Hair is laden with story
“Are you a feminist?”
How many of you have been asked this question with a combination of alarm/judgement/derision writ large and barely hidden in the questioners’ faces? Now, how many of you have answered that question dismissively or offered a lengthy explanation along with your answers… to dull the blow?
I know I have. For the longest time, I have attempted to strike softer than I meant to; rushed to rub salve in when I should have ground my foot in instead; I have been desperate to say the right things, when absolute silence would have served better; for the longest time, I have tried to be… someone else.
Now the good thing about growing older, is that one has the sense to look within and like what one sees. One also begins to have the sense to swerve elegantly away from things that one does not like to see/be/meet/fill-in-what-verb-you-like-please. (I am loving ‘soon-turning-forty’)
And the answer to the question: YES (period)
And this is the space that I want my Masters to be all about… I am beginning to see the connections that I want to make between story, gender, empathy and drawing/making/creating. And towards this, I have over the past few weeks, just finished a very engaging course on Coursera. It’s called ‘Sexing The Canvas’. I loved every bit of it. I strongly recommend this course to anyone who is interested in visual culture, art and gender.
And this post is (eventually) going to be about a painting and the artist who painted it, to sort of conclude and underline my learnings from the course and to begin stepping into whatever’s next. The painting that I want to talk about is by Frida Kahlo. And it is called ‘Self Portrait With Cropped Hair’.
Frida Kahlo, the more I read about her, the more I imagine how it would be to be like her. To love so passionately, to create art with such brutal honesty and abandon. She took a life of continuous physical pain, the infidelity of the man she loved, the inability to bear children and laid it bare on canvas. She painted her face with all its pores, hairs and whiskers. And in many of her self portraits, she looks straight at you, willing you to hold her gaze and… fail. The painting shows Frida dressed like a man. She is most likely wearing her husband Diego Rivera’s clothes. And she seems to have been caught between snips of the scissors, she is still holding the scissors in her hands and her beautiful hair lies scattered all over the frame, shorn, but alive… like so many snakes curling around the edges of the painting.
The room is bare, and the bright yellow chair could be suspended in any barren land, was she referring to her inability to bear children? Frida painted this work right after her divorce. I have never seen her painted like this before. Stark and androgynous. The writing on the top of the canvas is lines from a song which roughly translates to: “See, if I loved you, it was for your hair. Now that you are bald, I don’t love you anymore.” Rivera, as my reading tells me, loved Frida’s hair.
This painting, seen in this context, gathers into itself so much power. Like a gaping wound, that will not heal, it looks back at us defiantly. I like to think that Frida, in this painting; is looking forward… she has rid herself off the burden of femininity and perceived beauty. There is violence in the way her hair is scattered all over, yet she looks at you serenely. The only trace of femininity she has allowed herself, are her earrings. Why is she wearing Diego’s clothes? Is it merely to appear manly? Or is she coveting the careless freedom that a man has. A freedom that is often denied to a woman… Freedom is a laden word in the context of gender. And it intrigues me that here, we are looking at the physicality of hair, its presence in dense curls or its absence; and the slippery, metaphysical concept of freedom together in one viewing.
Hair is laden with story.
“As a spider spins out a thread, then draws it in; as plants sprout out from the earth; as on body and head, hair grows from a living man; so from the imperishable all things here spring.” (Hiltebeitel, Alf, and Barbara D. Miller. Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures. Albany: State U of New York, 1998. Print.) These lines are translated from the Upanishads. Hair has long been associated with fertility and sexuality; which is why it is clearly also a trope for femininity and chastity. Whether it is shaved off in deference and sacrifice to a deity or as a symbol of grief and continued mourning; shorn and cropped short as a symbol of non-conformism; or left loose and worn long, female hair has been such a storm of contention and attention. It plays a part in rituals, it has social taboos associated with it, there are social mores in place as to how it should be worn; who may be allowed to see it and who may not.
“In a drastic form of hair reduction, some women have taken the step of close-cropping their hair. This removes all ‘natural looseness’, all the time, even when they are in private. For beautiful women this is a defiant statement which says ‘look at me, I do not need pretty hair to make me attractive’. As such it can be seen as a display of vanity. It is also the statement of a rebel, one who ignores convention and refuses to follow hair trends of fashionable or conformist women. Those women who dislike it see it as a deliberate attempt at self-advertisement by the use of shock tactics. Men may simply feel threatened by it, having been robbed of the quest for the softly flowing locks they dream of caressing.”(Morris, D. (2005). The naked woman: A study of the female body. New York: Thomas Dunne Books.)
Clearly this was written by a man! Now that I read Desmond Morris again, I find a lot of what he says to be simplistic generalisations for something that is far too complex, layered and nuanced. How a woman wears her hair is her business entirely just like any other part of her body, her mind and her intellect. And the sooner we rid ourselves of this burdensome, all too reductionist idea of ‘appeal to another’, the sooner we will find our spines relax and our shoulders ease; we can then let our breasts sag, our bellies fill out; our faces wither naturally, laced with lines etched deep by the hands of grief and joy; let the hair spout where it must… or not… but do it, because it lets the voice from deep within our core sing out loud, raised in lament or in happiness; in hushed lullabies as we put our children to sleep; in thundering, roaring anger as we fight the insensitivities that we are subjected to everyday; or in louder, echoing silences, as we withdraw to let our wounds heal or just be.
It is this rich tapestry of brush strokes that I see in Frida’s work. A limitless voice that resonates and courses through its journey of life, telling its story with absolute integrity. She chronicles her body, her hair, her anguish and her joyousness without the veneer of borrowed notions… I find virtuosity in this particular painting. It speaks to me of a woman who took all of her torment and looked at it at leisure, as if she were examining a particularly rare flower or a particularly iridescent bug and may be in that process found catharsis of some sort.
‘Self Portrait With Cropped Hair’, will haunt me for a while. But it will also give me hope. Every time I look at it… It will help me define my own sense of agency and quietly assure me that a thing of beauty and grace will emerge from this as well.
