Brown Baby Read online

  It becomes a deep slide into Disney Princesses in general. You start to talk about Cinderella, and Snow White, and Alice (from Wonderland fame), and Ariel and even Ana from Frozen. Never Jasmine or Moana. Never the brown ones. Only the doyennes of Western beauty standards, with their alabaster skin, perfect thick straight hair and mixture of coquettish and strident. It’s never the brown ones. This confuses me.

  ‘Why?’ I ask. But I know the answer.

  One day I ask you why you don’t want to be Moana. ‘She’s brown,’ I say. ‘Like you.’

  ‘She has messy hair.’

  Your poor curls. Your poor sense of the propriety of hair. Already you’re falling for the ‘messy’ stereotypes that have plagued women of colour for years – something that Black women have had to push back against even harder than their brown sisters. I hate to see this happen.

  ‘She has beautiful curls, like you,’ I tell you.

  ‘I want blonde hair, like Elsa.’

  Talking to your mum about it, she wonders if it’s simply because Elsa is the most popular and no one will want to be Jasmine or Moana. Why doesn’t anyone want to be Ana? She saves her sister through love. She’s the hero of the whole film.

  White kids can’t identify with brown reflections. That’s why men can’t imagine a lady Ghostbuster or a Black James Bond. White is default and because that default is pernicious in its execution, especially in terms of who it others, it becomes a standard that you always have to be in opposition to. It creates a default. From small things, like when we talk about flesh-coloured microphones or tights or plasters, and they never match my skin tone. Or when we talk about who runs our countries, boardrooms, commissioning bodies at cultural institutions. Or when we imagine different jobs. Who do we see?

  A friend of mine, Yomi, once posted a link to an article about the Three Bears theory of popular culture. It theorized that if we tried to imagine what the ultimate object of attraction in the West was, not necessarily who we would be attracted to, but who popular culture will always point us to as someone to be desired, it’s the big-boobed, blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl who is a ‘cook in the kitchen, lady in the dining room and whore in the bedroom’ stereotype. And then popular culture will present her with three options for who she might find sexually attractive as a partner. Let’s assume that all three of these archetypes are desperate to sleep with her. But she will be presented with the Black man, whose dick is way too big and is a sexual predator, an animal, a savage. Then she’ll be presented with the Asian man (and let’s assume this generic Asian man could be from South Asia, East or South East Asia), and they have a small dick, and are either effeminate or creepy or sexually repressed or weak or, if we’re lucky, all of them. Which leaves us the white man. Average dick, average build, average personality, in the middle . . . steady Eddie . . . and he is, like the little bear’s porridge, chair and bed, juuuuust right.

  And if the girls are all shown the insidious message that means they all want to be Goldilocks, that this is an acceptable set-up, then we are messing with your brains, and I am sorry, and it needs to stop.

  You come back from a walk in the park with your mum and give me a hug. You have the bobbing frenzy of someone who just learned something and cannot wait to share it. You want to tell me something but the thought of it is so overwhelming, it takes you a second to pull it out of your brain. You stutter when I ask if you’re okay.

  ‘Daddy,’ you eventually say, throwing your open palms out in front of you. ‘Boys can have long hair too.’

  You shrug and smile, like what a time to be alive.

  ‘Yes. They can,’ I say. ‘Wait, what do you mean?’

  You climb up into my lap and give me a cuddle, tapping the back of my head twice, like you need to be more excited about this. You release me, look up at me and put your hands on my chest, looking off to the window like you have seen something almost too much to sum up in mere mortal words.

  ‘Daddy, I saw a boy in the park and boys can have long hair too!’

  Your open palms are right under my nose. The dad compulsion is strong in me: I want to pretend to bite them but I know that would undermine this big moment you’re having.

  I look at your mum and we share a knowing smile. Something has been challenged in your dress-wearing, Aryan white supremacist beauty standards brain and you need to talk it out.

  ‘Yes, boys can have long hair, girls can have short hair. Anyone can have any hair they want.’

  ‘Can they?’ you ask. ‘Can you have long hair?’

  I get out a photo album my mum kept of my growing pains. Her ardent photo-taking stopped around eleven but I had added a few photos to the end, just to complete the transformation. Only one photograph exists of me with ill-advised straight long hair, from when I was seventeen. I wanted it so badly but couldn’t be doing with the interim slow growth or upkeep. As soon as the hair over the front of my face was below my chin, I decided it was long enough and it didn’t suit me and I had your mama shave it off in the back garden. It’s the test print from my school portrait, that my mum chose not to buy because, my god, she hated that long hair.

  She preferred boys with short hair too. I show you the photograph and you laugh till your voice cracks; it’s a little forced, a little manic, a little like you are forever changed. All in the shrill forced huh of the ha ha ha ha ha.

  ‘Daddy had long hair,’ you tell your mum, squealing with delight, and she nods. Yes, yes he did and thank god he didn’t when we met because this would not have progressed, she probably thinks. You would not exist.

  I put the photograph away and you burrow yourself into the pit of my arms more.

  ‘Can girls really have short hair?’ you ask.

  I remind you of my old boss Clare. You nod slowly.

