‘Hair’ by Sinéad Gleeson

In the 1980s, nearly every six-year-old girl I know has long hair of unremarkable brown, as I do. There is a whole vocabulary for these shades, but mine is frequently referred to as ‘mousy’, which makes me think of timidity, and of mice in hedgerows. A girl at school passes on a great and mysterious secret: plaiting your hair and leaving it in overnight leads to transformative gorgeousness the next morning. Caught up in this revelation, I bind my locks into tight plaits and pull the blankets over my head. The anticipation, the eye-scrunching excitement, means I barely close my lids on the first night. The bumps are hard to sleep on. It will be worth it, I tell myself, already imagining a new me. Waking early, I take my mother’s comb, with its collapsible blue and red handles. It’s an Afro comb, and I do not know how it came into my mother’s possession. Whether it was a gift, or an impulse purchase at a pharmacy counter. It is an excessive tool for the fine, thin hair we both share. I loosen the bobbins and begin to brush, unravelling them as a skein of wool.

And there I am: Rapunzel without the tower, and at six I am ambivalent about princes. A memory appears: Kate Bush in a video on Top of the Pops, all fierceness and red-brown mane, her hair so much part of her essence and energy. In front of the dressing table mirror, with its mottled edges, the plaits loosen. I stare at the waves, at this sea of hair. And for years to come, every time I hear David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’, and the line about ‘the girl with the mousy hair’, I think of those long ago plaits and that old mirror. Of weaving a spell out of your own hair, of how we can alter ourselves with one gesture, in one night.

On a whim, months later, I tell my mother I want to cut off my hair. The hairdresser, my aunt, lives in a terraced house and cuts hair – only women’s, never men’s – in her kitchen. She is always immaculately made up, lip-glossed and kohl-eyed, with elaborate ash highlights. In less than an hour, mousy chunks are scattered on her lino. I regret it instantly, and for years beg my mother to let me grow it back. She refuses, saying that short hair is ‘easier to manage’. My aunt deems it a pageboy style, and every time we return for a trim, my mother tells her to cut it ‘like Princess Diana’ as she flicks through a magazine. I begin to miss my hair, the feel of it grazing my shoulders. No more night-plaiting and waking to hair that looks like rippled sand after the tide has gone out. On a trip to a family wedding in Liverpool, a man mistakes me for a boy and calls me son. I cry for hours. My godmother, who has always had short hair, consoles me. She gives me the first hardback I ever own, bound in red mock leather with gold indented lettering. I read, but don’t understand everything in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. These girls are as unique as they are similar. Their close, bonded friendships make me want to leave suburban eighties Dublin and relocate to their nineteenth-century world. And Jo – surely everyone’s favourite Little Women character? – does something that makes my admiration of her even greater.

As she spoke, Jo took off her bonnet, and a general outcry arose, for all her abundant hair was cut short.
‘Your hair! Your beautiful hair! Oh, Jo, how could you?’

Her newly shorn look invokes horror. Even Jo assumes ‘an indifferent air’, when it is clear she is distraught at the loss of her hair. Oh, Jo! We are crop-haired kindred souls! I think. The books we first read are the ones that indelibly affect us. The characters feel closer to people who are real, who merely happen to live in another time and place. As an only girl, I envied Jo and her sisters. Their closeness and connection was not unlike my friendship with my brothers, but hair was not something I talked to them about.

Jo’s reason for cutting off her ‘one beauty’ is to help the family, who need money. Her sacrifice parallels the narrative in O. Henry’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’, which also places hair at the centre. In the story, Della has some of the most exceptional hair in all of literature:

[It] fell about her, rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her.

Della’s motivation is similar to Jo’s. It is Christmas Eve and the opening line tells us how little money she has – ‘one dollar and eighty-seven cents’. Desperate to buy her husband a platinum chain for his beloved watch, she sells her knee-length hair to a wig-maker for twenty dollars. While she waits for Jim to return from work, she thinks: ‘Please God, make him think I am still pretty.’

