‘What did you do to yourself?’
‘Did you have a fight with a lawnmower?’
‘Are you a lesbian?’
‘Why would you make yourself unattractive?’
‘But . . . it’s like sabotaging yourself.’
‘What did your mother say?’
(Note: never ‘father’.)
In her book Girls Will Be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently, Emer O’Toole writes about shaving her head as a young woman. O’Toole outlines all the assumptions made about her, from her sexuality and availability to her personality type and demeanour. Having no hair also brought its own stereotypes, many of which were gendered.
Shaving my head for the first time was not a feminist act, but it kissed my feminist consciousness awake for good. Because I came to see that if people were assuming that I was aggressive because of a shaved head, they had equally been assuming that I was passive because of long hair [. . .] If my short hair made people pigeonhole me as homosexual, my long hair, then, made people pigeonhole me as heterosexual. Long hair, short hair, conformist, non-conformist, feminine, masculine: I was being gender stereotyped all the time. Suddenly, I had a new way to see.
D-Day, France, 1944. There is joy and celebration in the streets at the news of liberation. A truck pulls up, to the cheers of a gathered crowd. Women, their heads bowed, their faces a mix of sorrow and fear, are slowly hauled down onto the narrow street. Many of these women – young mothers seeking food for their family, a teenage girl, a sex worker – are accused of ‘collaboration horizontale’, sexual collusion with the enemy, which sometimes led to having a baby with a German soldier. They are paraded in the streets and lined up. A man, prepossessing and determined, holds up a razor. One by one their heads are publicly shaved. The punishment is an attempt at defeminizing them, at chastising them for their traitorous actions, but more for their display of sexuality. These women were known as ‘les tondues’, from the French ‘shorn’. Women who were humiliated and branded sexually, not only in France, but in Germany too, and earlier in Ireland during the War of Independence. A misogynistic act of comeuppance watched by large, heckling crowds.
My first head-shaving was aged sixteen, but there have been many occasions since. Once – classically – after a break-up; then during final year college exams; another to divest myself of a scalp-burning, high-maintenance bleached crop. The last time was in 2003. From motivation to method, I had little control over this particular haircut. This was the only time I removed the hair myself and the incentive was practical, not aesthetic. There was a diagnosis – a rare and aggressive type of leukaemia. Chemotherapy was just one aspect of the treatment, which began the day after diagnosis, with heavy doses of a drug called Idarubicin. I heard the word as ‘Ida Rubisson’, and imagined a stern, kindly Jewish matriarch (does she wear a sheitel?). Not all chemotherapy kills hair (Idarubicin, bless her, does) but it doesn’t fall out in an instantaneous cartoon moment. There is no KAPOW! and it’s gone. You wake up with it on your pillow. You brush it and strands come away in clumps. You watch it slip from your scalp and there is nothing you can do about it. The decision to get rid of it all came down to one thing: my eyes. Constant shedding irritated my lids, and my vision was already affected by the drug regime. Half, but not all, of my eyelashes fell out. My eyebrows thinned and clung on. The friendly Indian nurse – the one paged to deal with difficult, collapsing veins, frequently mine – laughed nervously. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, holding the hospital issue clippers. In that moment, I was back in the barbershop, twelve years earlier. Are you sure?
It was another cold day, also February, but this time I had no need of a hat. The hospital air was hot, overpowering. The smell of overcooked food and hand scrub. Standing in front of the mirror, Hickman line poking out of my pyjamas, I began to shear. Gita stood open-mouthed and offered words that alternated between shock and encouragement. I noticed she also did this whenever she tried to coax my ruined veins to surrender some blood. In three minutes, the expensive T-bar highlights were gone. Brushing the hair from my shoulders, I pushed the drip-stand and headed back to my isolation room with its two airlock doors. Most people who get leukaemia require a bone marrow transplant. I didn’t need one because my body rallied, responding quickly to the treatment. I discover that after bone marrow, hair is the fastest growing tissue in the body.
In my aunt’s kitchen in the 1980s, in a Dublin barber’s in the 1990s, in a dedicated leukaemia hospital wing in the 2000s, I have stared at the aftermath of my hair. Strands curled like question marks on the floor.
