It’s just hair

Guiltiness rest on their conscience, oh yeah
These are the big fish
Who always try to eat down the small fish
They would do anything to materialise
Their every wish
Woe to the downpressors
They eat the bread of sorrow
Woe to the downpressors
They eat the bread of sad tomorrow

—Guiltiness, Bob Marley

It’s just hair. Tell yourself that so you can make sense of this story in the newspapers. The one where the soldiers rob a man of his locks. Well it’s not a robbery. It’s more of a rape, come to think of it. A deliberately dehumanising, socially acceptable form of torture. It’s just hair. Tell yourself that so you can make it through to the end of the story without throwing up. Without wanting to go out and mash up things. Because your hair is still on your head and you can feel the locks tingling to their very ends. With absolute, uncontrollable rage. It’s just hair. This shouldn’t be the story that gets you the most vexed out of the whole state of emergency farce where the politicians finally get the chance to play the role of badjohn and they put their all into it.

It’s just hair. You should be more upset that people are saying that we should bring back the PNM, as if they ever had any interest in improving the fortunes of anybody other than their cronies. It’s just hair. Take a deep breath and consider that soldiers are just doing their jobs, stamping out troublemakers of all kinds. It’s just hair. That is why Samson was destroyed when Delilah cut his. It’s just hair. That’s why soldiers think they have a right to cut it. It’s just freedom. That’s why somebody else has a right to say who can be free and who can’t. It’s just hair. That’s why you can’t escape the irony of a Christian neo-colonial notion of decency being endorsed by a Hindu who must have grown up in a house with a picture of Lord Shiva, watching the Ganges spring from his jata wrapped like a crown around his head.

It’s just hair. And Selassie wasn’t a Rastaman. But Lord Shiva was. And so too, perhaps, was their Christ with his lambs wool hair. And so too the Shaivite saddhus who introduced their sacred ganja and ascetic life to the rural Jamaicans who gave the world Rastafari. It’s just hair. There is no power there that strikes terror into the hearts of Babylon, and the worst kind of Babylon is the one who looks like you, and talks like you but hates you as much as he hates his own blackness. Black like sin. Black like the devil. Black like power that he will never have except to take away your hair and make you feel less than human.

It’s not a thing of beauty. It is a thing of defiance. To wear your hair long. To refuse to deny your hair its right to grow. To reject their notions of beauty and manhood and decency. It’s just hair. And the State has a right to your body. Because the State is a corporation and you are its asset. But your dutty stinking Rasta head is a liability. Cut it out. Your offensive hair that flies in the face of authority. That says you will not be who they want you to be. Cut it out. And straighten it up so that you can look like a decent member of society. Because you can’t possibly be a good person with hair like that. Oh no. You have to be doing something illegal. You have to be a weed-smoking or selling pariah.

So if you have white skin and you grow your ganja hydroponically in your daddy’s nice Westmoorings backyard, that’s okay. If you have a few letters after your name and you’re a successful academic you can do a few lines of cocaine with your friends. There’s nothing wrong with that. But for those of you for whom your hair is your crown, a soldier could come and take it away. Who are you to think yourself royal anyway? It’s just hair, dread. It’s just hair. It could grow back.  It could grow back like the murder rate. It could grow back like the feeling of unsafety.

It could grow back like your contempt for people in authority. It could grow back like your disgust for citizens who are willing to accept that a lack of freedom is okay, once they’re not the ones who have to be disturbed. Certain things for me may never grow back. Like the cojones of certain people who have remained suspiciously silent during this state of emergency. Like your faith that any politician currently serving in the Parliament of this be-loved nation has any interest in building a functional state, a progressive nation. It’s just hair. And in Trinidad, in 2011, it is a symbol of all that is bad and dangerous. Because hair could unseat the power of those who want to turn us all into slaves of capitalism. Again.