KNOWLEDGE!!

What a fantastic book that is so eye-opening and captivating, and so, so well put together. The way Emma Dabiri has managed to write a book that is themed around hair -specifically hair of a black woman - and connect it to so many issues today such as racism of old, systematic racism now, European fetishization of black bodies, hair and culture while black woman are punished.

I honestly know so much more than I did before - not only about what hair truly means for a black person but how it signifies a bigger community, and a wealth of women in family and friendship - and how this was taken away from the black woman when she was forced into slavery. How people were made to feel ashamed of their hair - how the ideal hair for a woman with natural 'kinky', tight curly hair is still this European ideal of soft silky hair. How that all comes back to when Europeans initially colonized parts of African and brought their weird ideas of what hair was suppose to be, what beauty was suppose to be, what gender actually meant and how they even forced the European idea of time on African communities who used to measure time in a completely different way than we do now.

Natural black hair can even be connected to science and mathematics in the most amazing ways - and I'm saying this as someone who hated maths in school and still freezes up if I'm expected to do any kind of calculation in my head.

Hair in this book is so much more than something to brush (or not brush) every day. It's a whole history. I can't recommend this book enough!

"Through African hairstyles, we can observe beauty standards and aesthetics, spiritual devotion, values and ethics, and even, quite literally, maps from slavery to freedom."