One of my least favourite places to be is inside a hair salon. I hate the sounds; the sizzles of hot pressing combs going through patches of nappy, lightly oiled hair. I hate the smells of hair being burnt into submission, either through the chemicals in perms and relaxers or the heat of all the various irons—curling, flat, crimping, straightening. I’m always amazed at the amount of time most of my girlfriends and other women I know spend in salons, not to mention the amount of money. For most of my adult life I’ve worn my hair short, cropped close to the scalp. I love the freedom it gives me of being able to just shower and go without having to devote precious hours every week to standing in front of a mirror combing and brushing and curling and styling. I also greatly appreciate the money it saves me, hundreds and hundreds of cedis that would have been spent on washing, blow-drying, re-touching, and trimming or cutting, that can now be spent on other things. Ten minutes and a few cedis spent in a barbershop every two weeks and I’m done. It’s about all the coiffing I can bear. Eventually, though, I do start to get tired and bored of staring at my face in the same old hairstyle, so I invariably decide to grow my hair out, to try something new. This is what happens: I become suddenly obsessed with long hair, the sheer volume and seeming femininity of it. I then stop going to the barbershop, stop getting my new growth clipped. Wild experimentation usually goes hand-in-hand with these sorts of mood swings involving hair. My hair has been every colour known to man, and a few that previously were not. I’ve had two different sets of dreadlocks. Most times I am content with simply keeping my hair braided for a couple of months, with synthetic (read: plastic) extensions for greater length. After that, I’ll remove the braids and go back to my regular buzz-cut. I’ve generally stayed away from wigs, and in my opinion a lot of the people who wear them should do the same. They often do not look convincing, especially on older women who seem to just toss them on like a French beret, not caring that the tightly coiled gray hairs by the nape of their neck and their ears are still visible. Also, a lot of the wigs I see are ratty looking, too battered to still be in use. These are wigs which, when worn, make you look as though some small, furry animal has crawled onto the top of your head and exhaled its final breath there. However these days I’ve noticed that wigs have become far more sophisticated, as have their owners. When worn properly, some of them, like the lace-front, are actually difficult to detect. I admire the way my more fashion-minded girlfriends change wigs like they do clothes, sporting a different one every day. If Monday is the Beyonce look, Tuesday will be either the Halle Berry or Diana Ross look, and so on and so forth. What appeals to me about this practice is its playfulness and its refusal to buy into the age-old belief that how a black woman wears her hair is a political statement, one that enables others to gauge her level of self-love or self-loathing. Even so, I’ve never been able to bring myself to wear a wig. I don’t like the way it feels on my head, stretched tightly over my skull like some kind of stocking cap. But it was my willingness to at least consider wearing a wig that opened the door to a girlfriend talking me into getting a weave—yes, a weave. And let me tell you, it was quite an experience. The first thing I had to do was choose the hair to be used. I went to a shop that specializes in such things and told the woman behind the counter—I’ll call her, for reasons you’ll soon understand, “The Gravedigger”—what I wanted to buy. “I don’t know anything about this process,” I said to her, “so I’m going to rely on your recommendations.” That seemed to please her. “Well, my first recommendation,” The Gravedigger began, “is to use human hair. It’s more expensive than the synthetic, but it’s better and it lasts longer.” “Human hair?” I asked, with one eyebrow raised. “What exactly do you mean by ‘human hair’?” “Real hair,” she replied, “not man-made like the synthetic.” “Oh, I see,” I replied. “Where does it come from?” “Well, there’s Asian hair, which comes from China or Korea or India,” The Gravedigger explained. “Then there’s also European hair. I’d recommend the Indian hair. It’s the strongest.” That was interesting information but it didn’t fully answer my question, so I decided to be more direct. “Where do they get the hair? Whose was it?” She shrugged and shook her head. I continued. “Is it dead people’s hair?” “I have no idea,” The Gravedigger readily admitted. “But does it really matter? Maybe poor people cut their hair and sell it. Maybe it is from dead people, but it’s not like they’re going to need it or anything.” What she said shocked me. I pointed to her long mane, which I suspected was a weave. “So you’re telling me that you wouldn’t care if that came from a dead person?” “Girl,” she sighed, using both her hands to sweep her hair back into a handheld ponytail, “this hair costs so much, if it would save me some money, I’d go dig up a grave and cut it off the dead body myself if somebody told me where and showed me how.” With that, she released the hair she’d been clutching and I watched, still horrified from her statement, as it fell onto her shoulders and down her back. “Come on,” she summoned, “I’ll show you all the Indian hair we carry.” I followed her to another section of the shop and, within minutes, walked out with a couple bags of what I’d been assured was top-quality Indian hair. I was still a bit apprehensive about the fact that it was somebody else’s hair but I figured, Get over it! Surely they wouldn’t be selling it if it wasn’t sanitary and acquired through ethical means…would they? The following day, my hairdresser braided my natural hair into cornrows and sewed the human hair, the top strands of which had been gathered into a type of netting, onto each cornrow. The end result was…interesting. I wasn’t used to having that much loose hair on my head. I felt like one of those young, long-hair-lashes-and-nails R&B singers who only use their first name—like Ashanti or Monica or Cassie. But that didn’t bother me; I rather liked the change. What bothered me all throughout that first day and then on into the next day was the fact that I was carrying around somebody else’s hair on my head. No matter how hard I tried, I could not “get over it.” I kept envisioning some honey-skinned woman named Kavita, Bharat, or Ananda in a sari, walking around Mumbai completely bald and forlorn. What circumstances had led her to sell it all? Or had it been a desired surrender? Then, too, I wondered how the former owner of my new hair used to style it. Would she be aghast if she saw how I was now wearing her tresses? I tried to not consider the other possibility: the hair which now framed my face might have come from a corpse. In fact, years later, I still try not to think about it. The very idea gives me the heebiejeebies. On the fourth morning, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. I went to the hairdresser and asked her to remove the weave, which had cost me a few hundred dollars in total. She, much like The Gravedigger, felt that my squeamishness was much ado about nothing. I didn’t care. I had her take all of the hair out, then I drove straight to a barbershop and returned to what I realise suits me and my temperament best. I had all of my natural hair shaved off—and before I left, since I still had no idea how the human hair used for wigs and weaves was acquired, I gathered each clump of my hair that had fallen on the floor and took it home with me. This article—which was published in the Daily Graphic on Friday, August 19th, 2011 in the author’s weekly column, “The View From Here”—is copyrighted creative property, NOT fair use material. All rights reserved. This article may NOT be republished or reposted without permission of the author. The author, who is currently registering participants for a private writing workshop, can be reached at outloud@danquah.com