These are the moments that resurface when reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’. First published in 1920, it tells the story of a shy, unfashionable Wisconsin girl who goes to stay with her beautiful cousin Marjorie. Marjorie quickly tires of dull Bernice and her lack of social skills. They quarrel (including an admonishment, coincidentally, for quoting Little Women) but agree that Marjorie will train Bernice in the art of being desirable and popular. Bernice learns fast, and realises charm and sass bring attention. Her newfound wit sparkles in a series of rehearsed lines, including one coquettish offer to bob her hair.
‘I want to be a society vampire, you see,’ she announced coolly [. . .]
‘Do you believe in bobbed hair?’ asked G. Reece [. . .]
‘I think it’s unmoral,’ affirmed Bernice gravely. ‘But, of course, you’ve either got to amuse people or feed ’em or shock ’em.’
Warren, a long-time suitor Marjorie toys with, begins to show an interest in Bernice. Marjorie, realising the flirtatious monster she has created, sets out to sabotage her cousin, calling her bluff so that she is forced to cut off her long, cherished hair in front of a shocked crowd at the barber’s.
Bernice saw nothing, heard nothing. Her only living sense told her that this man in the white coat had removed one tortoise-shell comb and then another; that his fingers were fumbling clumsily with unfamiliar hairpins; that this hair, this wonderful hair of hers, was going – she would never again feel its long voluptuous pull as it hung in a dark-brown glory down her back.
Like Della in ‘The Gift of the Magi’, Bernice can no longer use her tortoiseshell combs. In a 1976 film version with Shelley Duvall in the title role, her hair is not brown, but strawberry blonde, elaborately coiffed, and finished with a pink satin bow. At the crucial scene in the barber’s, Bernice knows she can’t back down. She takes her seat (again, I’m in Wogan’s, sinking into the dark leather chair) and the barber tells her: ‘I’ve never cut a woman’s hair before.’
Just as he starts to chop, the camera pans around the salon to the faces of Marjorie, Warren and her assembled ‘friends’. The camera doesn’t allow us to watch the horror of the actual haircut, but the faces of the crowd tell us everything.
Bernice is changed in more than appearance. Marjorie’s pep talks and flirting lessons have taught her guile and guts. Before she returns to Wisconsin, Bernice gets biblical, Delilah-esque revenge by cutting off Marjorie’s plaits in the dark while she sleeps.
Old photos reveal the changing fashions, the good and bad choices when it comes to my hair. An unforgivable ‘body wave’ for my 1980s Confirmation, the experimental teenage dye spectrum of pink, blue and bleach. Hairstyles, lengths and colours as moments cast in amber. I haven’t had really long long hair since the days of night-time plaits. As a kid, I fashioned fake ’dos out of braided wool and scarves. I longed for the waist-length locks of others, watching hair flickers with envy. I have owned one genuine, so-expensive-it-looks-real wig. It was dark and sleek, a pristine swirl of synthetic strands. It should be unforgettable, a tangible thing, and yet I only have one memory of it.
During chemotherapy, a patient ‘loses’ their hair. This has become a jaded euphemism – no one misplaces their hair like keys or glasses. It falls out, and many health insurance companies cover the cost of a wig. Over the phone, a kind woman talked me through my application and explained that a high-en
d wig is considered ‘a prosthesis – like a leg’. I thought of Frida Kahlo’s elaborate red boot, of World War One amputees and their phantom limbs, convinced that a missing extremity of bone and flesh was still there. Post-illness, I never felt that my hair was missing. I didn’t imagine that one day it was piled up on my head, hair-sprayed or bee-hived, and the next it was gone. The health insurance customer service rep suggested the name of a specialist hairdresser. During the consultation, he spoke in soothing tones, used to dealing with women who were far more traumatised than me at losing their hair. Most people opt for a replica of the hairstyle they used to have, a sort of post-cancer sheitel. I didn’t want that. I wanted the opposite, something that was different from who I was before this had all happened. I chose something long and dark, and the hairdresser lovingly clipped and trimmed the wig as if it were real.
