That Hair Read online

  THAT

  HAIR

  Djaimilia Pereira

  de Almeida

  translated by Eric M. B. Becker

  TIN HOUSE BOOKS / Portland, Oregon

  For Humberto

  Giving thanks for having a country of one’s own is like being grateful for having an arm. How would I write if I were to lose this arm? Writing with a pencil between the teeth is a way of standing on ceremony with ourselves. Witnesses swear to me that I am the most Portuguese of all the Portuguese members of my family. It’s as if they were always greeting me with an “Ah, France! Anatole, Anatole!” the way Lévi-Strauss was greeted in a village in the Brazilian countryside. The only family members we manage to speak with, however, are those who are unable to respond. We operate under the belief that this family interprets the world for us when in reality we spend our lives translating the new world into their language. I say to Lévi-Strauss: “This is my aunt, she’s a great admirer of yours.” Lévi-Strauss invariably replies: “Ah, France! Anatole . . . ,” etc. To write with a pencil between one’s teeth is to write to a villager who finds himself before his first Frenchman. The matter of knowing who is responding to what we write might provide us with relief from our miniature interests, bringing us to imagine that what we say is important, despite it all. To stand on ceremony with what it is we have to say is, however, a form of blindness. Writing has little to do with imagination and resembles a way of coming to deserve the lack of a response. Our life is overrun all the time by this taciturn family—memory—the way Thatcher feared that English culture would be overrun by immigrants.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Translator’s Note by Eric M. B. Becker

  EXPEDITIONS INTO THE DEPTHS OF IDENTITY

  In 2017, a couple of months after I’d first translated work by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, I found myself in the middle of a brief stopover in Lisbon on my way to a literary festival in Cabo Verde; some Brazilian friends had sent me their own personal guide (a sentimental one, perhaps?) to the city. They recommended I trace a path from the traditionally bohemian Chiado—home to the iconic Fernando Pessoa statue—to the Feira da Ladra, a 900-year-old market in the Graça neighborhood. Along the steep and winding ascent to Graça, I passed the sun-bleached façade of the Igreja de São Vicente de Fora. Its edifice dates back to the time of Afonso I—the first king to rule Portugal following the expulsion of the Moors in 1147—and the church serves as the burial site for many of the members of the Brigantine Dynasty. (Its art collection features an eighteenth-century ivory statue of Jesus from Goa, a Portuguese colony until 1961.) The whole structure might be seen as an emblem of the nation, from the siege of Lisbon in the middle of the twelfth century through the end of Portugal’s colonial project in the late twentieth.

  My intention that Tuesday afternoon was to visit the used book stands, a Lisboeta version, perhaps, of Paris’s Left Bank bouquinistes or the ever rarer sight of used book dealers lining the sidewalks of New York’s Upper West Side. I came away with a few volumes that are now within comfortable reach of my desk in New York, but it was an encounter with a man selling antique stamps that had the greatest impact on me. A congenial man initially, he quickly pivoted to his time in the Portuguese army during the 1960s and ’70s, when several of the country’s African colonies waged wars for independence. My interlocutor wasn’t, he explained earnestly, opposed to their sovereignty, but he was deeply offended by the way the Portuguese “handed everything over on a silver platter” to their former subjects.

  It is in this context, barely forty years removed from the independence of Angola, that Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s That Hair steps in to plumb the depths of Portugal’s grisly history—its broader consequences, but above all its personal costs. Like her narrator, Mila, Almeida was born to a family that is Portuguese on one side and Angolan on the other. Like her narrator—“the most Portuguese of all the Portuguese members of my family”—Almeida moved from Luanda to Lisbon at a young age and is at once entirely Angolan and entirely Lisboeta. However, Mila’s indomitable hair is a constant reminder that she doesn’t entirely belong in Portugal, while her childhood exploits with her cousins in the streets of Lisbon are proof that the city is not entirely not hers, either.

  “The truth is that the story of my curly hair intersects with the story of at least two countries and, by extension, the underlying story of the relations among several continents: a geopolitics,” Almeida writes in the opening pages of this hybrid novel, which sits somewhere between fiction and the essay (another genre at which she excels).

  The story of the four-year-old Angolan girl who would grow up Portuguese traverses not only landscapes—from the Rossio to Mozambique to Little Rock, Arkansas—but eras. Photo albums from Mila’s Lisbon childhood in the 1980s and ’90s, and old films from her Portuguese family’s African days, amount to more than a personal story—concomitantly, they form a story of colonialism, of enduring racial and gender prejudices, of reparations.

  If the thematic material of That Hair is vast, so too is the gamut of other literary works with which it dialogues. Within Portuguese-language literature of the postcolonial era (which includes writers such as António Lobo Antunes), or from the perspective of those Portuguese who returned following the African colonies’ wars of liberation (such as Lídia Jorge), or the work of African writers like José Eduardo Agualusa or Mia Couto, Almeida’s is a first: the first work to be written from the perspective of one who left Africa for Lisbon, and whose family history straddles both the Iberian Peninsula and Portuguese Africa.