  ‘Wow,’ you say.

  ‘Sure, we wear our hair how we want. How we feel comfortable and how we like it. Not how anyone tells us to have it. How we like it. If you want short hair, I can get my clippers.’

  You clutch your scalp and shout nooooo. I laugh and tickle under your arms.

  ‘Do girls have short hair sometimes?’ you ask again.

  ‘Of course,’ I tell you. ‘Anyone can wear their hair how they want.’

  ‘I like my hair long.’

  You think about it and brush at my hair.

  ‘Have you ever had your hair really long? Down to the floor?’

  I shake my head, thinking back to my brief period of long hair and other questionable hairstyles throughout my life and what they said about me at each moment. I can’t even remember why, as an eighteen-year-old, I wanted my hair long. Probably because Jonny Greenwood had long straight hair, flopping over the front of his face while he contorted sound in unimaginable ways. But then a year later, when it was all about rap and jungle again, I had a shaved head. I could identify each stage of my life and what I was into through what my hair was doing.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I had long hair because I wanted to look like my cousins and my favourite guitar player.’

  ‘Were they a girl?’ you ask.

  ‘No, a boy,’ I say.

  You smile, as if you have gazumped me, and climb off me onto the floor, practising a forward roll with the innate confidence of someone who just told you what’s what.

  ‘I told you boys can have long hair,’ you tell me.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘And they can wear dresses,’ I add, a beat later.

  This stops you in your tracks.

  ‘Daddy,’ you say, cracking up. ‘You’re being silly.’

  I’m wearing a jubo lengha. It’s summer and the flowing jubo acts as a cooling system for my overheating body.

  I’m getting ready for work and you’re in your room, putting on a dress and helping your sister out. She’s figuring out socks. With little success. But she’s really trying. You burst into our room, smiling. You look at what I’m wearing.

  ‘Is that a dress, Daddy? Boys can’t wear dresses,’ you say, rolling your eyes
, rolling the consonants into an urgh-so-embarrassing tone. I don’t know what sort of teenager you’ll be yet but I know whoever you are will be mortified by me and what you’ll sound like when you tell me.

  I try to explain to you that it’s a jubo lengha and even if it wasn’t, if it was in fact a dress, that would still make it okay.

  Throughout your life you’ve been dressed in various Spider-Man outfits, all bought by me, from me, from Spidey Babygros to romper suits to a full-blown costume to pyjamas to sweatshirts, and so on. I once sent a picture of you wearing the Babygro to your fai and she replied, mortified, ‘Nik,’ she wrote (being one of the three people in the world who has permission to call me that), ‘she’s a girl.’

  ‘So?’ I replied. ‘Girls can’t like Spider-Man?’

  Months later, you eschew the Spider-Man jumper on a cold day for a sensible cardigan because Spider-Man was for boys. It breaks my heart.

  I show you pictures on my phone of South Asian men in their flowing robes. Because the aesthetic in this country is for jeans and T-shirts, often with your favourite band on them, it’s surprising to you that in other countries, different fashion styles dictate. I show you different sherwanis long jubos and kilts and shukas. You’re fascinated by the pictures but you’re still adamant.

  Beyond showing you pictures of men wearing dresses, which doesn’t really help because a photograph on a phone isn’t necessarily grounded in the real world of a four-year-old’s brain, I don’t know what to tell you.

  I visit Round Table Books, a bookshop opened by children’s publisher Knights Of, just before Christmas. They’ve opened up a small space in Brixton Market with the express intention of selling diverse children’s books to the world. The shop’s shelves are dedicated to ensuring that children have mirrors held up to them through stories and pictures.

  Talking to David and Aimée about the problem I’m having with your inflexibility around boys and dresses, Aimée points to a book called Julian Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love, where a young Black kid called Julian sees some people dressed as mermaids on the New York subway, and is immediately, in their imagination, thrust into a world where they can become a mermaid and dress how they want. It is a picture book about metamorphosis and becoming your true self. Julian spends half the novel becoming a mermaid using props from their grandma’s room while she showers. On emerging and seeing the chaos Julian has caused, instead of being angry, she smiles at this act of self-expression and puts a string of pearls around Julian’s neck to complete the look before taking them out to a parade, where Julian can be themselves amongst the mermaids. It’s a magical book about imagination, self-expression and people supporting you to find yourself.

  And it features a boy wearing what traditionally might be seen as girl clothes. I buy the book and take it home to you.

  That night we read it. As soon as we finish, you want it again.

  At bedtime, you ask me to read it first and then I read it twice more.

  The next morning, you want the book again. And then again. With Mum, and then again with me. And that night again.

  Then we have a day off from Julian’s world.

  Then it’s back to the book. You’re processing something. You never expressly tell me that you’ve accepted that boys can wear dresses now but I can see a shift in you.

  It is perplexing buying clothes for you. You grow so fast and so anything we get new isn’t going to last long. You’re an active child. Always moving, laughing, singing, jumping, trying acrobatics, running. You are always talking and shifting. Boys’ clothes are designed to be functional so they can run, jump, climb trees. Girls’ clothes are designed to be pretty.