When Jim arrives home, he is shocked by her actions and changed appearance. The tragedy of their situation is elevated when he reveals that he sold his treasured watch to buy expensive (but now useless) tortoiseshell combs for Della’s hair. Their mutual sacrifice of precious objects reinforces their love, but not before Della fears her short, unfeminine hair will mean that Jim desires her less. ‘Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?’

Della’s self-definition is through her physical appearance, specifically through the hair that her husband so admires. Her identity is bound up in her looks, and not something that stands alone. The story was published in 1905, when many women stayed home and didn’t work. Della is financially dependent on Jim, awaiting his return from work on the day she sells her hair. Economically powerless, she uses the one thing she has as a commodity, and the act of cutting her hair can be seen as either a castration, or an act of empowerment. I didn’t have Della’s luxurious hair, but cutting mine off at seven felt thrilling initially, until I longed for it to grow back. I had tomboy tendencies, and never felt like I wasn’t a girl. Femininity was an abstract, a word I didn’t know.

*

Hair is dead.

Each curl, every dyed or product-plied strand, is resting in peace. I used to believe the myth that hair continues to grow after we die, but the only part that is alive is inside the follicle under the scalp. And to me, it sounds made up, or just gloriously apt, that head, pubic and armpit hair is known as ‘terminal hair’. Keratin, the protein that forms its basis, is the same one found in animal hooves, reptile claws, porcupine quills, and the beaks and feathers of birds. Wing tip to split end, fetlock to forelock, we mammals are a menagerie of polypeptide chains. Each strand contains everything that’s ever been in our bloodstream. Are memories there too, lurking between medulla and cuticle, embedded in each lock?

Not dead, but ‘terminal’. Protein and protean. Like blood, it’s difficult to tell male and female hair apart, but it is women who have been historically judged for their crinicultural choices. Reductively labelled in noir films as blonde, redhead or brunette (a practice that exudes privilege, and ostracizes people of colour and other ethnicities). Hair has been used to define women racially, sexually, religiously. It makes them into temptresses: represents a troika of femininity, fertility, fuckability. This conflict is inherent in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus where Venus is ‘born’. Depicted as new and unsullied as a baby, but represented as a fully formed, voluptuous woman. Naturally she must cloak her nakedness – with what else but a swirling mane. The women of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings have loose, abundant hair, like in Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. According to Jewish tradition, Lilith was Adam’s first wife and her name was long associated with female demons (one translation of her name is ‘night hag’). She was created at the same time as Adam, and not, like Eve, from his rib. The relationship soured because Lilith refused to bow to him, considering herself an equal, and not lesser. Emblematic of seduction, in Rossetti’s picture she is utterly preoccupied with combing her lush hair. John Everett Millais paints Shakespeare’s Ophelia as she drowns in the river, her hair a funereal shroud. If loose, untrammelled hair implies that women are morally questionable, hair pinned up and tied back means the opposite: respectable, prim and obedient. Hair as signifier and symbol represents everything from social position and marital status to sexual availability.

*

In the song ‘Hair’, from PJ Harvey’s 1992 album Dry, the singer gives voice to Delilah, a biblical woman, with one of the most infamous hair stories of all. Delilah is anchored in history as a betrayer and fallen woman because she tells the Philistines the source of Samson’s strength. In Harvey’s song – as well as her obvious love for Samson – Delilah admires his hair, ‘glistening like sun’. She recognizes its dual power – that it is possessed of actual strength, but also as a tangible thing she covets. Harvey’s lyrics plead: ‘My man / My man’, as Delilah realises that her betrayal means she can’t have him, or his hair. Samson is weakened and defeated without it, but there are other possibilities that come with the loss of hair. As a teenager, I learned that there is power in absence.

Wogan’s Barbers was an old, wooden-planked room, long gone from Dublin. One Saturday afternoon, aged sixteen, I had made up my mind and took the bus to the city centre. In its dark room (a different kind of waiting room), I queued among old men for an hour. When my turn came, I eased myself into the leather chair and the elderly barber encircled me in a black cape. Upon hearing my request, he shook his head.

‘We don’t do that for girls.’

Red-faced and watched by other curious customers, I slunk out the door and made my way to another barbershop. Again I sat down in another leather chair, and the cape ritual began.

‘You sure, love?’

‘Yep.’

‘Last chance, now?’

