Thandwa '20 interviews Basia '19 about her hair (audio can be found here):
-What relationship do you have with your hair?
I love it. Because of its versatility, I can do whatever I want with it until I get a real job and can do all these colours. I love how i can braid it if i want, straighten it, wear it natural, even though I’m a little scared to wear it natural in Vermont cause we don’t have the resources.
-How has your relationship with your hair changed throughout your life? Since coming to Middlebury?
Throughout my life, I still liked the versatility, don’t get me wrong, but I kinda hated wearing it in braids [extensions or with your hair?] Any kind of braids because as soon as I wore anything that wasn’t straight, people just wanted to touch it, get to know the feeling of it; ‘oh you have an afro, why does it stick up when i do this this this. How do you clean it? Do you wash your hair? Dumb questions I would receive and I felt like I was, you know, always the center of a conversation, like my hair was the conversation because people weren’t understanding how I could get it to do things that it can do without thinking, oh maybe she just doesn’t wash her hair at all, and that’s how it can look that way. It was frustrating. Uhhm, but then I found with perms, it was just easier...because I was an athlete too, so I was kinda like, I was always on the go. It was very simple for me to go through my day to day without having to wake up early to do my hair.
- Has that changed since you’ve gotten to Middlebury?
Since I’ve gotten to Midd, I started with a perm and I sucked at taking care of my hair cause I realized I didn’t have my mother to help me or the person id go and see at the salon. I was in Vt. So, like, I had a lot of breakage at one point and ended up cutting off all my hair for a while, which I liked. And that’s when I got into this groove of wanting to always switch it up.
-What role does your hair play in your identity?
The role that my hair plays. I mean, i don’t know, it makes me feel confident and proud cause I can do what I want. But at the same time, it’s like a double edged sword cause the more I get more crazy and wild I get with it, the more people feel like they need to do their own personal investigations with their hands in it, so it kinda just...yeah, that’s...that’s tough.
- There’s this whole natural hair movement. What are your thoughts on that?
Mixed thoughts. Cause I’ll have people that are like why do you have permed hair, don’t you love your own look? And I’m like uhhhm...I’m lazy. So this is easy for me. So, I don’t know, and I find that a lot of people that I have encountered who do have natural hair, they keep trying to push me to do that as if that works for me and I’m like, yeah, if I haven’t done that my entire life, this gonna be very difficult. I might as well be like my grandmother and just have it buzzed. Because I don’t that I’d be able to handle the full like natural thing. And it’s expensive too. Oh yah, I did at one point, like it’s just very expensive to keep up with natural hair because you don’t have...like you know when you go to supermarkets and you go to that section that’s like made for hair that is our texture. It’s so much more expensive than the other things in the stores, so…
-But also do you consider the fact that within the natural hair movement, the hair that is depicted is the loose curls, excluding kinky hair. Does that affect your decision to not move into natural hair?
In a way sometimes, cause my mother has very, like that stereotypical curly hair and because I don’t, I feel like sometimes she picks at me a little bit about it. I mean, it’s just like, ‘oh, just get your hair permed or whatever.’ And so because I don’t have support there, because she pays for my hair and because I don’t want to, that kinda becomes this whole like, yeah i need to perm it, i need to braid it.
-How do you describe your hair?
Versatile (positively)
Complicated (negatively)
Versatile in the sense that...yeah without restrictions from society, I could truly do whatever I want with it, but i guess complicated in the sense that that desire is there, but I know that I can’t. Like a certain age, depending on my profession, I can not do some of the things I want with it anymore. And I think that would stifle my creativity in that way. Idk And that kinda sucks. That’s a harsh reality. That’s the negative side.