The vast majority of schools in Haiti have curly hair restrictions. The hair “Seeds” [littéralement “graines” en créole haïtien] are “more difficult to style as you grow and are not very pretty to see”, explains the director of the mixed school Union des coeurs, Anne Sydoma Zamor Vilpigue.
One of the most common cases that the normalienne says she encounters is that of parents who are too busy to monitor how their children are doing at school:
“These students therefore arrive with their hair uncombed. And, even when they may not actually be, their hair looks dirty.”
“If you have very frizzy hair, reports DJ, educated at the Canadian-Haitian College since 2016, officials will put more pressure to have it cut, because it looks uglier to them compared to other students’ hair, which is silkier or curly.”
The Martinican sociologist Juliette Sméralda translates this negative view of frizzy hair as a rejection of the type of hair in question. To support his argument, in an interview with AyiboPostthe author of Dark skin, frizzy hair [éd. Jasor, 2005] dates back to colonial times.
The problem, she says, arises with the clash of civilizations when the self-described white European enters the universe of the black with arrogance and aggression, then allows himself to look at frizzy hair with horror and contempt.
This problem goes back a long way, analyzes the sociologist:
“The blacks who are at the head of the institutions today are [parfois] substitutes for whites in the plantation era.”
Symbol of cultural identity
They run institutions that sometimes date back to colonial times. This is why they will tend to “forcing their peers to enter a body that is not theirs”.
For girls in school, the Afro hairstyle is the ban that comes up the most. Yet it is a symbol of cultural identity. In the 1960s, the afro was adopted by the protagonists