Change Your Hair, Change Your Life
I can either be Indian or I can be queer in the diaspora. When I cut my hair, I chose to switch camps.
Welcome to Bringing Fire To Earth! This is a place where I talk about the little things we do to effect the big changes we need, right now today. There are essays, poems, contemplation, calls to fight, everything in between. Big ideas and dreams of a better world. I’m so glad you’re here!
Thanks to andy nwannem for the essay that inspired this:
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When I was 27 and living in Minneapolis, I decided to cut my hair. It was February, and it was cold, and I was determined.
For context, I had a long braid that reached to my tailbone, and I had had that braid since I was seven. Twenty years.
Twice before I had started to make noises about "cutting it all off" but I was twice dissuaded by my then-boyfriends who each time had said, "but I like you with long hair" which yes, fine, good, but perhaps I'm ready for a change anyway?
But you know, I was in my 20s and patriarchy is not dead and besides, I'm Indian.
Well, half-Indian.
Diaspora-Indian.
ABCD, but that's a whole separate essay.
And one of the ways that I continually declared myself was by keeping my hair. All the way through elementary, middle, high school. I had no perms, no feathering, no hairspray.
Ironically, it was by looking Indian that I held onto my queerness--I was masc-leaning, a kind of butch I couldn't figure out how to name, my inner dyke biding their time until nonbinary forms of transness and genderqueerness came to the fore. I built my muscles for being different on the back of a less eraseable identity, the one that made me stand out. I chose to stand out more. Long hair, no makeup, jeans-t-shirts-oxford shirts I stole from my father's closet. A quiet longing for cowboy boots, a lifelong and eager turn toward horses. And that braid. I related to cowgirls, to handywomen in tool belts, long braid swinging from under their hard hats, covered in flyaway split ends, faces creased with laughter.
None of the ones I saw were brown, or knew how to eat with their hands, or would ever wear a tika, or knew what bandhini was. But they felt like me.
I was never a dapper dyke and I was never at home in a tux although I wished I could be; I was also not a sport dyke, I hated competition, and I was not a tomboy chiefly because I had no trees with low limbs I could climb and I did not wish to fight with boys, and all my 1950s novels told me that that's what tomboys did. (Years later while working at a summer camp I did find a tree I could climb and I climbed it and it was glorious).
But practical craft, knowing how things worked, making things beautiful and also useful...I take after my grandfather and great grandfather in that way, although I barely knew one and never met the other. My father also did craft, of a sort, but he turned his hand to DIY projects in the house and chemical engineering factory design. So there was never a workbench I could lean over with him, and honestly, we both have hot tempers and would probably have come to blows if we had tried.
But I did find myself. There was no saturday Hindi school or Bharatnatyam, we were too far away and I was not that kind of child. I envy my aunt the dancer's grace and my cousins the lilt of their classically trained songs, but I would not have managed well in the diaspora culture of the 80s. Instead, I found myself in the adventure child spaces that my mother delighted in, and it was good. Nonetheless, I knew I was Indian, and what my light skin made uncertain, my braid more than made up for. I became "that girl with the long hair"; it was the fallback conversation topic and the thing that sold my look whenever I put on traditional clothes. My Indian extended family loved that it was long, that I was vegetarian, that I seemed more Indian than they expected, given my rare contact with the sourceland*.
But it meant that when I finally came out in the mid-90s, I was invisible. Everyone thought of me as slightly more docile, a "good Indian girl". I had never been any such thing, but the braid did a lot of heavy lifting. At rest stops, in the bathroom, Indian mothers smiled and told their children to say hello didi, and in Indian restaurants I always got the menu and the eye contact. For all the unbelonging that I carried, it made a little space for me in the world, admission to a kind of network of tunnels through the thatch that immigrant communities make for each other.
In queer spaces, people looked surprised to see me and wondered who I had come with. Bi erasure was running high, and the fact that I was still dating men didn't help. The queer bookstore clerks and Pride booth people treated me like a tourist. Sometimes it was fun to surprise people; mostly it was a gentle gnawing at my sense of place.
But over time, I felt like I was keeping the braid out of obligation, because someone else thought I should have it, because other people liked it. It had become a burden because it no longer felt like a choice.
And if not now, when?
So right after I was accepted to seminary and before I moved to Chicago, I determined to cut it off.
Hair salons didn't want to touch it, and I didn't want to argue, so I got a friend and a pair of clippers and we sat down in their apartment, hacked off my braid, and started shaving.
When I looked in the mirror, I saw a self I recognized for the very first time.
I knew when I did it that I was switching sides. I knew, but I didn't know. The first time I went into a washroom on I-95 and a mother with dark skin and a long braid shied away from me and pulled her children close to her hip, my heart broke a little. The first time I went to a lesbian bookstore and I got eye contact, conversation, and a flirt from the clerk my heart broke a little more. I didn't know how much I had been excluded because they didn't think I looked like one of them. Now I knew, I trusted them less, even though they trusted me more. How many books of queer erotica does one person have to buy before it seems likely that they are not shopping for a friend?
Now the world has changed since then. Definitions and understandings are broader, acceptance is wider-spread, communities are less isolated. More people who look like more things are in more places.
And yet.
When I go to India, I can be somewhat Indian, but there's still not a place for my kind of queer. When I go to queer spaces, they're white, or they're not, but they're never made of people who look like me.
One time in my life, back when I lived in Chicago, one weekend I found a meeting of South Asian queer women, and I went. It was still bewildering--I am not quite Indian enough, either--but you know, I was in my late 20s and had never seen a South Asian dyke before. She had wide leg overalls and a brassy laugh and I had a second ring of keys moment. She wasn't exactly where I was headed, but finally--finally--I could see it from there.
* sourceland: coined by Kat Tanaka Okopnik to describe the place where a diaspora person has come from and from whence the cultural traditions come