‘da Kink in my hair is a remarkable illustration of story as a nutrition for the soul. This first major play by trey anthony shows her to be one of the most gifted and vibrant writers for the stage to come along in many years. Ingeniously, trey has not only created an incredible ensemble Black women’s voices, but her powerful use of the personal narrative stylistically links her work to an African oral tradition that has survived and still thrives in the African Diaspora in spite of a separation of four centuries and a vast ocean. Moreover, her choice to set the entire piece in a Caribbean Canadian hairdressing salon has enormous resonance for Black women. For no other racial or cultural group is a hair style also a personal and political statement which reflects the beliefs, the history, the aspirations, the pain, the jubilation and the contradictions of many Black women’s lives.
The business of Black hair is almost a $500-million-dollar industry in the United States. Here in Toronto, all one has to do is pick up a Share Magazine, a Pride Newspaper or one of any number of African Canadian or Caribbean Canadian weeklies to see that the overwhelming number of advertisements in these publications come from hairdressing salons and barbers to deduce that a relatively similar proportion of Black Torontonians spend their hard earned dollars in the same fashion. Still, what this phenomenon does not entirely reveal is the significance of Black hair salons to Black women on a psychological level.
Many of us growing up Black and female can relate harrowing tales of being told we have either “bad hair” (read more African), or “good hair” (read more European). To straighten or to ‘fro? That is most often the question. One choice sometimes connoting an aspiration towards European values of beauty, the other possibly either a reaction against it, or an embracing of ones own African-ness. This ultimately raises the questions, when is a hair style just a hair style? or is a hair style really always a statement? In attempting to untangle the roots of our obsession with hair, one might begin to see hair as a metaphor for not only our history, but for our present-day psyches. This is what makes a Black hairdressing salon more than a beautician’s parlour. For while a Black hairstylist might be able to do everything from shape and trim your ‘fro, braid (with or without extensions), cornrow, corkscrew, press (with a hot comb) and/or chemically straighten your tightly coiled tresses. For a majority of women in the Black community, the hairdresser is the closest thing to a head doctor we ever (voluntarily) encounter. She/he will not only twist your dreadlocks, weave very expensive Korean women’s hair into your head, colour your jet black, off-black, dark brown, auburn, copper, tawny or Beyonce blond hair, but she/he will also listen, with the attention of a first-rate therapist, to your countless joys and all of your woes. Now the fact that everyone else in the salon can hear every sordid detail of your story is not usually a call to silence, for all have come to see the head doctor and they too shall soon have their turn to work through the kinks.
This is what anthony achieves with the play. She gives voice to the “kink”, the coil, the loop, the twist, the flaw, the painful contraction, the frizz, the sharp bend produced when a loop in a line is pulled way too tight, the fit of laughter (for ‘da KinK in my hair is as incredibly funny, as it is moving). In presenting a hairdressing salon as a place of transformation, ‘da KinK in my hair requires that we let the stories wash over us; detangling the knots of denial and confusion; locking the multiple curls and twists of our identities in an act of self acceptance.
In the same way that we never leave a hair stylist’s lair the same way we enter it, the characters in this breathtaking story are not merely attempting to get things straight within themselves, they are, in the words sentiment of the great Marcus Garvey, not endeavouring to remove the kinks from their hair; they are attempting to remove the kinks from their minds.
Djanet Sears
Playwright/Adjunct Professor
University College, University of Toronto
December, 2004