There is a young woman in my neighborhood that is stunningly pretty. The first time I saw her I thought: “That girl could be a high fashion model.” As you can see from the cover photo to this post, I speak no lie. So I wasn’t surprised when one day a few months ago she walked into our yard asking me if I could help her achieve her dream of becoming a model. We are taking baby steps and crossing fingers that they will lead to bigger, grander steps to making that dream come true.
I had to do some research into things like make-up, clothes, and posturing in order to do our mini photo shoot. My fashion and beauty research got me to thinking about what is considered “beautiful,” as the concept is ever changing and is, of course, culture specific. However, globalization has shaped, and continues to shape, the concept of beauty so that it conforms to a western ideal, specifically, white tall and thin unless you fall into a category that is deemed “exotic.”
I wasn’t surprised when I came to the African continent and found that there are many attempts of adopting western imposed forms of beauty such as light skin and straight hair---as people of color living in the U.S. and other Western cultures, are also told that these are forms of beauty that we must aim to achieve. What I identified immediately as this young woman’s strong points to become a model, I’m sure , are what she has been over looked at in being considered beautiful in Mozambique: she is dark skinned and extremely thin (a sign of poverty). Many women in Mozambique, as well as other parts of Africa, the Caribbean and India (and surely everywhere else where darker skin is the dominant feature of the population), use skin lightening cream. These creams can have terrible effects if used over a long period such as hardening the skin to a rock hard texture. Many of the women I’ve seen using it, use it only on their faces. I suppose these creams don’t come cheap so it would get expensive putting it all over on’e body thus the effect is that women have very light skinned faces but then one can see the contrast with their darker skinned hands, feet etc. The original intent of these creams was to even out skin tones which often happens amongst darker skinned people---it was not developed to be used (and abused) to change one’s skin color.
Hair, on the African continent, and amongst most black folks outside of Africa, can be a contentious topic. I don’t believe women with curly or kinky hair (that includes women with Jew Fros) should feel the need to use chemicals or fake hair in order to have long tresses flowing down their back. As some of you can imagine I’ve received many a response from black women and other very curly haired women in the form of “well you don’t have our kind of hair so you can’t make such a statement.” But my mother does have what white people would call kinky hair (not necessarily what other black people call kinky) and she always told me that hair is beautiful when you take care of it, be it straight, curly or kinky hair. So it pretty much makes my skin crawl when women here in Mozambique fawn over my hair and ask me to cut it off and give it to them, so they can make a weave with it or use it to braid into their own hair. I always respond that they should accept themselves as they are, “you are beautiful just as God made you” which is answered with a fake smile. The fakeness of the smile speaks to possible inner thoughts of “of course you would say that whitey, you look like the women in fashion magazines.” Most likely, to them, I look like those women and the conversation would go nowhere if I tried to explain to them that growing up no one thought that my skin and hair looked like those white girls in the fashion mags.
Hair weaves are relatively new in Mozambique (maybe the last 5-10 years) and is considered a sign of increasing wealth. Many women use these weaves in a very ascetically pleasing way and I think it would be difficult to differentiate a Mozambican from a South African from an American black woman---that is how up to date the hair styles are. Yet, some women do miss the mark. I was walking with B once in Jo’burg’s bus station and I said out loud “Why? Why did she do that to herself?” Sitting on a bench not too far in front of us was a woman who could have easily been mistaken for Sabertooth from the Thundercats---her weave made her head 3x her size and it flowed down in a mass of blond frizz down to her waist. B said “Yeah. I know she thinks she looks like Beyonce, but no, sorry minha irma………she is Mozambican. I KNOW it.”
Western forms of beauty doesn’t stop at hair texture and skin color, it is also how people wear their clothes. I know many of us in the U.S. have seen recently arrived immigrants and have noted the outfit they are wearing and have asked “Why?” For example, the 60 year old Chinese woman who wears Hello Kitty from the barettes in her pixie cut, to her pink shirt with its huge Hello Kitty Face on it down to her pink house slippers in the form of a cat, ears and whiskers included (and yes she is wearing Hello Kitty socks too). Or the West Indian man with the tight fishnet shirt (our women like them too, with a nice lacey red bra underneath). Or perhaps the Russian woman with blue eyeliner all around her eye, donning a fake fur coat, in fuchia, and a super mini skirt and platform shoes, and let’s say she doesn’t say no to seconds at dinner time.
So I’ve been asking “Why?” a lot here. I’ve been asking why to the 50 year old man with a beer belly that makes him look like he is 9 months pregnant and wears a T-shirt that says “I’m Your Bitch”. I’ve been asking why to the women who shave off their perfectly lovely eyebrows and instead use a red eyebrow pencil to draw in scary clown eyebrows. I’ve been asking why to the women who wear thong panties as beach wear or lace ones with their pubic hair sticking through it. I’ve been asking why to the dudes who strut along the street with neon pink painted nails and ladies purses with fringes.
But it has come to this: I’ve had to stop asking why and just accept that people wear what they wear because they feel beautiful by being one step closer to what the dominant culture says is the right thing to be. Many people achieve this goal using what is available to them from our charitable donations in clothes (which are actually not given to poor people but sold to vendors who then sell them to the populace in open air markets) to Chinese made synthetic hair for weaves and braiding.
Thus, even though that man with the bitch T-shirt probably doesn’t understand what bitch means, he’s wearing a shirt with English on it, so he is perceived to know how to speak English and therefore he is perceived to be smarter or more educated and maybe as having more money. Perhaps a woman that sports a weave that makes her head the size of a blimpie does so because she can afford that much hair—so she’s telling people “I’ve got money and now I am beautiful because I’m sprtin’ Beyonce’s look.” The Chinese granny wears Hello Kitty because she probably had to work as a child and never got to be a kid that enjoyed kid stuff (I’m taking a leap..but probably not that big of a leap). My Guyanese brother wears a fishnet shirt because….ok there is no excuse for that, I’m sorry my Caribbean brothers and sisters--please stop wearing them.
What is considered beautiful has certainly changed from when I was a teenager, which is great, as now little girls have diverse representations of beauty in our popular culture from the lovely dark complexion of Lupita Nyong'o to the voluptuous bodies of J.Lo and Adele to the “be you” fashion styles of Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry. Unfortunately, our perceptions of beauty swing on a pendulum from honoring our diverse beauty as humans to exploiting, demonizing and politicizing such diversity. But I suppose that has been happening since the dawn of human civilization and we can only do our best to accept and love ourselves the way we are.
At the end of the day, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder and yes our current dominant white Western culture controls what is defined as beautiful. But I think reflecting on how people adopt these forced-fed images of beauty and then make them their own using the resources they have ….is just as beautiful.
