Fnimaniev! Fnimaniev! The Hare and the Turtle: The Black Mona

Abstract

A roller, what women use to set their hair, has long been the center of my head, and within it, my confused identity was debated among my black hair pulled taut and the small painful mounds that emerged from my scalp, resulting in many days being spent with my hair divided in two crowned, punishing buns by two enormous Russian-style knots. I almost couldn’t sleep with those rollers stuck on my head, but that was only the final step of the miraculous transformation that my black woman’s hair suffered. Although they called me a “refined, ready to go out mulatto girl” in Cuba, I suffered and that suffering was immense. Straightening out my unruly hair with soap and caustic soda was like the last draw of the trigger to complete the fantasy of having straight hair, straight hair “like whites.” But two months later, my curly hair appeared once again to remind me how insane the procedure was. And then I learned that I was not really interested. I suffered because of social and street codes that hid the subtle and inexplicable racism characteristic of our society. I didn’t know who I was, and it didn’t interest me so much, because I could be from anywhere, given my incessantly traveling mind. The rollers then became a mortifying sinister armor; they resembled the cylinders of gas explosives that covered certain weapons.