Good Boy
(This essay has been published in the first issue of Lolwe literary magazine in 2020).
My mother used to shave my hair as a young boy. She also shaved my elder brother Issa. There were no barbershops in our neighourhood, Bula Adaan, in Garissa. The only barbershops were few in the downtown market where my father worked at a clothing store. My mothers’s barbershop was the patch of land between our kitchen that stood in the middle of our compound and the latrine tucked into a corner under thick mathenge trees.
My mother shaved us every few weeks, just when hair was finally appearing on our bare scalps, and the sun was no longer burning our heads as though it were focussed with a magnifying glass. We knew we were getting shaved whenever we strolled home lazily from school, just before sunset and saw a bar soap and razor blade placed on the rim of a jerrycan of water outside the latrine.
We gave my mother a hard time before shaving us. We didn’t like getting shaved, and we preferred playing football in the small open area between our main gate, main house and the latrine. Finally, after some effort from my mother who chased us around with a cane, we sat, like captured chicken, one after the other, on a wooden stool while she squatted, my bawling baby brother Abdifatah fastened onto her back. Sometimes, when she was in a hurry or in a bad mood, my mother shaved us while we were standing.
My mother would grip my head firmly in place with one hand, the way players clasp a basketball, and face me away from her. She turned my head this way and that way. With her other hand she ran the blade up and down my head.
The blade my mother used was called Topaz. It came in a white wrapping with its name sprawled inside an ominous-looking red rhombus. It was the sharpest thing I ever saw. When it grated against my skin, I clenched my teeth. Sometimes when it cut my scalp I would cry, a muffled cry, and my head shrunk into my body, like the retracted head of a tortoise.
“Stop crying,” she said. “Sit still.”
When it was all over I stood up and scratched my head. I said, “Mother, there’s still hair left here, and here, and here…The other children are going to laugh at me.”
“This fire needs stoking!” We would hear Grandmother from the other end of the compound, where she sat outside her room on a woven sisal mat, wrinkles like veins on her loose olive skin, long rosary turning in her hand. Other times she’d shout, “The beans are burning.”
“Coming!” My mother shouted back.
My mother, in a hurry to add water to her beans, said, “Stand straight I bathe you,” she said.
The water and suds on my bare scalp made me squirm. In the evening Garissa wind the water was cold. I shivered. My mother smothered me in oil until I glistened in the twilight.
We heard my Father clear his throat from afar, the sign of his arrival back home from work, and we disappeared into the house.
“Someone get me water for ablution,” we heard him say. From the window, we saw him roll up his sleeves in preparation.
…
In our duksi, the religious school, there were some boys who had downy hair, soft and black as the charcoal ink with which we used to write on our long, thin wooden planks. I was envious of them. Our teacher patted them on the head avuncularly. At home, people liked to play with babies with soft hair. Women preferred to plait girls with soft hair. My mother had downy hair, and it glistened like the waters of the Tana River. When my aunt wanted to say someone was beautiful, she said they were “British.” The ultimate compliment. I had curly hair. As did my sisters, who hid whenever my mother called them to get their hair plaited. They screamed with pain when their hair was combed or plaited, or they sobbed silently, digging holes into their dira dresses with their fingers, tears streaming down their cheeks.
In school and in the neighbourhood, some older boys flaunted buzz cuts. We thought it was cool. It was first adopted by the non-Somali residents, mostly in the disciplined forces and civil service, then by a section of the town’s Somali youth. These boys wore bell-bottoms or jeans way too baggy for their skinny legs which they stepped on when they walked. They skipped classes—they were the “Dodgers,” at once a badge of honor and a symbol of stigma, of trouble. They roamed the deep bushes that grew in the school compound and sat in shop verandas in the neighbourhoods. Their names were always called out in the parade for the wrong reasons. They were whipped, but they never cried. We thought they were real men.
One such boy was called Hassan. He was dark. He walked to school in the afternoon torrid heat, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, his collar flung down his back, his chest thrust outwards, swinging his arms exaggeratedly with qaras—swagger—his trousers sagged and underfoot, his nose sniffing the clouds, his head in the clear blue skies. I was fascinated by him. I wanted to be Hassan.
