Why Rejection of Natural Hair Shouldn’t Be a Family Tradition

September 16, 2014 / Elizabeth Acevedo

In many families with African bloodlines, rejection of natural hair is passed down from generation to generation. Mothers teach their daughters to “fix their hair,” and daughters learn to fear for their own children’s hair.

Elizabeth Acevedo has had it with this family tradition. Watch her embrace the possibility of having daughters with natural hair in this poem.

Click for the Transcript

My mother tells me to fix my hair. And by “fix,” she means straighten. She means whiten. But how do you fix this shipwrecked history of hair? The true meaning of stranded. When tresses all tight like African cousins in ship bellies, did they imagine that their great grandchildren would look like us, and would hate them how we do? Trying to find ways to erase them out of our skin, iron them out of our hair, this wild tangle of hair that strangles air.

You call them wild curls. I call them breathing. Ancestors spiraling. Can’t you see them in this wet hair that waves like hello.

They say Dominicans could do the best hair. I mean, they wash, set, flatten the spring in any lock! But what they mean is we’re the best at swallowing amnesia in a cup of morir soñando. Die dreaming because we’d rather do that than live in this reality caught between orange juice and milk, between reflections of the sun and whiteness.

What they mean is, “Why would you date a black man?” What they mean is “a prieto cocolo.” What they mean is, “Why would two oppressed people come together? It’s two times the trouble.” What they really mean is, “Have you thought of your daughter’s hair?”

And I don’t tell them that we love like sugar cane. Brown skin, pale flesh, meshed in pure sweetness, the children of children. How it feels, how our bodies curve into one another like an echo, and I let my curtain of curls blanket us from the world. How our children will be beautiful, of dusk skin and diamond eyes, hair a reclamation. How I will braid pride down their backs so from the moment they leave the womb, they will be born in love with themselves.

My mother tells me to fix my hair. And so many words remain unspoken because all I can reply is: “You can’t fix what was never broken.”

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Elizabeth Acevedo is the daughter of Dominican immigrants, proudly born and raised in the heart of New York City. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been published or has poems forthcoming in The Acentos Review, The Ostrich Review, Callaloo, Poet Lore, and The Notre Dame Review. She has been a featured performer on BET and Mun2, as well as delivered a TEDx Talk that aired in March 2013. Acevedo was the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam representative for Washington DC, 2014 Beltway Grand Slam Champion, and as of August, a National Poetry Slam Champion. She lives in Washington, D.C.. Follow her on Twitter, or visit her website for more updates on her work.