Mi Negritud: Accepting Being Black

Hola Mi Gente!

I ran across an article yesterday that really hit home because it reminded me of my journey in figuring out my identity. Growing up, I was hyper-conscious of my hair. It was "malo," which is why my mom relaxed my hair at age 5 and continued to do so until I was old enough to work and cover that cost. Relatives would joke about my hair being so "bad" as a child that "water wouldn't pass through it." My mom would relax my hair at home sometimes and after the lengthly and painful process, look at my hair with such pride and joy and say, "que bella! ahora pareces una china!" The next day I would go to school so proud to have super straight hair that I could comb my fingers through. Being accepted at school and home made the painful and sometimes bloody scabs from scalp burns totally worth it. 

Fast forward to 2005 when I studied abroad in Brazil. During our 6 month program, we spent a month in Sao Paolo and the rest in Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia and a place known around the world as the hub for Afro-Brazilianness. I remember being in Sao Paolo and feeling so disconnected to everything and everyone. I lived in an upper-middle class community with my host mom/sister (she was 27 at the time) who was fair-skinned with green eyes and dirty blond hair. My Portuguese was decent at best so my communication was limited to my other study abroad-mates. At week 2, I was ready to begin the real study abroad program. I was done with the easing-in-process.

When I got to Salvador, however, everything changed. While I still lived in an upper-middle class community, this time with an older host mom who was fair-skilled with green eyes and dark blond hair, I attended University with people that looked like me. My Portuguese improved trememdously, I started to make Brazilian friends, and I started to train capoeira. I also went to beach...A LOT. Salvador itself is on the northern-most part of the country and I was lucky enough to live in a neighborhood that was literally 2 blocks away from the ocean. The first time I went I was so surprised because I saw dark-skinned people tanning. Yes, TANNING! I thought to myself, "they are buggin'!" Now. You have to understand that as a child, I would come to the DR during summer vacations and my mom would slather sun screen lotion on me WHERE EVER we went. Not because she was afraid of sun damage but because she didn't want me to look Haitian (read: Black) (I've spoken about Dominico-Haitian relations in another post). Naturally, I couldn't understand why in the world people who were already dark wanted to...dare I say it?!...get darker. Interestingly, in time, I too started to be okay with being darker. After all, in Salvador, as negras são gostosas  lol (dark-skinned women are desirable/sexy/fill-in-any-positive-adjective-here) But jokes aside, in this part of the world, it was okay to be dark....to be Black...to be of African decent...to be all the things that for 20 years, directly and indirectly, I was told not to be.

A few months into my program, one of my capoeira instructors expressed interest in me. He was light-skinned with green eyes. When he expressed his interest, I was in disbelief. I couldn't believe that someone like him could like someone like me. It wasn't because I wasn't pretty, spunky, or funny. It was because I couldn't belief that someone who was lighter than me could be interested in someone of my skin color. Let me put that another way: I didn't think I was worthy of dating someone lighter than me. Of course, at the time I didn't internalize this situation in this way. But as I started to learn more about myself and my culture, I realized that the self-loathing doctrine that was ingrained in my grandmother from growing up in the Trujillo era was also ingrained in my mom and later, me. (The brainwashing is real, ya'll! There has been so much written about the link between hair and psychology). Unlike them, however, I have been fortunate enough to have had experiences to help me see this foolish reality, and reverse what would have been an inevitable cycle of self-hate and deprecation with my own children. Living in Brazil was incredibly transformational for me in more than one way. I left Brazil feeling so proud to be Black....yet I still relaxed my hair. Some may say that hair is just hair but let's face it, it's so much more than that.

You see, the process of accepting my Blackness, of self discovery, happened in pieces. I've always been pretty adventurous with my hair. One year I cut my hair three different ways. I sported Rihanna's asymmetrical bob for a few months and then her subsequent pixie cut. One time I washed my hair and noticed that my hair curled like crazy where it was shorter (aka the "unrelaxed" part). It made no sense to me for I had cabello "malo" and this type of "bad hair" just doesn't curl. Common sense told that, well, if that part of my hair curled, all of it would too and I did the big chop (I cut off all my hair). For the next couple of months, I got to know my hair like it was the curly long-lost sister who I always wanted. It was amazing! People ALWAYS asked me what I did to get such an amazing curl pattern and, gleaming with pride, I would say, "nothing! It just happens that way!" I also felt angry. Really angry. I was angry at my mom for putting me through all the pain and suffering of relaxers. I also thought, "dang, you know how long my hair would have been now?!" lol. But seriously. I relied on blogs and the internet to learn how to care for my hair and about the natural hair movement in general. As I started to learn more and more about it, I started to feel less angry at my mom and started to feel more hopeful for me, my friends, and our young girls who will inevitably find themselves in the same predicament I was in. I realized that it was an ignorance problem. People just didn't know any better. That means that there was is a solution. All hope was is not lost. 

Like Tejada says in her article, "...I am Black because I am Dominican." I am Afro-Dominican. My personal journey has allowed me to "decolonize my identity" and reclaim what's rightfully mine: mi negritud.