“The matter is you must remember you are a part of a community,” my father said to us. He cleared his throat. Whenever my father said something important, he always cleared his throat and begun his speech by saying, “The matter is…”
He said to us, “Always be responsible. Don’t be like those boys who wear jeans and keep shaggy hair and sit all day in the verandas, you hear?”
“Yes father,” we said.
…
In high school, I was fortunate to get a scholarship to a private international school in Nairobi. I was glad to get out of Garissa and discover a new world, a much bigger city. The kids here were more worldly and urbane and sophisticated: they had read more books, seen more movies and travelled to more places. This world was both intimidating and freeing. I let my hair grow longer, and the school did not impose strict grooming rules. I would just shower and leave my hair as it was, not even drying it fully, loving the way the dampness made my hair feel softer and darker. When it dried during the day, I doused it with water and slicked it backwards.
Some of the boys took grooming seriously. Like weirdoes and police officers they shaved every other week. They combed regularly too. In the dormitories, soon after waking up, they put on their school uniforms and sprayed deodorant, a medley of sharp scents assaulting our sleepy nostrils. They applied a tonic or they didn’t, and quickly ran combs through their hair in the rush to get to preps on time. Most of my schoolmates were from the Bantu and Nilotic tribes and my hair was softer than theirs, more curly, as a Somali. Some boys would comb on their way to class, in the chilly semi-dark. Others did their grooming rituals during preps, while groggy. Others combed on the class balcony after breakfast and just before assembly. The boys used inordinate amounts of oils, like witches, and engines, until their dark faces gleamed in the morning sun like freshly made pancakes. Some boys, however, were like myself, and they kept afros. Some even had dreadlocks.
At the height of my puberty, I became more self-conscious about my appearance. Idle during school holidays in Garissa, I went to town and bought a relaxer. I came home and spent time in the bathroom, the patterned lizards running along the walls. I squatted and applied the chemical with my bare fingers, the smell at first off-putting. My heart raced, the way one’s heart does when they are doing something dangerous but thrilling. I applied the soft white paste to my hair and combed it. My hands were white and sticky. Within minutes, my hair was soft and malleable. When I combed it went whichever way I told it to go and stayed there. It was magical.
As the minutes passed, it felt as though my whole head was on fire. I rinsed it off, the white water and wisps of my hair seeping down the drain. Sometimes I applied a small sachet of shampoo with a pretty, smiling European lady with flowing hair on it. When I finished, I walked out of the bathroom, feeling guilty for having missed asr prayer, but happy with the outcome. Water dripping down my neck, I looked at myself in the wardrobe mirror and marveled at my hair—it looked dark and downy. I wanted to resemble the players in the English Premier League, like Cristiano Ronaldo or my hero David Beckham or Hernan Crespo. I walked to the mosque feeling on top of the world. In school, after relaxing my hair, I walked the corridors feeling confident. I haunted the bathroom sinks like Mourning Myrtle of Harry Potter (a book I was obsessed with), wetting my hair and looking at myself in the mirror, the bright fluorescent lights making the whole affair more glamorous.
…
For us Somalis hair was something more. We knew hair care products such as “Hair Food” and “Nice & Lovely” and others. We gelled our hair. Barbershops have thrived everywhere Somalis live. In the Somali-dominated Nairobi neighborhood of Eastleigh and the towns of Northeastern Kenya where majority are Somali, many barbershops have cropped up, and it’s a booming business, operated by non-Somali Kenyans, and they boast executive chairs and wall to wall mirrors and fancy decor. When a Somali visits the barber, he stays there for hours. He will first trim his hair. He will most likely get a buzz cut (unless it’s an old man, or a young boy brought in by his my mother or uncle). He will trim his beard, often leaving an O around the mouth. He will dye his hair and beard creepily black. Finally, he will get a “face wash”—the application of facial scrub. Thereafter he will apply gel until the hair was curly and shiny, parting it with his fingers here and there until it felt just right. He will smooth out his face, glance at himself in the mirror, adjust his glasses if he wears them, and, satisfied, he will smile, step out, cool and confident, into the hot sun.
