Of course, the song was India Arie’s ‘I Am Not My Hair’.
The feeling of hearing unexpressed thoughts so perfectly verbalised is one of my absolute favourite things about music, and only once before ‘Don’t Touch My Hair’ has an artist somehow managed to pinpoint my feelings about my hair. The second she started singing was an instant “Yes!” moment, similar to the relief you feel when you have a song stuck in your head and are humming the tune for days, to then have the lyrics finally come to you. The songs message of pride, ownership and identity immediately filled the blanks I’ve been struggling to fill since I decided to stop feeling insecure and self-conscious about my hair. The lyrics to the song are fairly simple and with a less powerful message, you could easily get lost in the cool production and Solange and Sampha’s soft vocals. Don’t touch my crown, they say the vision I’ve found”. Solange sings, “Don’t touch my soul, when it’s the rhythm I know. That’s why, whilst blissfully coasting from track to track of Solange Knowles’ A Seat at the Table, and settling on ‘Don’t Touch My Hair’, every feeling of self-recognition and validation that I had experienced listening to the album up until that point, amplified by a hundred. Regardless of where I fall on the love/hate spectrum, my many conflicting feelings about my locs are as tightly intertwined as the coils of hair that form the locs in question. I quickly adopted the identifier of “the girl with the dreads”, and, over the years I’ve gone from liking having a unique style, to resenting it not being able to imagine myself without my locs, to seriously considering cutting them all off hardly thinking about my hair, to obsessing over it. I probably had no clue about what that really meant – but foolishly thinking it would save me from more hours sat between my mum’s legs, I said yes. It started as it does for most of us: sat cross legged on the floor between our mum’s legs whilst she tugs and pulls at our roots, in a battle to get the hair to submit to a style.Īt age five I agreed to loc my hair. Unfortunately, like many black women I know, I’ve had a pretty tumultuous relationship with my hair.