Untitled (I Wash My Mother's Hair)

I wash my mother’s hair. I have always done this; it has been our ritual since I had the strength to. She has not cut it since before I was born, so it is long. It has not been chemically processed, so it is kinky; soft when wet, but unmanageable, tightly coiled, once the deepest black, now white, streaked with silver.


She tells me about our family, the story of how she came to be who she is. “A woman’s work is hard”, Mama says, as I wash her hair. “We are the bearers of life, as well as the harbingers of death.” I am young, when tells me this. I don’t understand. I am too young to know the responsibility, the power that women hold over the material portals; that we are the portals between Earth and the Divine. “You will see,” she says, “when you have your own daughter.”

Our family is full of women; there are an equal number of males and females; but the women’s presence is somehow bigger. The kitchens of the various aunts are always full of stories and warm bodies making food, and love and babies, and then sharing recipes.

I am brown, like my mother, but a deeper variation. My father’s eyes, his compassion and his ‘bigger picture’ reasoning are more ingrained in me than her elements. I know the love of my father, the love from my father. He is a wonderful man. He has loved my mother since they met. He tells me the story all the time. How they met in a room with humming conversations as their score. She performed a poem that night. He thought she was the most beautiful and dangerous thing he had seen. They spoke briefly and then carried on with their lives.

Mother’s story is much more dramatic. “I have loved one other man,” she says, as my fingers massage her scalp, I try not to get the foam in her ears. “Your father was different. He was the one who I allowed to conjoin with my power”. (She speaks like this, my mother, in riddles and mystical phrases). “When you meet a man, you need to summon patience; only time will tell whether or not he is worthy to have you as the conduit for his subtle elements. Many men are dark hearted, selfish brutes. But not your dad, no (She smiles, here). He is filled with a light that I was unable to take my eyes off, when I met him. I still can’t.” And then a girlish titter gargles from her, and there are no lines on her face, her hair isn’t grey: she is twenty five and alive with fire.

“When a man loves you, you can feel it. It makes you always turn to him. You feel comfortable enough to want him in the wet, warm throbbing way that only his woman can. You welcome him home to you deep inside of yourself. You smell his skin and taste his sweat and bask in the vibration of his groaning”. I thought understood this; I had seen this on television sometimes. It made me a little embarrassed, watching other people this way. I could never think of my parents in this way, they are woven together; they are more tightly bound than just that. Their relationship isn’t mundane. Papa is my mother’s friend. They do things together, they are inseparable.

My parents were my anchor. I came to learn that home is not a place with walls or mortar; home is the sound of a voice, repeating a verse. It is Dad rubbing his gruff beard into your giggling palm, the smell of butternut soup creaming on the stove, the tight kink of Mama’s hair and the wet of lather and water. It is the lull in her voice; her meter, the way she speaks in parables. It is the way he said no, or remembering how much sugar he takes in his rooibos.

©Ngozi Chukura 2010