The silky blue lights laid perfecting on the dewy, blemish-free almost neptunite skin of a woman. Her back straight, and arm pointed outwards guarding her chest. She looked over her shoulder. Her eyes stared out of the photo asking me the same thing that caption does, “have you ever looked at your body without the lens of your colonized mind?”
Instinctively I reach out for the part of my body that has been the biggest struggle of my life, my hair. The full afro on my head represents the many years of fighting my blackness. As a Dominican woman, I grew up in a family that doesn’t recognize the blackness that lives in our family tree. I’d lay my hair as flat as possible retraining the parts of me to conform to their thought of beauty that was never really theirs, to begin with.
Back then that straightness represented a structured guide that my mother gave. I needed to have straight hair like the family members around me. I had to look presentable. I subconsciously thought any other hairstyle was ridiculous. I’d see black girls with “nappy hair” and internally cringe; I’d reject that part of myself because I always saw my blackness as non-Dominican. It felt like if I ever gave into that clear and prominent part of myself that I wasn’t apart of Dominican culture. So I ignored at any cost. And the price was high. It was my self-love.
Turns out I was playing right into the hands of that colonized mind. That image in my head was the paranoia and denial placed in me by Dominicans that cling to any resemblance of whiteness to feel beautiful, to feel worthy. The ones that carry that “I’m not like one of those niggers” type of mentality.
The mirror has been my friend and my enemy… more of an enemy than anything else.
Perception is a hell of a thing.
At 13-years-old I was a pro at getting my hair relaxed. I’d sit in the tall black leather chair with silver detailing of my family hair stylist, Zenaida. The chair is facing the mirror as I stared at myself. I am covered from the neck down with a draping black sheet. My brown head is forward, and the pasty white concoction woven into the roots of my hair sent heat rippling in waves throughout my scalp radiating different patterns all over my head.
I think now if the chemicals were aware of how much of a dick they were being. Even while I was burning my head alive, I’d keep my composure. Each minute that past was like I was unlocking a new level of patience. Letting the chemicals seep into the follicles of my head inch by inch, how many times did I have to stop myself from scratching?
At the end with my head would be pulsing, I gently call for Zenaida to tell her I can’t hold it anymore. I would go home with my hair laid, but if I ran my fingers through my scalp, I could feel the scabs of where the chemicals clung to my head for far too long. Damaging my skin to make sure that my hair had been perfected.
You end up hurting yourself the more you try to erase yourself. You end up never meeting that perfect definition of beauty.
I learned that my first year of college when after all these years of semi-successfully achieving “beauty,” I had to learn how to personally take care of my hair. I ended up doing what I had always been doing which was ignoring the problem, but instead of there being a salon where I could straighten my hair, there were buns and headbands.
Ignoring wasn’t working out at all.
How do you unlearn years of carefully and underhandedly placed racism? Racism that was so sneaky that you start to believe it and it dictates how you look at yourself.
By realizing that very thing that you tried to snuff your entire life has been waiting for you to take care of it instead. What I found in that journey was a community of black woman, women who have removed those colonizing goggles and decided that the world was wrong. And I began to nurture this black hair of mine while the politics of that black hair became exposed to me, not through internalized racism but through a silent and blatant revolution.
It would be nice to say that in 2019 that I have decolonized my thought of beauty, but it is still there. I’ve conquered that love and appreciation for my hair. Even though, just when I think I found out what my hair needs it switches up on me again. But there are still more parts of my personality, of my own body that I have not fully accepted still. I don’t wear certain outfits because my body spills out of them. I see it as overwhelming even though I’m told it’s not. I am not entirely comfortable in my skin.
When I lay down with friends as we watch random shows on Netflix, my hips are so high that some cannot see over the hill that is my hip and I get made fun of. I end up apologizing when I don’t need to.
What would life be like when I finally stop apologizing for my body?
Slowly not believing the things that I should be, and accepting and loving the things that I am and have always been.
So in short, I have not entirely looked at my body without the lens of my colonized mind? But I am getting there.
Have you?
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