  I’m saying nothing new, Ganga. I know.

  But it’s only in shopping for clothes for you that I see all the boys’ clothes cover more ground in the images they show: dinosaurs and space and vehicles and food and Marvel. You get unicorns and cats. Maybe it’s the shops I’ve gone to, sure. But boys’ clothes seem different; they’re roomier. They have pockets and are stretchier so you can kick balls, run through the park and jump off walls onto the ground. I read somewhere that boys and girls pretty much grow the same way until they’re six years old anyway. Which means the difference in the clothes makes no sense to me. Coupled with your obsession for wearing dresses. It’s hard. Could a dress have a construction vehicle on it? Could a blue sweatshirt have a glittery rainbow unicorn?

  You will only wear dresses. And they will come off at bath time, muddy, ripped, covered in the detritus of a day spent constantly on the move. Ganga, you are restless. Have been since you were born. Always moving, never still, unless you’re eating. I have no desire to slow you down or make you still. It’s more the inflexibility you feel in your dress sense that worries me. You can wear whatever you want, ultimately. Just don’t make the choice based on what you see as a gender role.

  For your fourth birthday, your fai buys you an Elsa from

  Frozen dress. This is the moment everything becomes about princesses. You immediately take your clothes off and put it on. It bouffs out onto the floor, with a train behind it. You want to look at yourself in the mirror. You’ve never seen Frozen and yet, you can see yourself, in the mirror, as Elsa. You want long blonde hair now. You want to be a princess. You want to be the big sister with magical powers.

  You run in the garden. To the trampoline. You stand on the train. Two or three times, on your way, pelting to the end of the garden. On the trampoline, you jump, and land on the train, a few too many times. Frustrated, you growl.

  ‘It’d be easier if you took it off,’ I suggest.

  You pull a face, upset, trying to stop yourself from crying. The thought of taking this dress off feels like the worst suggestion I could possibly make. It’s the dress of dreams. The idea of it all crumbles in your face. The crushing disappointment. The reality. That girls’ clothes just aren’t made for you to jump about on trampolines, peel across the garden, bundle me, or kick a football. Especially if you want to act like a princess. You process this and stop jumping. You pick up the train and look for somewhere to tuck it. I offer to tie it around you and you let me. You carry on jumping, but you keep stumbling on the hem of the dress. Frustrated, you ask to be unzipped and you pull it off.

  It’s one of those hot, sticky, early autumn days where the weather hasn’t quite realized it’s not summer anymore. You jump in your pants, screaming across the garden at your little sister, who watches from the grass, amazed as the muscles on your brown body propel you into the air.

  Later, inside, you put the dress on to wear for dinner. You sit there, like you’ve decided to put on evening wear to eat fishfingers and beans. Your train is still tied around you because that’s the easiest way to deal with it.

  Speaking to my friend Sam, she tells me she hates the word tantrum. She never uses it when referring to her daughter.

  ‘It’s sexist,’ she tells me. ‘A tantrum is just another word for hysterical.’

  I ask her what’s wrong with hysterical.

  She fixes me a look.

  ‘Well, we’re not talking about the connotations of being funny,’ she tells me. ‘It comes from the Greek word for uterus. Hystera. So, if someone is having a hysterical reaction to something, like if they are having exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, it’s because of their silly little womb. Oh, silly little women and their silly little wombs.’

  ‘And tantrum?’ I ask.

  ‘. . . is what you’re having when we call you hysterical . . .’

  ‘I guess I’d never thought it was sexist. I’m an idiot. Sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Well, we only use tantrum for girls,’ she tells me. ‘Girls have tantrums. Boys get to be angry. You can justify a lot of anger. A tantrum is a bit like, oh, you’re just over-reacting, silly little woman with your silly little womb. You and your silly little tantrum. Calm down, dear . . .’

  I ask Google the question, later: Is tantrum sexist?

  I get back a heap of results
about Serena Williams having a ‘temper tantrum’ at a sexist umpire. Serena Williams is probably as good a case in point about the sexism and racism that coexist in an undeniably messy package.

  She is never allowed to be her exceptional best. She is proof that the immigrant motto, fed to all of us by our parents, that you have to work twice as hard to have half the opportunities, is actually never enough. She has been the best for more than a decade and she is still never accepted.

  People still assume she is in a long-standing rivalry with Maria Sharapova. She has beaten Maria Sharapova 17 times out of 19. That’s less a rivalry and more a . . . smackdown fam.

  When she wins, the authorities over-test her for performance-enhancing drugs. When she wins more, it is because of ‘eugenics’ and how Black people are more predisposed to sports, or maybe it’s because she’s manly. Her femininity is constantly called into question. Her Blackness is constantly used against her. Her anger at all this injustice is reduced to a tantrum. Meaning it’s not taken seriously. As Claudia Rankine writes of Serena Williams in Citizen: An American Lyric, ‘Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context – randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out “I swear to god!” is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship.’

  Ganga, I used to assume that tantrums were a child’s overreaction, an inability to control your emotions despite low stakes.

  No, you have to wear those shoes.

  No, you can’t watch television right now.