The Somali is a “great dandy” who “possesses a well-kept chevelure [head of hair]” that is “always admired by and is the envy of his friends,” remarked the British explorer Ralph Drake-Brockman who spent some time in the Horn of Africa in the 19th Century during British colonization of the region. Somali men used to grow their hair to the same lengths as women and applied camel butter to it and then combed it into fancy shapes. One of my pastimes is googling old sepia photos of nomadic moran-esque young Somali men with big afros, donning white shawls, and standing cross-legged, a miswak dangling nonchalantly from their mouth. My imagination of “vintage Somalia,” the Somalia of the pre-1970s, involves debonair people with interesting hairstyles walking about the neat streets of Muqdisho, with Arabic-style whitewashed houses and white beaches in the background. Even in Northeastern Kenya where I’m from, a region formerly part of Somalia but annexed by the British into Kenya just before independence, my older male relatives often speak of a time (as recently as the seventies) when as young nomads they kept big old afros, the comb stylishly lodged in. “You remind me of my younger self,” some of my uncles have often to me.
In contemporary Somali communities, however, people are conservative about hair. The ladies knot their hair into buns or braid. The men prefer the close trim. Quintessentially conservative, Somalis generally emphasize the strict observance of good manners and responsibility for men, or akhyaarnimo, and, for women and girls, modesty and beauty.
Yet despite this general conservatism, there is an embracing of individuality and individual styles in the community. The urban male youth is experimental with grooming and appearance. You will also find some middle-aged Somali men who keep big afros and flowing manes that gather at the base of the neck, especially in Eastleigh, Nairobi’s Somali-majority neighbourhood, and they look cool and hip, and they seem to be mostly Somalis from Somalia or those who returned from the diaspora. It is in this cohort of Somalis that I often find kindred spirits. They evoke in me nostalgia for a vintage Somalia I have never seen. Novelist Michael Chabon writes that “Nostalgia, most truly and most meaningfully, is the emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, of seeing what you missed seeing, of meeting the people you missed knowing, of sipping coffee in the storied cafés that are now hot-yoga studios. It’s the feeling that overcomes you when some minor vanished beauty of the world is momentarily restored.”
…
I went to university in Eldoret town in the Rift Valley province of Kenya to study Law. There I grew my hair even longer. It grew into itself, into to a bed of dark-brown interwoven curls. I listened to rock and roll and musicians who were comfortable with being unconventional, and I admired the long hairs of Kurt Kobain and John Lennon and Metallica and Bob Marley and the like. I subconsciously gravitated towards the stereotypical image of the artist: the aloof, long-haired, grunge, trench-coat-wearing, Bohemian. I drifted farther and farther away from what an ordinary Somali was supposed to be, from what my father would have wanted me to be. I grew my hair out because I thought it made me look cool and different. I twisted it around my fingers when I was bored or daydreaming. My hair tempered by perennial baby face, an insecurity I had. It became the thing with which people identified or recognized me with. I was the guy with the afro. It became a vital part of me, almost like a limb.
The world had its own interpretations of my hair. To the Kenyan students it seemed cool, and most of them were used to seeing people with afros. The girls loved it, thinking it exotic, and always wanted to touch it, and I was of course happy for it to be touched by them, and this made me popular with the ladies. My Somali people were, however, unsurprisingly, not amused. They thought it a sign of delinquency and an obvious indication of mental illness. Once, Halima, a Somali girl from Garissa who had just joined our law school, on laying eyes on me, exclaimed, “Who is this mad person?” I quietly left the room and would not trust the lady for while after that.
Keeping shaggy hair in law school of course presented a conflict of interest. I would have felt more at home in, say, art school or media studies. The legal profession across the world is associated with strict rules of attire and appearance. Sharp suits, robes, aristocratic mannerisms. My peers started wearing suits, and they looked sharp as my mother’s razor. I loved suits but was weary of the obligation to wear them, of being formal all the time. I had this restless creative energy inside me that made me want to be spontaneous. I found it hard to be like my peers, even though I knew that the normal thing to do was to be like them. I suspect it was because I had a real necessity within me of not having only one way of being. Someone would later say that I made rules of my own as I went along, that even though I was a grown man, my afro didn’t look vulgar. I considered that I had a non-negotiable right to choose my appearance, that there was a link between my individual autonomy and human dignity. I felt that the society was forcing its choice of grooming practices on me.
This would be a source of constant anxiety in my young adulthood.
…
When I went home to Garissa during school holidays from the university, my mother always commented on my appearance before I could put my bags down.
“Waryaa, why do you still have that bird’s nest on your head?” she said after kissing me on both cheeks.
