On what it means for a stranger to touch your hair in a public space.
About six months after you arrive on this island called Australia, you decide to take an afternoon for yourself. Your children are small, and they need you so much, but you have needs too. You are tired.
Your partner says, “Go, I will deal with the kids. Pamper yourself.” You want only solitude, which you finally understand as the ultimate luxury. You want to wander and not have anyone ask you for things. You are homesick and grieving your mother and so alone, and it is hard to be these things in front of children who need you not to be any of them.
So you agree, and you claim the space and the time. A whole afternoon to yourself. You go to a fancy shopping centre that smells expensive and is full of thin white women and their sulking children, and you walk around by yourself, blissfully unencumbered.
You are alone, walking and thinking, beginning to enjoy the solitude and anonymity when you see a woman—white, well-dressed, older than you, maybe in her fifties—walking towards you. She is smiling with warm eyes, though she is a stranger. You smile back, as you do when any stranger smiles. You do not think there is any reason to be wary.
As she passes, the stranger reaches out and touches your head. It’s a gentle movement, full of wonder, but her hand is on you, and you pull away because, what the hell? It’s instinctive, of course – your fast movement.
You are protecting yourself because it is unclear why a stranger would be touching you.
Until this point, you have just been walking, being yourself, thinking your thoughts, not self-conscious in any way. You have not been thinking that you are a Black woman on the street. You have just been walking as you, being you in a very you kind of way.
But now, you realise you are not just you. You are a Black woman walking down a street where no one else is Black, and where being Black means something it has never meant for you.
As you pull away, the woman’s smile disappears. At first, she isn’t angry, just surprised that you are so surprised, and then, when she recognises the reproach in your eyes, her surprise turns to irritation and then very quickly, to anger.
Her entitlement to your body is jarring, and you can see that she finds your instinct to protect yourself equally jarring. She does not like it. You are saying to her that you are not the curiosity she thinks you are; you are not her plaything; you are not ‘her negro.’
And then, the moment is over, and you are heading off while she moves in the opposite direction, and no words have been exchanged. She is lucky it was you – a polite, surprised, grieving woman who isn’t inclined to curse.
Afterwards, in the weeks and months that follow, you wonder whether the woman will tell her friends about this silent interaction. You wonder if she will find language to describe what happened. You wonder whether she will speak of it with shame or with anger. You wonder whether she will be indignant about the unfriendly Black woman who pulled away.
It is a split second’s interaction, but it stays with you. You wonder what she might have done if you had been the one to reach out and touch her light brown hair; if you, similarly fascinated, had sought to feel its texture with a smile. Race is what helps us understand the impossibility of the situation. There is no corollary—no situation in which you have unspoken permission to gawk at her.
Each time you tell the story, you insist it was neither traumatic nor hurtful. You will emphasise your shock.
You will insist that this is not a story about hair—no story about a Black woman’s hair is ever truly about hair. It is a story about the normativity of whiteness.
It is not a story about hating yourself or doubting yourself – what an absurd thought. Instead, it is a story about understanding that you are a stranger in a place that has never known what to do with Black humanity. It is a place where the sovereignty of the land and the people who have walked it for millennia has been dismissed, and so, it is a place where Blackness must continually be subjected either to queries and curiosities, or to stark violences. These are different ends of the same spectrum, which insists that we do not belong to the same human family.
You finish your afternoon of solitude, but now it has been spoiled by these questions.
Later that evening, you tell your sisters that you were treated like a Black Venus, pawed as though you were a pet. In the coming weeks, when people back home ask how you are settling in, you tell the story and they shake their heads and gasp, and you commiserate and talk about racism.
Over time you realise that you never tell anyone in Australia this story because you’re not sure they will understand it, and you don’t want to risk what that means for how you will ever speak to them again.
What you don’t say — what you keep very close to your chest — is that in the minutes after you moved on that day, even as you bristled with indignation, you also felt an ache for your mother, because to be a stranger in a strange land is to be a motherless child.
Now, all these years later, what remains is the image of that friendly, then not-so-friendly stranger’s fascination. What remains is the singular question you still cannot answer: if home is where everybody knows your name, what do you call a place where you live, even as strangers insist that you are unknowable?
This blog post is republished with the author’s permission. Subscribe for more posts by Sisonke.
Sisonke Msimang is a South African writer and opinionista. In 2019, she delivered the inaugural ZAM Nelson Mandela Lecture in Amsterdam. Msimang lives in Perth, Australia.
