Sometimes, I straighten: my journey with my hair has shown me how much ethnic identity is entangled in aesthetics.

Suheir Hammad starts her book, Drops of This Story, by cutting off her hair--the hair that had been as much a part of her aesthetic as the nose on her face. "I told her to chop it all off. I didn't want the weight of it bending my neck no more. Didn't want to recognize myself. The hair stylist fought me on it. She said it would be a sin to shear off all those thick curls. Did I know how many people would kill for my hair? Did I care? She cut it off. All of it," Suheir writes. Hair plays a big part in this coming-of-age memoir. First times are marked in terms of her hair--the first time she straightened it, cut it, wrapped it. She recalls the first time she had to fight with it in the mirror before school. She wasn't allowed to cut it. It had to remain long and tied back because, in her father's mind, loose hair meant a "loose woman."

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Reading these words struck a chord with me. They forced me to think about my own journey with my hair and, by extension, my ethnic identity and how it is shaped by aesthetics. At this point, my hair has been fried, dyed, laid to the side and chopped up. Until the time I started college, it was long--very long. The first time it was even cut, I was nearly 10 years old, and that was just for a trim. I cursed the long hair every time my mother tried, not successfully, to tame it whenever I was getting ready for school as a young child. Most often, I was sent off with a ponytail and a prayer, because it still looked a mess. But it wasn't just the fact that my hair was long, oppressive and certainly a pain on hot summer days that bothered me. It was the fact that, like Suheir, I wasn't allowed to cut it, by my father's edict. My mother and I used to joke that he wanted my long hair to compensate for the lack of hair on his own head, but I knew better. It was a form of control: he wanted to tell me what to do with every aspect of my life.

Taming the Mane

When I went away to college, my father could no longer control virtually every aspect of my life, so off the hair went. (Snip. Snip. Cry. Oh my God, what have I done with my hair! Ohhh, I look kinda cute, though.) At the time, my intent was to stop taming it altogether and just be the natural me. It turns out the natural me still can't properly take care of my natural hair, so the straightening continued. But that, too, was symbolic of a new sort of freedom, or so I like to think.

You see, there are about three types of Arab hair. First, you have your straight, thick, shiny "swish-swish" (as in, when you walk, it swishes behind you) hair, usually glossy and black. Then you have what those near and dear to me affectionately refer to as "half-nappy," meaning it's a big mess. Friends and family marveled that I would end up with this kind of hair, considering that my mother is white with fine, straight hair. Finally, you have the typical African hair (as in, tightly curled, thick)--most often found in Arabs from North Africa. Years of European oppression (or maybe just too much time spent looking in the mirror) have taught these people that their hair needs to be tamed and assimilated, which is why you'll find them begging any relative they have in North America to bring back boxes and boxes of every hair-relaxing product they can find. More than a few times, my mother (who, before you forget, is very white) would get strange looks from check-out clerks at drugstores when she'd purchase a shopping cart full of Dark 'N Lovely to ship over to my father's sisters and friends in Egypt. At one point, a well-meaning clerk took one look at me and the rat's nest that was my hair and urgently told my mother, "Honey, that little girl don't need all that. Just get her some Just For Me, lowest strength, aisle six, it'll take care of it real good ... you'll burn that little girl's hair off with all that!"

How We Look

The visual is obviously important to us, and as ethnic women we spend a great deal of time thinking about, doing and, in my case, writing about our hair. However, I don't want to trivialize this "ethnic experience." The obsession with aesthetics is, I believe, masking deeper issues. It has been argued that self-worth, ideas about what is beautiful, even self-ownership, are all represented in how we look and how we choose to look.

In Everything But the Burden, Michaela Angela Davis' essay "The Beautiful Ones" recalls my ranting about my own hair, in a different light. She writes, "Our head tales were filled with intense imagination, revolution, pain and satisfaction. They spoke in tongues of large bulbous afros, shiny spring curls, intricately woven cornrows and fat wooly plaits. They spoke in colors of black like Mississippi molasses, gingerbread brown and blond like creamed corn ... we presented the shape and texture as badges of honor.

Living proof that we had made it through the slaughter attack on our beauty." In claiming and celebrating her hair, Davis rejects the conditioning of a dominant culture and pities those who she feels have absorbed that same conditioning. As much as I respect the self-love and confidence that exude from her piece, I have to take issue with it. Yes, how you represent yourself aesthetically can mirror how you represent yourself internally. But to say that simply because somebody relaxes their hair or dyes it, they are somehow ashamed of who they are and have internalized white aesthetics of beauty is to trivialize people of color and their collective mentality.

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In his autobiography, Sammy Davis Jr. suggested that the reason he, James Brown, Jackie Wilson and Michael Jackson wore the conk was because they wanted to appear larger than life as Black men, using that "white" aesthetic to aggrandize themselves, throwing it in the faces of those who participate in championing the very premium on whiteness that Michaela accuses people of absorbing. The absolute rejection of whiteness isn't only liberation, as Michaela would suggest. On the contrary, it can be just as suffocating as the imposition of whiteness. Blackness (and, indeed, whiteness) cannot be uniformly identified and defined as one thing, and to do so is only to feed into the very mentality that we're supposed to be rejecting. Defining Blackness as totally opposite to whiteness is limiting and self-defeating.

Later in Everything But the Burden, Wilona Wilkerson's poem "Dear Mariah," presumably addressed to Mariah Carey, derides Mariah for thinking she's cute "with [her] hinkety high yella ass." The fact that such animosity can be hurled toward someone as benign as Mariah Carey makes me think one thing--there's a difference between owning yourself and your identity and hating anyone unlike yourself. And nobody is immune to confusing the two. I'm not sure if I have the answer to all of this, but one thing I'm convinced of is that no amount of "passing," relaxing or bleaching erases who you are, and resenting those who choose to present an aesthetic different from yours is only denying others the right to be themselves.

The Choice to Straighten

Recently, on a trip home, I thought it would be fun to buy a fake ponytail to supplement the hair that I've been slowly growing back since my freshman-year shearing. Somehow, all of the contentiousness between my father and me regarding my hair disappeared with the purchase of that hair extension. He marveled at its silky, straight swish-swish aesthetic and lamented that. "If you had never cut your hair, it would look like that." I nodded and smiled and let him go on thinking that growing my hair would somehow make it totally change texture, but I was amazed at how easy it was to smooth over our rift. Something as simple as a fake ponytail made him happy, and the fact that I could take off the hair and still be me, in all of my half-nappy glory, is what finally put me at peace with my locks.

When I was younger, I resented the oppressiveness of my father forbidding me to cut my hair. Now, I resent being told that I'm somehow less true to myself because I choose to style or wear my hair in a way that someone doesn't deem authentic enough. If one chooses to wear her hair straight because she thinks that curly hair is somehow inferior because it connotes being ethnic, that's a problem. Me choosing to straighten my hair because I want to be able to get a comb through it? Not an issue.

Ultimately, the only person who can dictate whether or not you are being true to yourself is you, regardless of what society says. In a way, operating counter to what people perceive as the accepted aesthetic is probably the truest way to be authentic and real. Michaela and Wilona may be disgusted with me. Suheir might think I'm a punk for re-Anglicizing my hair. I don't care. It's me--it's what feels comfortable and right. So, pass me the damn flat-iron.

Josephine Zohny recently graduated from New York University with a degree in music business, writing (creative non-fiction) and race and ethnic Studies. Check out her blog at jzohny.com.