“I think he wants to braid his hair like a woman,” my aunt Isnino added.
Grandmother laughed and rolled her rosary and arched her neck back, her big yellow necklace glowing starkly against her skin, like little harvest moons in the night.
My father would clear his throat at this point. “The matter is you are embarrassing this family.”
“Your hair looks bad when long,” my aunt said. “Maybe he wants to become a Rastafarian.”
“What’s that?” Grandmother said.
“People with shaggy hair that entangles itself into ropes,” my father said.
“Show them to me I could use rope for my camels! Haha!” Grandmother laughed.
“The matter is you have become Maikal Jackshen.” My father was not a big fan of Michael Jackson.
“I say give the young boy a break,” Grandmother said.
I said to my father, with an obvious trace of pontification and righteous indignation, “But you and your male relatives used to keep big afro hair when you were young men.” I said. “Why can’t I?”
My father scratched his goatee and sighed. Everyone looked at each other.
Grandma said, “A riddle is only defeated by a riddle!” She talked about how indeed before colonialism Somali men kept big afros and long manes and even applied camel fat to their hair. It was a glorious time, she thought, and men were so fashionable and so masculine.
“Camel fat? I said. “Gross. But thank you Grandma for appreciating my style.”
When her appeals failed, my mother tried other approaches. She began attributing any issues I had to my hair. Whenever I complained of a headache, she said, “Shave that nest of hair waryaa.” When I was moody she offered: “Definitely that stinking wool on your head.” When I fell ill, she was ready with a diagnosis: “It’s the hair.” I could not complain about anything to her because she always advised that if I shaved my hair all my problems in the world would be resolved. Whenever she saw me approach she made the stop sign and said, “Uh uh, just get rid of the hair!”
…
My parents loved to see me look smart and comport myself as a respected member of society. My mother was happiest and proudest when I was adored by everyone. I couldn’t understand their concern with what other people thought. My father desired to see me about, smartly dressed and cheek by jowl with other smart and religious young men.
My father made efforts too. He often gave me money to shave. But I used the money to watch English Premier League matches at the neighbourhood video stall. The next time he saw me, he looked at me and scratched his head. He promised blessings and prayers if I shaved.
My father often said, “Why don’t you just be a good boy?”
I feel ugly without my hair, I wanted to say. But I said nothing.
Other people in my hometown were disappointed too: relatives, neighbors. They never passed up an opportunity to voice their disapproval. When all their pleas fell onto deaf ears, divine intervention was considered. This was definitely an illness of the soul or a demon. Not used to people with afros, bewildered children would often stop in the road and ogle me for uncomfortably extended periods, turning around and looking back at me even after passing them. It was an anomaly, and it was not common for boys and men to keep afros. Even my brother Issa and cousin Aden kept their hair neat and short. Random strangers would pull me aside by the road and counsel me sincerely. Their advice was thorough and passionate. Some simply pleaded, implored. They seemed to have taken the matter entire personally. They were offended and could not believe I was walking around breathing the same oxygen while having “that” on my head. They concluded their sermons by saying I simply must shave. That was the only way. I was shocked the first few times. I would be dying to offer an angry retort (what business is it of yours? Do you pay for my food? Who are you?). But I would instead adopt a somber look and nod in vehement agreement with the unsolicited adviser’s thesis. Sometimes I would throw in an ironic smile.
Once, while doing my internship after law school, a colleague advised me to shave if I am serious about being a lawyer. “You are a handsome young lawyer,” he said. “But you have to shave your hair to be presentable.” I sighed and stared at the files in the cabinets behind his executive table. He went on, “Listen abow. People are just judgmental. They can’t help it. They will deny you that job simply because of how you look.” He looked at me, genuinely concerned. Up until that point I had always been antagonistic to negative comments about my hair because it was a personal matter. And often it was always from people who were too close to me. But this comment by this avuncular colleague made me realize that my hair was no longer only a personal matter. My hair and appearance was a public issue whether I liked it or not. Maybe it was because of how he empathized when he said, “People are just judgmental.” He humanized my critics for me: they were no longer bad guys imposing their will unfairly on me, but just human beings. For once I truly saw it from the other person’s perspective.