‘Go for it.’

The radio blared, tuned to a 1980s hits station. The clippers slid through my dyed roots, buzzing in my ears. He started in the middle, working outwards, and at first it resembled a samurai’s chonmage. In five minutes, it was all gone. Like Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (what must it have been like for an actress in the 1920s to shave her head for a role?). Shorn. On the bus home, I wore a hat against the February cold, and the word rolled around my head like a marble. Shorn. At school, there was outrage. A talking to. Fears of copycat head-shavings. Enquiries about my health. Jokes about Sinéad O’Connor, who had been on TV that week winning an award. In the months that followed, I was often mistaken for her. One man insisted I’d been in Filthy McNasty’s pub in London, drinking with Shane MacGowan. Every time I’ve shaved my head, or sported a suedehead of regrowth, there is always a response, especially from men. They are mostly horrified, or bemused; some declared it attractive: but I was always asked to justify myself. To explain what I’d done. And why.

‘What did you do to yourself?’

‘Did you have a fight with a lawnmower?’

‘Are you a lesbian?’

‘Why would you make yourself unattractive?’

‘But . . . it’s like sabotaging yourself.’

‘What did your mother say?’

(Note: never ‘father’.)

In her book Girls Will Be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently, Emer O’Toole writes about shaving her head as a young woman. O’Toole outlines all the assumptions made about her, from her sexuality and availability to her personality type and demeanour. Having no hair also brought its own stereotypes, many of which were gendered.

Shaving my head for the first time was not a feminist act, but it kissed my feminist consciousness awake for good. Because I came to see that if people were assuming that I was aggressive because of a shaved head, they had equally been assuming that I was passive because of long hair [. . .] If my short hair made people pigeonhole me as homosexual, my long hair, then, made people pigeonhole me as heterosexual. Long hair, short hair, conformist, non-conformist, feminine, masculine: I was being gender stereotyped all the time. Suddenly, I had a new way to see.

*

D-Day, France, 1944. There is joy and celebration in the streets at the news of liberation. A truck pulls up, to the cheers of a gathered crowd. Women, their heads bowed, their faces a mix of sorrow and fear, are slowly hauled down onto the narrow street. Many of these women – young mothers seeking food for their family, a teenage girl, a sex worker – are accused of ‘collaboration horizontale’, sexual collusion with the enemy, which sometimes led to having a baby with a German soldier. They are paraded in the streets and lined up. A man, prepossessing and determined, holds up a razor. One by one their heads are publicly shaved. The punishment is an attempt at defeminizing them, at chastising them for their traitorous actions, but more for their display of sexuality. These women were known as ‘les tondues’, from the French ‘shorn’. Women who were humiliated and branded sexually, not only in France, but in Germany too, and earlier in Ireland during the War of Independence. A misogynistic act of comeuppance watched by large, heckling crowds.

*

My first head-shaving was aged sixteen, but there have been many occasions since. Once – classically – after a breakup; then during final year college exams; another to divest myself of a scalp-burning, high-maintenance bleached crop. The last time was in 2003. From motivation to method, I had little control over this particular haircut. This was the only time I removed the hair myself and the incentive was practical, not aesthetic. There was a diagnosis – a rare and aggressive type of leukaemia. Chemotherapy was just one aspect of the treatment, which began the day after diagnosis, with heavy doses of a drug called Idarubicin. I heard the word as ‘Ida Rubisson’, and imagined a stern, kindly Jewish matriarch (does she wear a sheitel?). Not all chemotherapy kills hair (Idarubicin, bless her, does) but it doesn’t fall out in an instantaneous cartoon moment. There is no KAPOW! and it’s gone. You wake up with it on your pillow. You brush it and strands come away in clumps. You watch it slip from your scalp and there is nothing you can do about it. The decision to get rid of it all came down to one thing: my eyes. Constant shedding irritated my lids, and my vision was already affected by the drug regime. Half, but not all, of my eyelashes fell out. My eyebrows thinned and clung on. The friendly Indian nurse – the one paged to deal with difficult, collapsing veins, frequently mine – laughed nervously. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, holding the hospital issue clippers. In that moment, I was back in the barbershop, twelve years earlier. Are you sure?

