Lyzette Wanzer’s newest book, Trauma, Tresses, and Truth: Untangling our Hair Through Personal Narratives, (Lawrence Hill Books), explores the social, political, and everyday lives of Black women and their natural hair in an anthology of essays, narratives, and history.
In a way, this hybrid text mimics natural hair—it’s braided with complex experiences, woven with legalities and policies, and intertwined with poetry and imagery. Overall, it is a beautiful, textured body of work that teaches, inspires, and conveys a nuanced yet common reality. In addition to the expansive context of individual stories and facts, Trauma, Tresses, and Truth includes resources, a study guide, and educational extras.
With the elements mentioned, this body of work further discusses the sociopolitical surveillance and control the world has on Black and Afro-Latina women’s hair, the nuances of palatability, and professionalism. This text speaks not only to the oppression experienced by Black and Afro-Latina women donning natural hair but also to the joys and wonderful experiences that can only be experienced through a journey with natural hair.
Wanzer is a San Francisco–based writer, editor, and instructor whose writing has been published in the Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, and others. The recipient of numerous writing residencies and grants, she has presented her work in panels at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference, Litquake Festival, and more. I was able to chat deeper with Wanzer about the origins and inspiration that started Trauma, Tresses, and Truth, the process of fielding narratives, and making a full-bodied anthology.
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The Rumpus: Trauma, Tresses, and Truth originated as an AWP panel. Can you tell me a bit more about how a panel became a book?
Lyzette Wanzer: [Trauma, Tresses, and Truth] was, in large part, a response to the upheaval of the summer of 2020, which I call “the summer of racial reckoning.” And it was kind of a therapeutic and cathartic way for me to deal with the rage that I was experiencing on a daily basis after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor happened. Going to marches and protests wasn’t helping me. I was waking up angry. I was going to bed angry. People were noticing it even at work. I said, “This is not good for me. It’s not healthy. I’ve got to come up with a way to metabolize all of this rage.” So I produced the panel at a conference in March of 2020 in San Antonio, also called “Trauma, Tresses, and Truth.” I recruited four other Black and Latina authors and myself, where we read essays about our experiences wearing natural hair in American society.
After that session was over—we had standing room–only participation—six women came up to me and said, “So where can we get the book?” And of course, there was no book then and I didn’t think that this had any real mileage as a book. But after Breonna and George happened, I changed my mind and started writing the book proposal. Just writing the proposal was an exercise for me in healing. Then when it was done in late July of 2020, I went ahead and said, “Well, you’ve finished it. So, you may as well go ahead and send it out. No one’s going to accept it, but just send it out since you went through the work of writing the proposal.”
By mid-October I had four publishing offers. I like to say that I don’t think that would have happened any other year. It wouldn’t happen this year. It wouldn’t have happened in 2019. It happened that year because everyone—all organizations across the country—were posturing platitudes all over their website saying, “We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and blah, blah, blah. We practice diversity and inclusion” and whatnot. I think a lot of BIPOC writers’ manuscript submissions and book proposal submissions were getting extra-close reads that fall. And that’s how this happened.
Rumpus: Did you know that this was going to kind of work itself into being a hybrid text?
Wanzer: I knew I wanted it to be an anthology because I didn’t want to write a book where people said “Well, that’s just that experience. It’s not typical.” In the book, we have three generations of women writing, which demonstrates that this is not new. It’s a long-standing problem. It’s recurring and it’s a stubborn problem. And now we seem to need legislation to protect us to be allowed to wear our hair the way we want. I knew I wanted it to be an anthology, and I knew I wanted both Afro-Latina and African American voices in the volume.
I originally wanted just essays, and then one person submitted a poem. It was the opening poem, and it was so beautiful. I was like, “I’ve got to find a way to include this, but how can I just pick a poem in a collection of essays?” Then, I thought, “Wait a minute, I can have four poems, I can have one section, each section opened by a poem.” So that allowed me to accept four poems and have greater representation as well. The book is geared for a general readership, but it’s also being marketed to institutions, as well. You can probably see that from the table of contents, the way the book is divided, and the study guide in the back.
Rumpus: What were some of the guiding questions? What were some of the main things that you knew had to be addressed for this to be full?
Wanzer: Well, I knew I wanted Afro-Latina and African American voices because Afro-Latinas add a whole extra layer to the complexity of this issue. I have seen lots of other books out there about natural hair, very few of them are anthologies. And none of them had a focus on Afro-Latinas. I knew it was important to have people from across a wide geographic area across the country and across generations. And that was a little challenging sometimes, too, because I’ve been living here so long. I have a lot of West Coast connections, and because I’m from New York, I know a lot of New York connections. But I wanted to make sure that we had the middle of the country represented and the South and so on. I did live in Atlanta for six years, so that was helpful. That was the biggest challenge.
I also knew what I didn’t want, which is twenty different hot combs stories and twenty different Jheri curl stories. We needed some variety.
Rumpus: How did you choose to have a well-rounded narrative throughout this? When did you know that it was a good representation of different natural hair narratives?
Wanzer: That took some curation. I had to recruit the authors, but I also had to curate the whole book as a whole and shape it. During the editing process, I did three full deep rounds of editing the entire manuscript before I even gave it to the publisher. And then of course, there were additional rounds of editing but I had to go back to some of the contributors and say, “We already have a couple of essays focusing on this aspect. And I see you brought up [another] aspect. Could you enlarge that more in your particular essay so that we can fill a missing piece or a niche that we don’t have filled yet?” So it took some curation and that was a tough thing to do. There would be some back and forth with some of the authors and asking them to shift their focus a little bit.
