Issue 3: Culture

CULTURE

Stay woke.

My Body HairBy: Sarah Akaaboune

I wanted to be white. A small nagging want that transformed into a consuming, cavernous yearn as I got older and the world more complicated. I had blueprints in my mind of the perfect version of me, a name like Kate or Elizabeth, that rolled right off the tongue, it’s letters bonded by privilege and generations of untainted bloodlines. Limp, blond hair, that lay flat against my scalp, rendered greasy after skipping one wash. Cornflower blue eyes and the special type of pale skin that blistered red after just 30 minutes in the sun. For years I tried in vain to assimilate to standards of beauty that did not apply to me, to a culture that did not want me. And ever so stubbornly, my genetic code did not allow for it, my heritage ingrained within the twists and spiraling proteins of my nucleic acids. Because being Muslim was hard enough in a world where knowledge of the Ten Commandments, stained glass mosaics of St. Peter, and Jesus on a gilded cross took precedence; but passing for White in the most fleeting of instances was even harder, there are times when the facade cracks, when the foundation slips off its axis and people begin to ask questions. Questions motivated by innocent curiosity, similar to that of a toddler newly discovering the workings of the universe, others motivated by a morbid fear or hate or ignorance. Terrorist, ISIS, unamerican, white girls hate you, white boys will never love you, white moms are scared of you, hair straightener at 350 degrees to press away curls into stick straight strands, blue jeans, the Grand Canyon, apple pie and years of correcting the way my father rolled his r’s and snipped his t’s.

A fundamental rule of survival in the United States of America, the easiest way to secure some variation of Norman Rockwell’s American dream, the four bedroom house, the white picket fence, the emerald green lawns, a baseline salary of 80,000 dollars, a golden retriever named Max, and the unvaried calamity of suburban life, was that the lighter the skin, the easier the existence. Dutifully filling out tax

returns, always dropping a quarter in the parking meter, never forgetting your “pleases” and “thank yous”, tipping your college aged waiter with pockmarked skin and the weight of thousands of dollars of student loans resting between his shoulder blades at the local Applebees the customary 15 percent, is not enough. The key, rather, is assimilation - to shed your identity, to strip yourself bare of any hint of culture, imitate the staged candid clean cut models in magazines and billboards; induct your tastebuds to the taste of unseasoned chicken, to dinner before the sun dips below the horizon, and to splicing your ancestry into odd numbered percentages from nondescript Eastern European countries.

There are mostly white women between the glossy, synthetic pages of American Vogue, pages so sharply chiseled that if you were to flip them a smidge too fast, your index finger would be the recipient of a paper cut lasting weeks. They all had perfectly symmetrical faces, not a blemish in sight, dewey skin, noses upturned 30 degrees and no body hair; legs cleanly shaven, upper lips waxed, eyebrows threaded, smooth arms. Body hair on a woman in Western culture is an uncustomary additive of female anatomy, disgusting and unwelcome. Yet I have hair sprouting out of every available square inch of flesh, on my arms, on my legs, a fine dusting on my cheeks on jaw, everywhere where hair is not supposed to be. A fixed part of me that for the longest time, I saw no fault in.

As I reached the cusp of adolescence, the insults began, sharp, biting words that if they were to take physical form, they’d manifest themselves into dark, thick, inky black liquid, cobwebs, and the husks of dead insects. Insults that even today bounce around within the confines of my grey matter. Perperated by young boys on the school bus, boys too young to know any better. Gorilla, monster, was there something terribly wrong with you? One of them, the corners of his mouth crusted with the remnants of a lunch his mother had painstakingly crafted for him the night before, a sandwich cut into triangular halves, sliced fruit and a note telling him she loved him; leaned in close, so close I could feel a hot mist of saliva powdering my face, and told me I was so ugly that no one would ever be able to love me. His words meant nothing more to him than an assortment of consonants and vowels, that would fade into

wisps of a half remembered memory within the hour. But to me, they would dictate how I lived my life, the way I would dress, my mannerisms, my relationship with what I saw in the mirror. Starting at eleven years old, I whittled away my days in the poorly lit guest room bathroom, cheap pink disposable razors slipped between my fingers, gashes on my legs, blood trickling down and pooling into rivulets at my ankles, ironic that something that cheerful and vibrantly colored could cause so much pain. Congealed half peeled wax strips on the chipped formica countertop and crusted to the dirty tiles, empty bottles of strong smelling bleach proven to make your hair 9 shades lighter, but served nothing but reducing my arms into a mismatched checkerboard of alternating black and blonde hairs, my upper lip marred with red scars from pink Nair left on far too past the 10 minute limit.

In a sense, it was more than simple hair removal, but rather a desperate self deprecating attempt to prove my femininity, to those boys on the bus and most importantly to me, to achieve hairless smooth skin only brought me closer to checking off all the boxes that came with white standards of beauty. Today, I can’t wear t-shirts, even in the most scalding and humid of heat, I’ve got a hair straightener on permanent standby, I’ve forgotten how to read and write Arabic, unable to decipher my own book of faith. I am still coming to terms with my obstinate physical features, and the yearn to be white, while it has dulled and dimmed over the years, it still nags the pit of stomach, unrelenting and evermore present.