The series Akosua Adoma Owusu: The Hair Trilogy is showing on MUBI starting February 24, 2022.
White Afro
“What are you?”
It’s the question I’m most frequently asked. I wish it were in the sense of my life philosophy or allegiances, but it’s because my appearance is just “ethnic” enough to confound whatever categories people have floating around in their heads. If I suggest that the answer is neither important, nor their business, nor polite to push for, the querent gets indignant or guileless. Often they offer their own heritage (would you be surprised, mostly German/Irish) as proof demanding someone define their genetic makeup/identity (two different categories frequently conflated) isn’t rude. Though rarely meant with malice, repeatedly being asked what you are defines what you are clearly not: the default. At best it’s exoticism, but mostly it’s exhausting.
In his 1903 book The Soul of Black People, W.E.B. DuBois coined and defined “double consciousness,” the psychological exertion of the oppressed living in the world of the oppressor. He described it as “this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” The term has since been embraced by other marginalized groups, as it is a perfect naming of the enervation not felt or considered by those fitting the default, whatever the default may be.
Filmmaker Akosuo Adoma Owusu extends the sensation to “triple consciousness” in her films, an existential crisis of neither/nor familiar to hyphen-Americans, especially those of the first generation. The sole member of her family born in America, Owusu said in Artforum, “I’ve always felt in Ghana that I’m too American and in America that I’m too Ghanaian,”1 on top of existing as a Black woman in the world. She’s turned that discomfort into a third consciousness projected onto cinematic space to play out her anxieties, and though her tensions transfer to audiences, the conveyance is done with a thoughtfulness and sense of humor that’s a delight to engage with. She explores with a frank curiosity I’d call childlike, if the word could be stripped of the saccharine naivete encrusted on it.
2019’s White Afro completed what Owusu dubbed her “hair trilogy,” including Me Broni Ba (2009) and Split Ends, I Feel Wonderful (2012). British art critic and writer Kobena Mercer, whose essays on Black hair Owusu cites as early influence, describes hair and skin as “highly sensitive fields” on which battles of “the beautiful” play out. It is, by default, a public battle—even covering up hair and skin is a visible decision. From early on, relatives informed me I’d got “the good hair.” This was confusing. School photos prove my tangles broke combs and refused taming, though I didn’t have to suffer hours of heat and chemical straightening or learn to swim with my head a foot out of water like my cousins did. In my teen years, sick of its weight, I chopped my hair to an inch, causing my mom to cry. That’s when I realized hair isn’t just protein dangling from one’s scalp, it’s aesthetic, the physical made socially political via styling.
In his essay “Black Hair/Style Politics’” Mercer is fascinated by a Jamaican hairdresser’s diplomatic metaphor of hair-straightening as cultivating the hair. Cultivating holds the contradictory meanings of transforming something wild (and all that word’s facets of meaning) into something socially valuable—we cultivate fields, and children. That which is to be cultivated, in its natural state, is socially valueless. “But on the other hand, all human hair is 'cultivated' in this way in that it merely provides a raw material for practices, procedures and ritual techniques of cultural writing and social inscription,”2 Mercer notes. So Owusu cultivates her films from the raw material of her own cultures.
Though Me Broni Ba features her own footage, a travelogue of Ghanaian hair salons, Split Ends and White Afro use archival footage and ephemera (materials not intended to last beyond their commercial use). In all three films Owusu’s dense layering, countercutting, direct audio rebutting—most prominent in Split Ends, where a stiff British Pathé narrator joking about time spent on beauty is intercut to ribbons by Angela Davis advocating revolution—and overt overlaying of texture turns the tools and products of her societies into a quantum identity. Owusu manages to share her own state of mind with us intact, while also implicating our biases by the Kuleshov effect. The jolt of dissonance pushes us into the space of third consciousness, even if we haven’t lived it.
That space evolves significantly over these three films. There’s a Zen saying: before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters. With a glimpse into Zen truth, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters. After enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains, and waters once again waters. So goes the chronological journey of the hair trilogy. If the significantly longer Me Broni Ba is a personal essay, a round-trip journey between America and Ghana made by family and film, then Split Ends is a paean, and White Afro an imagist poem.
Me Broni Ba is the only film using black-and-white photography alongside color, giving a flashback feel to a story experienced and spoken of in present tense but from Owusu’s borrowed past—she admits lifting the narration from her older sister’s childhood diary. Black and white becomes a way of accessing memories one is in the process of creating, with film texture paradoxically dissociating from present to timelessness, while emphasizing the immediate tactility.