  It would, however, be folly to read Almeida’s work in a Lusophone context alone. That Hair is also of a piece with Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, English writer Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, or Somali Italian writer Igiaba Scego’s Adua. Like these writers, Almeida is concerned with exploring the spaces between cultures, the vagaries of identity and belonging.

  Almeida’s sources also stretch back much further than the recent past. In That Hair, Mila’s search for her origins is a search à la Whitman for the multitudes within, as the author herself has acknowledged. The reference to Whitman necessarily recalls Pessoa. Other influences include Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900, with its “expeditions into the depths of memory,” and Danielle Allen’s writing on Will Counts’s iconic 1957 photo of Elizabeth Eckford on her way to integrate Central High School in Little Rock. (“It is the portrait of a self-persecution and the daily struggle to achieve indifference,” Mila posits during her own reckoning with this “X-ray of my soul.”)

  Translating an X-ray of the soul is no ordinary task. Portuguese and English are, often, languages at odds with each other. Whereas much of mainstream writing in English since the time of Hemingway has favored the short sentence, Portuguese is many times more permissive of and malleable to discursive detours, repeated pivots, and elliptical flights of lyrical fancy, all in the same phrase. A challenge I faced from the outset, with this book and every book I’ve translated, was deciding what was simply Portuguese and what was a matter of style. There’s a philosophical bent to Almeida’s work, which, as Portuguese critic Isabel Lucas described it, operates as extended soliloquy. In a book riddled with questions and few straight answers, it was clear that the digressions, the sentences that sometimes stretched a page and beyond, were Almeida
’s way of including the reader in Mila’s arduous journey toward self-discovery, of fostering understanding and common cause.

  The expedition into, or excavation of, memory that is central to That Hair unfolds in the context of Mila’s confessed unease at writing the biography of her hair (“How might I write this story so as to avoid the trap of intolerable frivolity?”). It’s a discomfort that recalls Virginia Woolf’s reservations about the biography (or “life-writing”) and its related genres, from her weariness of “the damned egotistical self” to misgivings about “[writing] directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes” (Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee). Almeida, through Mila, takes that position one step further, claiming: “Memory is a demagogue: it doesn’t allow us to choose what we see; it thrives on the temptation to make less of the people we were not.” At every turn in this journey to the past, there is the risk of reinforcing caricature where one seeks an origin. There is always “the trap of sentimentality” to be avoided.

  It would be wrong to situate Almeida within this pantheon and risk leaving her novel desiccated, by which I mean that I want to properly appreciate the vitality and urgency of her narrative on its own terms. That Hair is not only an exploration of identity, race, and a stagnant past; it is one possible manifestation of American intellectual Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work,” a process of recognizing the legacy of colonialism and its racist systems that thrive to the present day. Sharpe’s multitudinal metaphor of the wake—as keeping watch with the dead, the path left by a ship, the consequences of a racist past that stretches across borders and seas, and, finally, as an awakening to consciousness—is the heartbeat of That Hair (a work that preceded Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by just one year). It is present in the rejection Mila faces at certain Lisbon salons, in her sojourns to far-flung hair studios, in her remote journey toward the ruins of the past. Writes Almeida, “It is we who . . . survive as if the only castle in a miles-wide radius: a sign that life once existed where today there’s only dead grass, olive trees, and cork oaks.”

  As Mila exhumes and interrogates these signs of life, she soon finds that her true discoveries are made along the way, via detours, in the places and artifacts that lie beyond what was sought. She finds questions of nationalism, of who is permitted to belong and what that belonging means, and of the borders—real and imaginary—that exercise so much more influence over some lives than others. In That Hair, the question Almeida seems to be asking of all of us is: If we are so often the details we considered mere incidentals in our search for ourselves, who then are the people we claim to be?

  June 2019

  New York, NY

  THAT HAIR

  1

  My mother cut my hair for the first time when I was six months old. The hair, which according to several witnesses and a few photographs had been soft and straight, was reborn coiled and dry. I don’t know if this sums up my still-short life. One could quite easily say just the opposite. To this day, along the curve of my nape, the hair still grows inexplicably straight, the soft hair of a newborn, which I treat as a vestige. The story of my hair begins with this first haircut. How might I write this story so as to avoid the trap of intolerable frivolity? No one would accuse the biography of an arm of being frivolous; and yet it’s impossible to tell the story of its fleeting movements—mechanical, irretrievable, lost to oblivion. Perhaps this might sound insensitive to veterans of war or amputees, whose imaginations conjure pains they can still feel, rounds of applause, runs along the beach. It wouldn’t do me much good, I imagine, to fantasize over the reconquest of my head by the soft-stranded survivors near the curve of my neck. The truth is that the story of my curly hair intersects with the story of at least two countries and, by extension, the underlying story of the relations among several continents: a geopolitics.

