Finally, Aisha finished with her customer and asked what colour Ifemelu wanted for her hair
attachments.
“Colour four.”
“Not good colour,” Aisha said promptly.
“That’s what I use.”
“It look dirty. You don’t want colour one?”
“Colour one it too black. It looks fake,” Ifemelu said, loosening her headwrap. “Sometimes I use
colour
two, but colour four is closest to my natural colour.”
[…]
She touched Ifemelu’s hair. “Why you don’t have relaxer?”
“I like my hair the way God made it.”
“But how do you comb it? Hard to comb,” Aisha said.
Ifemelu had brought her own comb. She gently combed her hair, dense, soft and tightly coiled, until
it
framed her head like a halo. “It’s not hard to comb if you moisturize it properly,” she said,
slipping
into the coaxing tone of the proselytizer that she used whenever she was trying to convince other
black
women about the merits of wearing their hair natural. Aisha snorted; she clearly could not
understand
why anybody would choose to suffer through combing natural hair, plucked a little attachment from
the
pile on the table ad began deftly to twist.
A passagem do romance da escritora nigeriana traz um diálogo entre duas
mulheres
negras: a cabeleireira, Aisha, e a cliente, Ifemelu. O posicionamento da cliente é sustentado por
argumentos que