After all of his efforts, I remember wearing it on only one occasion. For weeks, it was wrapped in tissue paper in a box. When I told my best friend that I was writing about this subject – these words on this page, moving me back in time, to books and barbers, art and hospitals – she told me a story about this same wig. She talked of a night out some weeks after I was first discharged from hospital. A group of us met in a dark basement venue on a Friday night. Smoking was still allowed in bars and the air was fogged and close. It was someone’s birthday (she thinks) or a friend’s band was playing (I think). When she walked in, she saw me across the room, wearing this expensive, not-my-hair wig, which she describes as ‘long, dark and vampy’.
‘You looked like a frail little bird holding court. Everyone coming up to you to wish you well, and you are more interested in them. I can still vividly feel what it was like to look at you, with that fake hair, and how I welled up. I had to take myself away, so I wouldn’t cry in front of you.’
I have no recollection of this night. Or of other nights wearing it; of having long hair, or a simulacrum of it, falling down my back for the first time since childhood. I know that our brains selectively archive trauma, in illness or grief, but why was the wig censored? In my friend’s story, I know the venue well, the friends who were there, and yet in my own mind, I am utterly absent from it. Post-illness, in social situations, I talked a lot, filling up most exchanges with questions and monologues, so that I would not have to talk about how I felt or what the doctors were saying. Soon after that night the wig was lost. All seven hundred euro of slick, pseudo-hair disappeared and I don’t know how, or where it is. Its loss transforms it into some sort of emblem. A symbol in a folk story, something that came into my life briefly when I needed it, only to vanish instantaneously once its work was done. Or perhaps it sits somewhere, carefully wrapped up, a once-worn thing.
The girl with the mousy hair is long gone. But I have another in my life. Most days, I attempt one of the trickiest tasks known to humankind – brushing the hair of a reluctant small girl before school. To ease this battle of brushes and bobbins, I have had to figure out a strategy. A means of distraction. It’s not ninja stealth, or bribery, or all-out war (I think of the samurai chonmage again).
I use words. And music.
My daughter loves to sing, and constantly asks me to teach her songs. I rummage through my brain, frantically searching for choruses or verses, scraps of tunes. I find ballads and pop songs, songs ‘as Gaeilge’ (in Irish). Beatles tunes and soundtrack songs from films we’ve watched together. I brush and wrestle, offsetting each knot by starting a new note. I scoop handfuls of her sweet-smelling hair – identical in colour to mine when I was her age – but refuse to call it ‘mousy’.
My hair. Her hair. Me. Her. Us.
Humming a song – we go from bluegrass tunes to Taylor Swift – I fold her soft strands over the comb’s teeth. I tell her about the night-plaits and the sea of hair in the morning, the wavy locks like a tide-departed sand.
60,000 Miles of Blood
A+
It was January: dark mornings, frosted hills, ice breath.
It was January: the year’s youth piled up; a snowdrift.
It was January: six months ago today, we got married.
It was January: our lives forever altered.
In 1891 Karl Landsteiner published a paper on the influence of diet and nutrition on blood. The Vienna-born scientist’s interest was in antibodies, and he is best known for his discovery of the polio virus. His blood research examined the idea that transfusion could be fatal due to the likelihood of agglutination (where red blood cells stick together). In 1900, Landsteiner’s research also discovered a connection between red blood cell destruction and the immune system, leading to one of the most important medical discoveries of the twentieth century: blood groups. Initially he identified them as A, B and C (which we now call ‘O’), the letters referring to the presence or absence of antigens (a substance foreign to the body that can stimulate the production of antibodies). Two years after Landsteiner’s initial findings, two Vienna colleagues identified the rarer AB type, and in 1907, Czech scientist Jan Janský isolated all of the blood groups, labelling them with Roman numerals. Without these systems, intra-transfusion death would be higher, and the uncontested idea that all human blood is the same would also have persisted.