It was another cold day, also February, but this time I had no need of a hat. The hospital air was hot, overpowering. The smell of overcooked food and hand scrub. Standing in front of the mirror, Hickman poking out of my pyjamas, I began to shear. Gita stood open-mouthed and offered words that alternated between shock and encouragement. I noticed she also did this whenever she tried to coax my ruined veins to surrender some blood. In three minutes, the expensive T-bar highlights were gone. Brushing the hair from my shoulders, I pushed the drip-stand and headed back to my isolation room with its two airlock doors. Most people who get leukaemia require a bone marrow transplant. I didn’t need one because my body rallied, responding quickly to the treatment. I discover that after bone marrow, hair is the fastest growing tissue in the body.

*

In my aunt’s kitchen in the 1980s, in a Dublin barber’s in the 1990s, in a dedicated leukaemia hospital wing in the 2000s, I have stared at the aftermath of my hair. Strands curled like question marks on the floor.

These are the moments that resurface when reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’. First published in 1920, it tells the story of a shy, unfashionable Wisconsin girl who goes to stay with her beautiful cousin Marjorie. Marjorie quickly tires of dull Bernice and her lack of social skills. They quarrel (including an admonishment, coincidentally, for quoting Little Women) but agree that Marjorie will train Bernice in the art of being desirable and popular. Bernice learns fast, and realises charm and sass bring attention. Her newfound wit sparkles in a series of rehearsed lines, including one coquettish offer to bob her hair.

‘I want to be a society vampire, you see,’ she announced coolly [. . .]
‘Do you believe in bobbed hair?’ asked G. Reece [. . .]
‘I think it’s unmoral,’ affirmed Bernice gravely. ‘But, of course, you’ve either got to amuse people or feed ’em or shock ’em.’

Warren, a long-time suitor Marjorie toys with, begins to show an interest in Bernice. Marjorie, realising the flirtatious monster she has created, sets out to sabotage her cousin, calling her bluff so that she is forced to cut off her long, cherished hair in front of a shocked crowd at the barber’s.

Bernice saw nothing, heard nothing. Her only living sense told her that this man in the white coat had removed one tortoise-shell comb and then another; that his fingers were fumbling clumsily with unfamiliar hairpins; that this hair, this wonderful hair of hers, was going – she would never again feel its long voluptuous pull as it hung in a dark-brown glory down her back.

Like Della in ‘The Gift of the Magi’, Bernice can no longer use her tortoiseshell combs. In a 1976 film version with Shelley Duvall in the title role, her hair is not brown, but strawberry blonde, elaborately coiffed, and finished with a pink satin bow. At the crucial scene in the barber’s, Bernice knows she can’t back down. She takes her seat (again, I’m in Wogan’s, sinking into the dark leather chair) and the barber tells her: ‘I’ve never cut a woman’s hair before.’

Just as he starts to chop, the camera pans around the salon to the faces of Marjorie, Warren and her assembled ‘friends’. The camera doesn’t allow us to watch the horror of the actual haircut, but the faces of the crowd tell us everything.

Bernice is changed in more than appearance. Marjorie’s pep talks and flirting lessons have taught her guile and guts. Before she returns to Wisconsin, Bernice gets biblical, Delilah-esque revenge by cutting off Marjorie’s plaits in the dark while she sleeps.

*

Old photos reveal the changing fashions, the good and bad choices when it comes to my hair. An unforgivable ‘body wave’ for my 1980s Confirmation, the experimental teenage dye spectrum of pink, blue and bleach. Hairstyles, lengths and colours as moments cast in amber. I haven’t had really long long hair since the days of night-time plaits. As a kid, I fashioned fake ’dos out of braided wool and scarves. I longed for the waist-length locks of others, watching hair flickers with envy. I have owned one genuine, so-expensive-it-looks-real wig. It was dark and sleek, a pristine swirl of synthetic strands. It should be unforgettable, a tangible thing, and yet I only have one memory of it.

During chemotherapy, a patient ‘loses’ their hair. This has become a jaded euphemism – no one misplaces their hair like keys or glasses. It falls out, and many health insurance companies cover the cost of a wig. Over the phone, a kind woman talked me through my application and explained that a high-end wig is considered ‘a prosthesis – like a leg’.

