Black Girl Surrealism

March 12, 2021 Karina So

An ode to Black beauty salons and the rareness of spaces that permit widespread Afrosurrealism, featuring excerpts from the sixth scene of the VAGUE Communion anthology.

Blackness and playfulness are still so rarely considered within the same context.

You see it in the cautiousness of white colleagues as they attempt humorous repartee or clarification on a cultural conundrum; or on the flipside, in educational institutions’ continued adultification of children of colour. The darker the berry, the graver the juice.

As Afrosurrealism creeps back onto the creative industry’s vision boards again, this time to illustrate the dystopian, post-George Floyd times in which we live — although whether it ever really left following Amiri Baraka’s debut of the term is definitely worth debating — I’m reminded of the sixth scene from the Communion wherein our VAGUE Faces — Ayomide, Oreoluwa, Nene and Zeinab — stormed local beauty salon, Solange Bee in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, looking every inch like they’d been primped and preened by an intergalactic glam squad for a glamorous night on the town.

For Black women, hair salons are the harbingers of memories, both comforting and combative; how the scales tip depends on your location. In England, being told your hair texture was not welcome to cross the threshold of a local salon likely wrestles for the armrest of your general attitude towards beauty establishments with the energetic Black aunties trying to make something of themselves on the high street, walls stacked from end to end with kanekalon extensions in just about every shade known to man to colour in your wildest dreams. And within these Black-owned spaces, more nuances abound: walking out with a head of hair world’s away from the reference photos and detailed instructions you walked in with ten hours prior.

Back in the motherland, attitudes are perhaps less bipolar. Visits to the hair salon are a normal part of everyday life, with nary a care about whether you will get shunned from the door for anything other than the limited availability of your favourite stylist. Where your memories may sour, however, would be in the judgment of your hair’s volume, or artistic vision. “Colour 33 again, really? Why not green and white for Independence Day?”

In any case, whether kindly or completely unintentionally, Black hair and by extension Black beauty is seen as the epitome of playful potential, completely unbound by the shackles of traditional ways of thinking. With so much to offer, Black beauty forces you to question everything. Your purpose, your intention, your technique. With Black beauty putting everything on the table, challenging the societally conditioned confines of ones’s imagination, I bring us back to the word: play.

There aren’t many spaces for the Black diaspora to embrace the term freely, or at least there weren’t before the pandemic. In lockdown, the internet has become the Black girl’s most enduring playground. Bullies may abound in the comment section, but what a life lived largely on social media has provided in the absence of pre-corona normalcy, is freedom… freedom to dare wear the bright pink lipstick society told you was ill-suited to your skin tone; freedom to buy that questionable wig in lieu of the absence of unfair expectations in the workplace, and of course the millions of TikTok tutorials on how to cut and dye it any which way you like if it flops; freedom to twerk on the ‘gram, just because; to explore your sensuality through OTT dress — or lack thereof; to spend your time on things that are less functional, less fundamental to your success despite the odds.

But before this, spaces that afforded much less encouraged Blackness to play, to exercise their right to nuanced, unrestricted creativity were limited and rare. For Black women, the hair salon was one of those spaces.