Most people move through life never knowing what their blood group is. Unless they require surgery, or have a baby, an individual might never find out. My blood group is A+, a fact I had forgotten until doctors told me there was something wrong with it. Years earlier, in childhood hospital corridors, I would hear a man’s footsteps and fill with dread. The phlebotomist – the medic that takes blood from patients – would approach, in search of my arm and a well-behaved vein. The one who took my blood as a teenager was unfeasibly tall and wild-haired; my mother said he looked like Frankenstein’s monster. He was, like many doctors I met back then, almost mute, but he at least offered up the A+ information when I asked.
It is not difficult to be curious about this substance: its necessity, the silent unassuming way it moves around the body. Some years after I had recovered, I was invited to speak to a room of a thousand blood donors, who were gathered at a dinner to be commended for donating thousands of units. In awe of their collective kindness, I told my story, of how without them, I would not be alive today. Medals were awarded to people who had hit milestone donations. What motivates a person to give up their time – their blood – for someone they’ll never meet?
Of all our bodily fluids, blood – to me – is the most fascinating and the most complex. It has distinct connotations in art, sex, spirituality and ancestry. History is full of blood stories, of sacrifice and war, medicine and myth. Herodotus wrote, in the fifth century BC, that the Scythians drank the blood of their slain enemies, using their skulls as tankards. In Ancient Rome, it was believed that drinking the blood of a dead gladiator could cure epilepsy. Blood has seeped – fluid and uncompromising – into our language and etymology: in cold-blooded killers or hot-blooded lovers; blood magic and blood diamonds; blood moon, blood rain and blood lust. Blood – as we’re repeatedly told – is thicker than water. Working a circuitous route around veins and arteries, with its own directional rules. Each day, the heart pumps 7,500 litres of it around our bodies. It makes up 7 per cent of our body weight and is in every part of us, from fingertip to scalp and each skin crease. Breast cancer, a broken limb, cirrhosis are localised, but a blood disorder is a whole body issue. Unanchored, migrant – blood is its own diaspora. There is no part of the body it can’t reach. A nurse who specialised in collapsed veins used to come to take my ‘peripheral bloods’, i.e. blood extracted from an arm, not an intravenous medical line. Peripheral made me think of the edges of my body, of my skin as a boundary wall.
Blood is most physically evident when summoned to specific sites: to a cut, a blush or an erection. Marshalled by the heart to locales of trauma, panic and arousal. When it accompanies sexual stimulation in both sexes, tumescence – a gloriously lofty and underused word – is assumed to just refer to male genitalia. More than liqu
id red, more than oxygenated fuel, blood is a complex compound of platelets and leukocytes, plasma and neutrophils. Blood runs as rivers and tributaries within us; deltas crisscrossing over organs, under ligament and around bone. But blood does not rise in the mountains and journey outwards to the sea. It circles unceasingly within us, even in sleep, or paralysis and comatose states.
Blood donation is that rare and uncomplicated incidence of a selfless good deed. The taking of time to attend a clinic, the ritualistic act of allowing a nurse to drain blood. The Irish Blood Transfusion Service collectively describes blood, platelets and plasma as ‘blood products’: strangely consumerist language for an act that is devoid of the politics of transaction. There is no monetary benefit to the donor, no thank you card. Anonymity is an essential aspect of the donor–recipient relationship, and despite this, I have remained curious about all the blood I’ve received. Post-surgery, post-childbirth and in chemotherapy I’ve received around 150 units. A unit is one bag; it contains 470 millilitres, so almost 70,500 millilitres of other people’s blood have been inserted into my body. An altruistic army, none of whom will ever know who received their blood; that a part of them is now part of me.
Long before transfusion existed, doctors prescribed a different kind of intravenous treatment. Not the addition of blood, but bloodletting. George Washington had five pints removed in the hours before his death in 1799, while Mozart agreed to the process to treat his rheumatic fever. As well as cutting hair, barbers used to perform bloodletting, and the red and white of a traditional barber’s pole represents blood and bandages. I had no idea how much blood can be lost in surgery, until I underwent multiple operations myself. Lying on an operating table for a C-section, the sheer volume of spilled blood was a shock. Later, my husband said it looked like a murder scene.
Constellations Page 3