Written piece
Conversations with My Hair
Itah Patience Mbethki
Uganda
About this piece
The submission is poem written on hair and its interpretation within a personal reflection of what it means for a woman to have hair, to cut off their hair especially in an era where hair comes with a lot of pressure.
Conversations with My Hair
Imbued in the ethnicity of hair,
My strands are tribal knots released from
The yokes of modernity,
Reclaiming
their kinky coiled form.
My hair shouts out in protest,
“I NEED NO FIRE
ONLY WATER TO QUENCH MY THIRST!”
The voice of my hair is the tribal shout
That called the clan to fight off invasion.
It is the music of the forests and sounds of the wild,
That stood its ground and remained long after the
Land was attacked.
My hair protests the judge-mental glare,
And scoffs at alien spirits
That hold captive the heads of the naïve.
My hairs are the awakened soldiers
Fighting back at century-old wars
In which their ancestors were victims
Of many forces unknown.
Yes! My hair screams in its clan wrought way
And in familial design
its voice a rejection and condemning,
A confrontation of powers
And a consolidation of my place;
Reclaiming my society’s graces.
My hair is a resilient
unmovable
indestructible
nature of its coiled defense,
The founded throne of its ever-present crown
The blackness of its classiness,
The brawniness of its sun,
The tackiness of its speech
The crankiness in its thickly held folds.
My hair
is the jewel that
Adorns the necks of freed minds;
The hair I wear, is a river sound,
It falls, once, twice and thrice.
It is the heart-beat of my nature,
The symbol of my presence,
The intricate feeling of my soul
And the budding light of revelation
Through my tears and my joys.
It is the first change in my changing,
The foundation of my charging,
It is the sign that the battle is ripe
And the field is ready.
Yes, my hair is my visible secret weapon
The armor I use for quest and conquest,
My hair is war.
My hair is peace.
My hair is diplomacy.
IV
My hair as native speaks all the tribes of its people,
Swahili, Luganda, Samia and Rukiga,
It is the essence of the nativity song,
Coping in the biased fog
Of counter-pointing
In its hairizing, it is decolonizing the head;
It is the boisterous force with which I crush
Hostilities
And the powerful action that shatters dominions.
My hair is the spirit of my nativity soul.
Ha! My hair sings on its own
Because it was watered by nature,
Now it stands firm in its conscious spirit,
Aware of the power that lies
Within its loud silence.
Yes! ask them who have
Seen the nativity cut
Twice and then again…
It stretches like a road headed away
Only to turn and find a new path to back home.
V
My hair is freedom
That danced
The night
it conquered
My nature;
With lessons of truth
That become starting again.
It stood proud
As it fell in sheaves
Down the barber’s chair.
It washed away with liberating waters
And shouts of redemption.
I had become hair-less
And then upon the ruins of the broken spirit,
arose a fierce
Unbreakable fire
Of re-growth.
“We shall rise again you and I” it said,
And we rose and freed the un-free from the bonds
Of holding on.
11
My hair as poetry
Are the lines that run through
In dizzying sizes of cornrows,
The falling cascades of the spring rolls,
The bald statement of courage.
It is the cut tree sprouting at the roots,
Each shoot a story of
My survival.
My hair is the rebirth in which
Restraint, virtue and perseverance live.
It is the potent passion of those who
Wait years to enjoy
The fruit of their labour.
My hair is the gourd
That keeps the secrets of the past.
It is the earthiness of propagated life.
It is the lustre of every language
The longevity of the short
The briefness of the stretched out…
My hair is the truth
In all the seasons of my living.
It is the scenes that run in the drama of my life.
It is the agony of my being,
Through the gaze of its many cuts.
My hair is the spring board of my being.