Touches of Hair in Sofia Samatar's "The Clan of the Claw"
An elderly woman approaches me in the park. Your hair, it must be naturally curly. What’s your nationality?” She reaches to touch my hair. I flinch. She is taken aback, hurt. The monster destroys all innocence, all fellow feeling.
The above quote comes from Sofia Samatar’s “The Clan of the Claw” to describe an encounter she had with an elderly lady. The overall story focuses on the experience of Samatar trying to find her people, or the group of people with similar experiences as her. She makes references to significant figures who were outcasts, and she comments on the similarities with their experiences. However, she doesn’t want to overshadow their experience by taking them over as her own.
The main commentary in the story focuses on finding your place, but the above section focuses on her interaction with the elderly lady to show that simple interactions can have unconscious prejudice within them. The act of touching someone’s hair is now considered a micro-aggression.
A microaggression is a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (Merriam-Webster). To fully understand why touching a person’s hair is a microaggression, it is important to know the significance of hair to identity.
The importance of hair to identity
Hair is a marker for identity when thinking about African and African American hair because it provides insight into a person’s identity and holds cultural significance. Black Hair has had evolved throughout time with the changes happening as a result of colonialism, the slave trade, and assimilation. Rumeana Jahangir from BCC News wrote a blog focusing on the historical importance of hair to black history. It showed that black hair was initially used to identify different tribes or stages of life.
The slave trade and later the segregation would cause African Americans to straighten their hair to fit into the norm of society. These individuals also saw changing their hair as a method for becoming more accepted in society. The civil rights movement emphasized the importance of embracing the natural kinks of African and African American, and the focus on natural has reemerged into the mainstream in today’s world.
Samatar is not the only author who uses hair as an identity marker in her works, and many speculative fiction authors of African descent play with the concept of hair. Tomi Adeyemi and Nnedi Okorafor are other authors who focus on hair, and the importance that it plays when defining an individual, especially Africans and African Americans.
In Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi creates a world where white hair on dark skin is the identity marker, and these individuals are treated differently in society solely based on the identity associated with the color of their hair. In Binti, Nnedi Okorafor plays with the idea of hair having ties to cultural background by making her main character Himba woman. All these works show that hair holds a deep significance in the identity of a person and how they move about in the world.
As people move through life, they are constantly aware of what makes them different from everyone else. While the most prominent factor that people notice first is skin color, hair is the second most prominent factor. The difference between these two identity markers is that people are comfortable with touching someone’s hair without permission whereas it is taught earlier not to touch another person’s body. There are many reasons why a person should not touch another’s hair, and Samatar’s interaction with the elderly provides a good starting point for addressing this microaggression.
Why is touching someone’s hair a microaggression?
- Touching someone’s hair is a microaggression because the act identifies the person as different. People with hair that fits norm rarely have people asking to touch their hair or question their ethnicity. The touching of the hair makes the person who has curly hair feel like an outsider. The person doing the touching has the power in the moment to out a person as different.
- The act also demonstrates an intrusion of personal space. In Samatar’s story, she flinches from the act. In her case, the flinch is an unconscious reaction. Yet, the underlying assumption is there that someone must have something else in them to have hair that is not straight.
- The people who want to touch the hair feel as though they have some right to be able to touch the hair like it is a museum exhibit. The act in a way is exoticizing the person who has the different hair. In a society when people are expected to conform to certain image, it can be jarring for a person to bring attention to the fact that there is a difference in people.
- For people who have constantly adapted their hair for the dominant culture, it can emphasize the fact that society still does not find their attributes as normal. Under the surface of the action, it holds the inequality shared between the dominant culture and the Africans and African Americans living with their hair.