  Perhaps the place to begin this biography of my hair is many decades ago, in Luanda, with a girl named Constança, a coy blonde (a fetching “typist girl,” perhaps?), the unspoken youthful passion of my black grandfather, Castro Pinto, long before he became head nurse at Luanda’s Hospital Maria Pia; or perhaps I ought to begin with the night I surprised him with braids that he found divine. I’d spent nine hours sitting cross-legged on the floor at the hairdresser, head between the legs of two particularly ruthless young girls, who in the midst of doing my hair interrupted their task to turn some feijoada and rice pudding from lunch into a bean soup, and I felt a warm sensation on my back (and a vague odor) coming from between their legs. “What a sight!” he said. Indeed: perhaps the story of my hair has its origin in this girl Constança, whom I’m not related to in any way, but whose presence my grandfather seemed to seek in my relaxed hair and in the girls on the bus that, after he was already an old man living on the outskirts of Lisbon, would take him each morning to his job at Cimov where, his back hunched, he swept the floors until the day he died. How to tell this history with sobriety and the desired discretion?

  Perhaps someone has already written a book about hair, problem solved, but no one’s written the story of my hair, as I was painfully reminded by two fake blondes to whom I once temporarily surrendered my curls for a hopeless “brushing”—two women who, no less ruthless than the others, pulled my hair this way and that and commented aloud, “It’s full of split ends,” as they waged battle against their own arms (the masculinity of which, with their swollen biceps bulging from beneath their smocks, provided me, the entire time, with a secret form of revenge for the torture they inflicted). The haunted house that every hair salon represents for the young woman I’ve become is often all I have left of my connection to Africa and the history of the dignity of my ancestors. However, I do have plenty of suffering and corrective brushings after returning home from the “beauty parlor,” as my mother calls it, and plenty of attempts not to take too personally the work of these hairdressers whose implacability and incompetence I never summoned the courage to confront. The story I can tell is a catalog of salons, with Portugal’s corresponding history of ethnic transformations—from the fifty-year-old returnees to the Moldavian manicurists forced to adopt Brazilian methods—undergoing countless treatments to tame the natural exuberance of a young lady who, in the words of these same women, was a “good girl.” The story of surrendering my education in what it meant to be a woman to the public sphere is not, perhaps, the fairy tale of miscegenation, but rather a story of reparations.

  No white woman on a city bus ever gave my Grandpa Castro the time of day. Humming Bakongo canticles to himself, Papá was a man whom you would never suspect of carrying this time-honored tradition with him as he sat next to you on the bus. A man of invisible traditions—and what a ring this would have to it, capitalized: The Man of Invisible Traditions, a true original. No one ever looked at him, this man who, by his own account, was rather cranky, “the Portuguese kid,” as he was known as a young man, who was always shouting, “Put it in the goal, you monkey,” referring to black soccer players, and who categorized people according to their resemblance to certain jungle animals, even describing himself as “the monkey type,” the kind of person who patiently waits for the conversation to come to a close before proffering his wisdom.

  I come from generations of lunatics, which is perhaps a sign that what takes place inside the heads of my ancestors is more important than what goes on around them. The family to whom I owe my hair have described the journey between Portugal and Angola in ships and airplanes over four generations with the nonchalance of those accustomed to travel. A nonchalance that nonetheless was not passed on to me and throws into stark relief my own dread of travel; a dread of each trip that—out of an instinct to cling to life that never assails me on solid ground—I constantly fear will be my last. Legend has it I stepped off the plane in Portugal at the age of three clinging to a package of Maria crackers, my hair in a particularly rebellious state. I came dressed in a yellow wool camisole that can still be seen today in an old passport photo notable for my wide smile, the product of
a felicitous misunderstanding about the significance of being photographed. I’m laughing with joy, or perhaps incited for some comic motive by one of my adult family members, whom I reencounter tanned and sporting beards in photographs of the newborn me splayed atop the bedsheets.

  And meanwhile it’s my hair—not the mental abyss—that day in and day out brings me back to this story. For as long as I can remember, I’ve woken up with a rebellious mane, so often at odds with my journey, no sign of the headscarves recommended for covering one’s hair while sleeping. To say that I wake up with a lion’s mane out of carelessness is to say that I wake up every day with at least a modicum of embarrassment or a motive to laugh at myself in the mirror: a motive accompanied by impatience and, at times, rage. It’s occurred to me that I might owe the daily reminder of what ties me to my family to the haircut I received at six months of age. I’ve been told I’m a mulata das pedras, as they say in Angola, not the idealized beauty that mulata conjures for them but a second-rate one, and with bad hair to boot. This expression always blinds me with the memory of rocks along the beach: slippery, slimy stones difficult to navigate with bare feet.

  The lunacy of my ancestors factors into the story of my hair like anything else that demands silence; it is a condition from which the hair might be an ennobling escape, a victory of aesthetics over life, as though hair were either a question of life or aesthetics, but never both. At the same time, my deceased ancestors rise up around me. As I speak they return as versions of themselves distinct from the way I remember them. This is not the story of their states of mind, which I would never dare to tell, but that of the meeting between grace and circumstance, the encounter of the book with its hair. There is nothing to say of hair that does not pose a problem. To say something consists of bringing to the surface that which, because it is second nature, often remains undetected.