I thought of Frida Kahlo’s elaborate red boot, of World War One amputees and their phantom limbs, convinced that a missing extremity of bone and flesh was still there. Post-illness, I never felt that my hair was missing. I didn’t imagine that one day it was piled up on my head, hair- sprayed or bee-hived, and the next it was gone. The health insurance customer service rep suggested the name of a specialist hairdresser. During the consultation, he spoke in soothing tones, used to dealing with women who were far more traumatized than me at losing their hair. Most people opt for a replica of the hairstyle they’ve lost, a sort of post-cancer sheitel. I didn’t want that. I wanted the opposite, something that was different from who I was before this had all happened. I chose something long and dark, and the hairdresser lovingly clipped and trimmed the wig as if it were real.

After all of his efforts, I remember wearing it on only one occasion. For weeks, it was wrapped in tissue paper in a box. When I told my best friend that I was writing about this subject – these words on this page, moving me back in time, to books and barbers, art and hospitals – she told me a story about this same wig. She talked of a night out some weeks after I was first discharged from hospital. A group of us met in a dark basement venue on a Friday night. Smoking was still allowed in bars and the air was fogged and close. It was someone’s birthday (she thinks) or a friend’s band was playing (I think). When she walked in, she saw me across the room, wearing this expensive, not-my-hair wig, which she describes as ‘long, dark and vampy’.

‘You looked like a frail little bird holding court. Everyone coming up to you to wish you well, and you are more interested in them. I can still vividly feel what it was like to look at you, with that fake hair, and how I welled up. I had to take myself away, so I wouldn’t cry in front of you.’

I have no recollection of this night. Or of other nights wearing it; of having long hair, or a simulacrum of it, falling down my back for the first time since childhood. I know that our brains selectively archive trauma, in illness or grief, but why was the wig censored? In my friend’s story, I know the venue well, the friends who were there, and yet in my own mind, I am utterly absent from it. Post-illness, in social situations, I talked a lot, filling up most exchanges with questions and monologues, so that I would not have to talk about how I felt or what the doctors were saying. Soon after that night the wig was lost. All seven hundred euro of slick, pseudo-hair disappeared and I don’t know how, or where it is. Its loss transforms it into some sort of emblem. A symbol in a folk story, something that came into my life briefly when I needed it, only to vanish instantaneously once its work was done. Or perhaps it sits somewhere, carefully wrapped up, a once-worn thing.

*

The girl with the mousy hair is long gone. But I have another in my life. Most days, I attempt one of the trickiest tasks known to humankind – brushing the hair of a reluctant small girl before school. To ease this battle of brushes and bobbins, I have had to figure out a strategy. A means of distraction.

It’s not ninja stealth, or bribery, or all-out war (I think of the samurai chonmage again).

I use words. And music.

My daughter loves to sing, and constantly asks me to teach her songs. I rummage through my brain, frantically searching for choruses or verses, scraps of tunes. I find ballads and pop songs, songs as Gaeilge (in Irish). Beatles tunes and soundtrack songs from films we’ve watched together. I brush and wrestle, offsetting each knot by starting a new note. I scoop handfuls of her sweet-smelling hair – identical in colour to mine when I was her age – but refuse to call it ‘mousy’.

My hair. Her hair. Me. Her. Us.

Humming a song – we go from bluegrass tunes to Taylor Swift – I fold her soft strands over the comb’s teeth. I tell her about the night-plaits and the sea of hair in the morn- ing, the wavy locks like a tide-departed sand.

From issue #1: autumn/winter 2015

About the Author
Sinéad Gleeson’s essays have been published by Granta, Winter Papers and Gorse, and broadcast by BBC and RTÉ. Her debut essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life (Picador 2019) won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at 2019 Irish Book Awards and was shortlisted for the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her short stories have featured in several anthologies including Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber, 2019) and Repeal the 8th (Unbound, 2018). She has edited the award-winning anthologies The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland, with The Art of Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories forthcoming from Head of Zeus in October 2020. She is currently working on a novel.