finally give me belonging, community, make me like the other girls on my block, make Jesus love me. So when my Italian-American, emphasis on American, mother decided for me that I was going to have the same hair style as the television actress JP Morgan, a shag, because she wanted her daughter to look American, actually to look Hollywood, and not like a “guinea,” a girl from the “other side,” which meant southern Italy where most, if not all, the girls in my neighborhood were from, I knew how the biblical character Sampson must have felt, defeated and betrayed.

In that defining moment I understood the power of hair.

For the past fifteen years, since I converted to Islam, the one question I have gotten most often is, “You mean you don’t cover your hair?”

For years my response was a long polemic that included much stuff about the patriarchal forces in Islam co-opting the faith for their own testosterone charged destinies or in short that there is nothing in Islam that requires a woman to cover her hair. However, and I always emphasized the however, if a woman chooses to cover her hair because it brings her closer to her faith then her right to do so must be defended.

Personally I never covered my hair because it wasn’t part of my cultural identity. Where I grew up, girls in my Italian American (emphasis on Italian) Bronx neighborhood just didn’t think about covering their hair, except for that short period in the seventies when Rhoda (a mid-seventies sitcom) made wearing a bandana fashionable. Even during the “summer of Sam” when a serial killer was shooting girls in my neighborhood with long brown hair, girls cut and dyed their strands but they didn’t cover them up.

Besides there was a time when I got a kick out of inspiring the look of surprise and/or confusion when a person would find out I was Muslim and then do a double take on my latest hair style. I like to believe that this double take meant I had broken through some of the stereotypes so often made of Muslim women, “Yes, not all Muslim women cover their hair and no not all of us walk ten steps behind our husbands (actually, I often do but only because he walks so much faster).”

But then after years of being the self-appointed defender of Islam to the West (or at least to New York) I got tired of hearing my own voice. I had wasted enough breath defending Islam and a woman’s right to cover her hair to my feminist friends, and I just couldn’t bear to hear one more diatribe from the Muslim right about how us women who do not cover our hair are not real Muslims and are in cahoots with Satan.

So, I eventually got to the point where when someone, from whatever side they stood, asked me the question, “You don’t cover your hair?” I simply said, “No.” Or I flashed them a look that made it clear I didn’t want to talk about it.

Then I was sitting watching the morning news with one of my many non-Muslim, self defined apolitical relatives, who only watches the news for the weather and celebrity gossip. A clip of women protesting France’s recent decision that now makes it illegal for girls to wear the hijab in school appeared, and I was asked a different question -- “What is it with you Muslims and your hair?”

In times when governments are making it illegal for girls to cover their hair in school; in times when fifteen girls burn to death because the Saudi authorities wouldn’t let them exit their school building due to their exposed hair; in times when Muslim women like my mother-in-law, undergoing chemo, would rather walk the streets bald than wear the hijab, in times when I wake up late for work and to save time showering I can’t just roll some deodorant under the arm and wrap a scarf around my head because of what a scarf represents… It’s easy to feel that Muslims, especially Muslim women, have a monopoly on the divisiveness of hair.

And can you blame us? For many Muslim women having a bad hair day means more than sticking a baseball cap on top of your head as you run off to the supermarket. It means risking prison or beating if you choose not to cover your hair or on the other side of the spectrum, it can mean being kicked out of school if you choose to cover your hair because of your beliefs.

I was about to launch into all of the above, which I’m sure this relative has heard from me before, when ironically a woman with long bouncy hair came on the screen holding a bottle of what you would have thought was a mood enhancer but was actually shampoo.

“What is it with all of us and hair?” I replied to my inquisitive relative.

We can’t turn the channel without hitting commercials that tell us that if we don’t buy their hair product…dye, shampoo, conditioner, vitamin, restorer…our hair will not bounce or be beautiful, luscious and full, or grow back, and as a result our lives will inevitably suffer. We can’t pass by a newsstand without seeing dozens of magazine cover stories promising the inside scoop to the perfect hair inside its pages. And how are the latest stars wearing their hair?

I constantly hear the argument that it’s really not the choice of these young girls in France to cover their hair, that their parents and communities pressure them. Well, that may be true, but I don’t remember having much of a choice in the seventh grade when every girl had to have her hair cut like Farrah Fawcett. Talk about pressure. If your hair didn’t flip like Farrah’s (and no one’s ever did) you would never be popular with the boys, who were all pressured into styling their heads like Starsky or Hutch. And more recently we couldn’t turn a New York City street corner without walking into a Jennifer Aniston hair cut.

There’s no question that hair (and I haven’t even touched on the whole subject of hair removal) is a multi-billion dollar industry. Products and promises may come and go, but there will always be new ones to take their place.

Still, multi-billion dollar industries don’t become multi-billion dollar industries without us, consumers -- any economic professor can tell you that. But what makes us consume what we do, what makes a trend a trend, a statement a statement, like the anti-establishment symbol of the long hippie hair of the sixties or the short spiky punk hair of late seventies and eighties, is not just a matter of economics but a matter of art, literature, culture, gender, cross-gender, race, religion, politics, power.

Obviously, there are as many answers to this question as there are hair products, but when I look at the issue of hair in this context I understand why a young girl wearing a simple scarf around her head to school would pose a threat and stir public outcry. A scarf around the head in today’s world is almost as threatening as the biblical reference that Jesus Christ had black woolen hair and not the blonde flowing locks as depicted in so much of European art. As much of a threat as Sinead O’Connor posed when she walked on stage to receive her Grammy with a shaven head. Her basic act of self-imposed baldness stirred so much public controversy, one would have thought Sinead had someone rip her top off during half time at the super bowl.

Maybe Muslim women don’t have the monopoly over divisive hair issues after all. And I sure don’t have the unequivocal answer as to why, biologically speaking, a bunch of dead cells have since the beginning of time been the source of identity, power, and controversy. But for some of us, a bad hair day means wearing a baseball cap to the supermarket, and for others… Well it really is a whole different matter.

Patricia Dunn has an MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where she also teaches creative writing. Her fiction most recently appeared in Global City Review. Her non-fiction has appeared in the Village Voice, the Nation and the LA Weekly, among other publications. A contributing editor for muslimwakeup.com, Patricia is finishing work on her first novel, “The Other Side of What.”