nafisa in the south

# 22 : Project Perm

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And I say to thee, race is discursive not visual-biological.  So, I got a perm today.

Begin shpeil »  » »  I’ve been changing my appearance frequently and radically throughout my post-adolescent career as a ferocious asshole.  The fact that I haven’t at all while in Calcutta (and feeling like I am lying through my teeth every-day for reading as a ‘nice’-little-girl) is almost a testament of my personal stagnation.  Two days before I boarded my flight to India I went to cut my hair Off, as a deliberate public marker.  Why wouldn’t I want to become invisible in India, I wonder.. hah.

Having your body read is a tedium that is keenly -experienced- and one that I like to think, is especially fun for POCs to pick at.  In the US I’m not just brown.  I’m a glorified brown person.  I can confidently claim a particular politicized community there.  There has not been any sort of mainstreaming of this type of identity [read:me] in any sort of public culture.  Nor does Race in the larger american narrative have a fetishized “hip” South Asian.  There’s abundant fantasy about terrorists, Mouglis and Jasmines, Sanjayas?, or the new tanner model minority geek.  Boring.  Though it’s nice to think that my existence, and the small group of peers is a confrontation between these different lines.  See, I also often glorify myself.

I’ve been balking since high school at any sort of racial fetishist banner.  Maybe a little too much to the point where I felt physically ill wearing a salwar kameez in the presence of a non-South Asian person.  Ask my parents.  Certainly the treatment I got as a youngin (“Nafisa, what does that mean, beautiful water lilly in Asian?” verbatim - high school english teacher) made me feel like a perpetual fan-dancing Other.

In other words, frequently chopping up my hyper racialized hair to obliterate it from resembling “Oh-Can-I-Touch-It” S.Asian hair was an early, admittedly simple, impulse.

But I cut my hair 2 days before my flight with eyes towards India (or rather Dhaka).  Initially I was most afraid of being buckled into a patriarchal straight-jacket because of my long locks.  That’s my baggage from being stuck in the paternalistic headlock in Bangladesh.  I’m certainly no stranger to squirming under various gazes or exercising privilege and access because of the way I look.  Similarly, I wanted to cut it in a genderblender way referencing how I was back when I was organising.  Man, my short hair had currency then.  Then again, nothing a part of that identity mattered much when I was living with family in South Asia.  Why I thought it would matter much living in Calcutta, is beyond me.

So I’ve gone ahead and permed my hair straight.  Certainly not as a way to edge a seat closer to White beauty (or what’s a little more immediately relevant is edging a seat closer to the perfect South Asian beauty, which I hope I alluded to earlier and how it still makes me vomit a little).  I’m in a completely different train, of circulation, symbols and norms. It’s been interesting, like living with a (faint) phantom limb.  I don’t have to deal the same fetish-object relationship here.  Haha. Instead, this haircut is a little more about me not drowning in invisibility in India.  Hair has been a veritable obstacle this year.  More later and why it’s been good to be “ugly” this year.