‘Growing up my hair wasn’t something I was proud of’: documentary explores the complex relationship between Black Calgarians and their hair

She remembers being young, having someone touch her hair and tell her “this is what I want my rug to feel like.” She was devastated.

From then she refused to have to wear her hair in its natural state in public. She’d use intense heat to kill her curls and make them lay flat. In university, with the rise of pro-Black hair on social media, she slowly started to accept her natural hair.

Abubaker, a Mount Royal University journalism student, spent a semester working on a short documentary called Black Hair, which looks at five Black Calgarians’ complex relationship with their hair. On Tuesday, she’ll have her second viewing of the documentary.

The 20-minute documentary focus on different issues that surround Black hair — from appropriation, to stereotypes and fetishization.

Abubaker said the project, which spanned months of filming, highlighted the universal experiences that come with having Black hair.

“We all went through the same experience of being young, sitting between your mother’s legs, getting that scalp ripped out of your head, having your mom braid your hair, going to school and getting picked on. It’s something that resonated deeply.”

Adora Nwofor was born and raised in Calgary in the late 1970s. She grew up in a time where kids causally would call her the N-word on the playground.

She learned in daycare that her tightly-coiled hair was not desirable. When she tried trying out African hair styles, she was relentlessly teased.

“My mom was really focused on us being presentable. The only Black folks, we got to look good because we are the models of the minority. Everybody looks to us,” Nwofor said.

“It was traumatizing a lot of times when that one hair comes out, the gel doesn’t stay or it flakes.”

When she was growing up, she said there were no salons in the city who knew how to do Black hair and really only three hair products designed for Afro hair.

“Imagine — now there’s complaints now (about lack of products), but when I was 14 years old and doing my hair by myself there was Dax, Blue Magic and Pink Lotion or a Jerry curl,” Nwofor said.

“There was not a lot of products when we were younger, so if you didn’t have the ‘good hair’ it was a problem.”

Nwofor said hair has been problem in every facet of her life — from romantic relationships to corporate jobs to modelling gigs.

At work, she would notice the way people would treat her if her hair was straight and when she wore it natural. Her hair was often a hot topic of conversation. Employers would suggest she try straightening her hair.

“I actually had a co-worker seek me out to call me out on my hair to prove to people it was a wig or weave or whatever she believed it to be,” Nwofor said.

“So she actually came up behind me and started pulling up my hair from the back of my head to check and see if there was tracks.”

There’s a tactfulness of styling Black hair for certain situations, said Larissa Crawford, an anti-racism consultant and Indigenous policy intern with the government of Ontario.

“When I’m doing anti-racism policy and training or work and I go into a room where there’s all white people … I recognize what I’m saying is already pushing them with their comfort zones,” Crawford said, who often wears her hair in a sleek ponytail for these sorts of meetings.

“After I’ve gotten into the spaces that I need to get in to, that’s when I make a point of wearing my hair out. Once I’ve solidified my position in those spaces, that’s when I claim my identity and that’s when I claim my Blackness.”

Crawford spent most of her childhood in Lethbridge, Alta. The first time people outwardly made her feel different about her hair was in fourth grade, when she moved to the town.

“My mom could never take us to get our hair done anywhere in Lethbridge because they would make us feel so bad about our hair,” Crawford said.

“I remember this in elementary and middle school, I sat in the front of the class and the boys in the back would throw erasers and pencils at my hair. They would have a point system for whoever got the most stuck in my hair. It was so bad.”

In the seventh grade Crawford started wearing weaves. She noticed instantly the interest boys would show her when her hair was long and straight.

“Growing up, I never saw Black women wear their natural hair, especially in Lethbridge, and I never saw that in any ads, any TV shows,” Crawford said.

“It wasn’t until I was 18 and I moved out to Toronto for school, I had never seen women wear their natural hair out like they do in Toronto.”

In 2015, she became pregnant with her daughter, Zyra, and that was the catalyst to shifting her perspective on her hair.

“I really started thinking about my own self image and how I look at myself and how that will impact my kid … I started talking how I feel about my hair so much more seriously because it’s going to directly impact how Zyra sees her hair.”

Nwofor is very proud of her hair, though the struggles her children face frustrate her.

“(My son) grew his hair until he was six years old, and I’d braid it and he went to school and they were bullying him at school and someone cut it. Here in Calgary,” Nwofor said.

“My daughter had cornrows with extensions in it and a little girl was pulling on it, trying to pull it off her head and mocking her telling her ‘your hair is fake’ and pulled my daughters hair so hard that yes a piece of my daughters hair came out.”

Nwofor said she never wants her kids to hate their natural hair.

“I try to let them know that your value is not based on your beauty. You are the most beautiful people on this earth because I am your mama,” Nwofor said.

“That being, said you don’t owe anyone beautiful, you don’t owe anyone presentable, you don’t owe anyone ethnocentric values — that’s not our standard. Your hair is good hair, it’s beautiful.”

Catch Abubaker’s documentary, Black Hair, at Madison’s 1212 on Oct. 30 at 6.30. For more information, visit the Facebook page.