…
It anguished me that I was disobeying my parents. They had done everything for me. Why couldn’t I be “a good boy?” I believed I was generally a good son, and it was only in this area that I was stubborn. What is worse than seeing your parent simply watch you, their child, from a distance, utterly disappointed, convinced they had failed as parents, maybe even wondering why God burdened them with such a disobedient child. The greatest source of a parent’s pride is from the adoration of his children by other people. A son’s greatest source of meaning comes from the respect and approval of his parents.
And all this for what? Just so I could so I could keep my head of hair, even though it turned my parents’ sense of values and principles topsy turvy? Just so I can stubbornly be myself? When did I become so individualisitic? But what about their sense of self? my relatives? the community’s? Is my hair worth all that trouble, all the anguish, on my part and on theirs? And where is the line, if at all there is one, between a child’s need to forge their own identity and their parents’—even the community’s—role in shaping the child’s sense of identity to their own preferred way? Which one should take precedence? Can something seemingly so ‘trivial’ as hairstyle be so serious as to significantly shift one’s identity and moral standing in the eyes of others?
During one school holiday, I walked to a barbershop in downtown Garissa. I looked at my hair through the mirror, taking one last glance, as if to permanently brand the image to my memory, perhaps so I could remember who I once used to be. I looked helpless as I stared at the buzzing machine, frightened, uncomprehending. It all came tumbling down. My hair gathered in useless heaps on my lap, reduced to nothing by the hurried strokes of an indifferent barber. I felt as though I had lost a limb as I walked back home, navigating the dusty pathways of Bula Adaan, my head light, my heart heavy, my scalp exposed to the elements, burnt by the scorching heat of the Garissa sun, the whistling winds almost knocking me off, my ‘mast’ gone.
At home my mother was ecstatic. She started referring to me as “my good boy.” She made me a special dinner of spiced tea and anjeera pancakes served with liver, my favorite meal. When my father saw me he could not hide his toothy grin. The mood in the house became festive as though a new baby was born.
Perhaps I was born anew. Because I could not recognise myself as I stood before the mirror later that day. I cringed. The reflection staring back at me from behind the mirror seemed to me like a funny looking stranger. I thought the image before me resembled Gollum, the hideous creature from TheLord of the Rings.
I wasn’t the only one who didn’t recognize himself. The following afternoon I went to see my law school friend Abdifatah in the next neighbourhood over. He couldn’t recognize me when I approached him. After laughing, almost to the point of tears, he said: “Bro, don’t ever shave your hair.” It felt as though that was the best advice anyone had ever given me.
I stayed indoors for weeks. I cringed at my image in the mirror. I wished I could cast a spell and my hair would grow back in an instant. I was happy when my hair grew back.
…
Leaving Garissa at an early age and studying with people from different ethnicities helped temper my ingrained lack of self-esteem about my own hair. As a young adult, reading helped me embrace my sartorial peculiarities not as flaws but as part of my own unique sensibility and accept that I could be many things at once. I stopped relaxing my hair, long before I read the autobiography of Malcolm X,one of my heroes. The chemicals were damaging my hair and it had begun to fall off and lose it color. I realized I would rather have my own natural hair than one which was not really mine. Even though relaxing my hair made me feel like it looked better, I felt ashamed of this. I came to understand myself as not only Somali but a member of a bigger community of African peoples. I was pleased to find out that leading African-American civil rights activists like Angela Davis kept afro hairstyles, that closer home, African colonial fighters such as the Mau Mau freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi kept dreadlocks, as did the great Bob Marley whom I admired and loved. I felt I was part of this heritage. Yet, I faced opposition to my afro hair. In history I felt at home; in real life I was an alien. In this I understood, I think, the root, the very scalp, if you will, of modern hair politics—the prevalent Eurocentric notion idea that straight hair is the standard of beauty, and the subsequent rejection of this by some enlightened persons who are not Europeans, as part of a growing political consciousness predicated on racial pride.
As I grew older I trimmed my hair it more and more to try to appease my parents, to try to meet them halfway. I still live with the guilt of their disappointment in me and maybe one day I’ll shave it to the level they want. Now, my afro does not feel out of place with a suit. It’s considerably less in volume than before.
I still feel nervous when I enter a barbershop. I worry a careless barber might cut too deeply. Every time a sharp object comes close to my head I remember my mother’s razor. I still feel the cold water running down my body. I still shiver.
