There too, I would grip my handbag tightly at my side, to protect myself from the jostling crowd and erect a barrier between myself and the outside world. But this morning the jostling crowds were within me. They were loud, chaotic voices, clamoring to be heard. One of these voices rang clear over all the others:

"What have you done to your hair?!"

In the five minutes it took me to walk from my dorm room to the library, I realized that the loudest chorus in my head was an echo of what I had grown up hearing at home. I paused at the entrance to the library, one hand on the door, unable to move. I was paralyzed by my own tumultuous thoughts. Even here, in rural New England where it was zero degrees Celsius in April, worlds away from my home on the West African coast, I was haunted by what I had been told I was supposed to look like. I have rejected those images, but here I was...terrified!

I've always had what people call good hair: straight, long and obedient. I'm not as scared of water as most other women with chemically-relaxed hair are because I can return my hair to its relaxed, non-frizzy state with minimal effort.

My hair has been treated with chemical relaxers for so long that it never occurred to me that I wasn't born with straight, manageable hair. For nearly 20 years everyone, myself included, has grown used to me looking a certain way. Visiting the hairdresser every six weeks to have my hair treated never felt like a farce because, at least, I was not one of those girls who wore fake hair. These questions never came up during my time in Ghana because I didn't know that there was any alternative to relaxed hair.

When I came to the United States to attend college, suddenly  women of color looked different to me. Aside from the perms and weaves I was used to, there were women who chose to wear their natural hair in dreadlocks, sister locks, afros, twisties, braids. Intrigued, I started talking to them and concluded that they really love their hair and themselves.

I wonder when relaxing my hair became an act of self-rejection? My mother, grandmother and most of the women I know still relax their hair. What does this say about them? My mother and grandmother are both phenomenal women in their own right. I find it hard to imagine that relaxing their hair has been a manifestation of a racial inferiority complex. Does it mean that they have been unconsciously buying into a certain ideal? Would it be unfair to shift the blame onto  the media for suggesting that the dominant images of beauty drive women of all races to aspire to a certain ideal which included straight, silky hair?

I continued to ask questions and talk to women of all ages. I refused to relax my hair until I got some satisfactory answers or until the perm fell out and I had my natural hair back, whichever came first.

I heard different justifications. Relaxed hair is practical, easier to manage, obedient. Afro hair cannot be combed because it is more rebellious. The implications of these characterizations hit me squarely in the face when I really started looking at other Ghanaians.  

I saw the "weave-girls" - girls who would not be caught dead with their own hair, the "been-to" girls who fake British or American accents to impress people in their social circle. I also saw dark women who bleach their skin to make it lighter.

This is not to say that there is no genuine beauty in the country that I call home. Regardless of whether they are guilty of these things or not, women are under pressure to act and look a certain way, which is incompatible with their natural selves. This pressure is another way of quelling that "rebellious, unruly African-ness."

The message is clear: tame your hair, tame your blackness, tame all those things that make you different. There are more questions than answers, and most of the time, I want to shelve all the questions for fear that all this is just useless mental gymnastics.

In the meantime, my chemically relaxed ends continued to break off, and lively new roots began to appear. I stopped relaxing my hair because I was no longer able to justify it to myself but could I justify going natural? Did I need to? I kept my hair under wraps for months. As I headed back to Ghana for Christmas, I wondered what my family would say.

In America it was simply a decision to go natural. Women of color did that everyday. In Ghana it was unheard of. I hadn't told my mother fearing she would be upset. I walked out of the arrival terminal at the airport and scanned the twitching crowd for my family. I recognized my brothers, my father and oh my...my mother with short natural hair!

I walked through the library and into the student centre, that social hub of the campus. People I knew would see me, the new me. I smiled to myself, remembering the conversations I had with my mother over Christmas. They were conversations that yielded answers to questions about beauty, self-image, about what to do when you have a bad-hair day, and about embracing the fact that everyday will be a black-hair day.