But even as Owusu literally pauses to highlight intimate moments she’s captured—a tired side eye warily eyeing the camera, a ball rolling in dust as three women skein, a girl nodding off mid-braiding—there’s a feeling of observer and observed, an unbridged distance between them. It’s only in the film’s final shot, a long, glorious slow-motion take of Owusu herself whipping her hair around, that there’s a sense of feeling at home with what’s on screen.
That sensation carries through a short whose name reflects the same spirit: Split Ends, I Feel Wonderful. Mountains are no longer mountains: the screen kaleidoscopically multiplies images of hair care as pleasure, of Black women pleased and proud of their looks, all amid wah-wah pedals and wood paneling for a 30s-glamor-meets-70s-funk vibe. The pauses here are close-ups on shared emotion, a smile, a playful raspberry. Even the last segment on “unmanageable hair” turns covering it up into its own loud and lovely statement piece, a crowning glory worthy of strutting out and about proudly in. The colors are warm, the textures fuzzy, lo-fi. Word association across an artifacted image of cornrows (including cultivate) pokes at the supposed nature/culture split.
In White Afro, the sole film void of visible Black women (save as disturbing, tongue-in-cheek negative image), we are back at mountains once again being mountains. All three films feature professional hairstylists at work, but while Me Broni Ba observes the craft and Split Ends revels in it and its results, White Afro is the only one to talk about its potential profit. Blackness remains an Other, even if positively exoticized; capitalism our American god. The distance between filmmaker and subjects is now ironic instead of yearning, though observational as always—the poor woman getting her hair set looks haunted throughout, especially during the presentation of the finished look but equally uncomfortable reverted to her initial straight blonde “ideal” at the film’s end.
The negative inversion is historical as well; overlapping the original narrator’s authoritative assurance that this skill is a money-maker, Owusu’s mother talks about learning the same skills in a mostly white Virginian hair salon, Fantastic Sam’s. Toni Morrison’s words on the domination of white female beauty appear under talk about “improving our (white, blue-eyed) model’s appearance” with an afro. Black is beautiful, when you can exploit it for green. But even beauty standards are inverted and re-inverted: “limp, lifeless hair” must be manipulated chemically and physically to achieve this wonderful, profitable style.
It is especially startling to see Bill Cosby’s name in the credits, and to hear his words, originally from a CBS special ironically (appropriately?) titled “Black History: Lost Stolen or Strayed.” Cosby’s own image of America’s beloved patriarch was inverted after over 33 women came forward credibly accusing him of sexual assault. He’s discussing forgotten refined sugar inventor Norbert Rillieux, but his dissociated words sound like the stereotypical Black menace encroaching on white women: “What’s the whitest thing you know?...non-integrated, non-black, sweet sugar. But you see, there is a black man in your sugar.” It’s the closest Owusu gets to cynicism, but its inclusion fits with the entire trilogy’s sitting with contradictions and discomforts intentionally created.
Picking up a camera in search of an identity, Owusu found and embraced a faceted multiplicity. Speaking to blog Neo-Griot in 2016, she said she’d resolved that “existential crisis” and realized there is no singular notion of home or self, but a constantly shifting presentation.3 It’s fitting that the filmmaker’s only appearance in these films is the final shot of Me Broni Ba, scored to a 2004 rerecording of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” by the Dap-Kings, restoring Guthrie’s overtly socialist lyrics.
There was a big high wall there That tried to stop me The sign was painted Said 'Private Property' But on the backside It didn't say nothing This land was made for you and me.
Tried and failed to stop me is the sensation, as Owusu swirls her own braids around in motion so slow it becomes paradoxically a vitrification of pleasure in the moment and beautiful abstraction, crowning glory swirling around, pure joy.
1. Johnson, Grant. “Akosua Adoma Owusu.” Artforum, 3 May 2019, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/akosua-adoma-owusu-talks-about-triple-consciousness-79725.
2. Mercer, Kobena. “Black Hair/Style Politics.” New Formations, vol. 3, no. Winter, 1987.
3. ya Salaam, Kalamu. “INTERVIEW: Ghanaian-American Filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu.” Neo-Griot, 2016, http://kalamu.com/neogriot/2016/08/05/interview-ghanaian-american-filmmaker-akosua-adoma-owusu/.