Rumpus: I also appreciate that even though “trauma” is within the title, it’s not all these hard stories about Black women and their natural hair. I find that a lot of times throughout, [the book] talks about the joy in our natural hair, our progression, hair being a sacred practice, or a time that we bond with our mothers and women in our families. Can you speak a little bit more about that?
Wanzer: Yes, trauma is in the title. But of course, I wanted to get Black joy into the book because that’s also part of our experiences. Some of my favorite narratives are the ones where the women are recounting those times with their mothers, getting their hair done and sitting on the floor between their knees, and the bonding that took place around that experience. There’s an Afro-Dominican who had a story like that but with her father, which was really wonderful.
Rumpus: Was there anything that you feel, in retrospect, is missing or could have been spoken more to? Conversations that you’d like to have in the future?
Wanzer: As I was working on this book and tweeting about it, I began to hear from people from other cultures contacting me and saying, “Is there a way we can get into this book because we have this trouble too. We have this as an issue as well.” First, I heard from a woman of Middle Eastern descent, and she said, “Do you think there’s any room for us to get into this book because we have this issue in our culture.” And I heard from multiple Native American men on Twitter saying, “We have this problem also. I go for a job interview, and I wear my hair. It’s long, but I wear it in a neat braid down my back. They still will say, ‘Well, in order for us to offer you this job, you’ll need to cut your hair.’ I can’t cut my hair because it’s part of my tribal custom and I’m honoring my ancestors.” There are some who believe there’s power in their hair, and that’s why they can’t cut it. I heard from East Indian women as well. [They say] “This goes hand-in-hand with the colorism that we experience in India and the Indian diaspora. Is there a way for us to get into this book?” Most surprisingly, I heard from white women who talked about Jewish hair, which I had never heard of and had to research some.
Rumpus: It feels like hair, although we get a lot of the—I’ll just generalize it and say violence from it, in policy and everyday social interaction—it affects everybody, but we know it in the most intimate way.
Wanzer: It’s interesting. I met a young Native American man in Minnesota back in October when I was doing a monthlong range residency there. And he was explaining how people walk around and try to touch his mother’s hair. They asked her if it’s real because it’s so straight and so black.
Rumpus: Do you think there might be an iteration of [Trauma, Tresses, and Truth] in the future that discusses other groups, people of color or people of different religious, and cultural backgrounds surrounding their hair?
Wanzer: I’m already thinking about that because of the comments that I heard on social media while I was working on this book. Even at readings, I still have people coming up to me and saying the same thing. It’s very interesting how internalized the colonized unity is worldwide.
Rumpus: Did you expect that to happen, or was that surprising for you to experience people [sharing similar experiences] who aren’t Black women?
Wanzer: I did not see that coming, especially hearing from Native American men. But we all know what hair bias and hair discrimination is a proxy for anyways. It’s just a proxy for racism. If you look at it from that perspective and through that lens, then yeah, it does make a certain sense.
Rumpus: What were some other themes or common threads that weren’t as in-your-face, that you realized while doing research?
Wanzer: Well, for one, realizing the number of [Black and biracial] children who have been disciplined and expelled because their hair is either too big or too distracting, the number of kids across this country in schools being told that they have to go home and fix their hair. They have to cut it, they have to straighten it, they can’t wear braids and can’t wait to wear dreadlocks. That’s a whole other kettle of fish that this book doesn’t address at all, but I couldn’t stop reading about it once I heard about it.
Rumpus: Was there anything else in your research that didn’t make it into the book?
Wanzer: I mean, after I finished doing research, I probably had enough material for books. But I did get at least one person speaking about the Tignon laws in eighteenth-century Louisiana, but there was so much more around that that I could have done. Also, I was fascinated with Black newspapers and the hair ads that were in them. I’m still fascinated with that. I put some of that in my closing essay, which was turning the lens right side up. Looking at the old newspapers, especially from the early twentieth and nineteenth centuries and seeing the different hair brands, and how the number of ads sometimes took up ninety percent of the real estate and you’d have just a little bit of news there, and all the ads would be talking about how you can straighten your ugly, gnarly, kinky hair, and so on. I’m like, “Wow, this is what they had to do. Even freed slaves, if they wanted to get a larger slice of life, had to assimilate.”
Rumpus: Is there anything else that really stood out to you as an editor putting this all together?
Wanzer: Well, I just think it’s absolutely absurd that we need legislation to protect us—that is just ridiculous. Yes, I’m proud that I’m in California, which was the first state to enact the CROWN legislation, but it’s just preposterous. Nobody else needs hair protection laws.
I mean, it’s just ridiculous that we have to have this to protect people in schools and in their employment and their workplaces. It’s just ridiculous. I think when the book went to press, we were up to fourteen states. And now we’re up to twenty. Six more states since the book has gone to press, but you know, we’re not even halfway there. So if I go to a state that doesn’t have a CROWN Act and I interview for a job and I’m very well qualified based on my background and my skill set and my resume, they can legally make that job offer contingent to me, based on the fact that I take my dreadlocks out or cut them or straighten my hair or et cetera, and I wouldn’t have a legal recourse. That to me is just stunning. I still can’t get over it.
Rumpus: One of the lines that really stood out to me was what you wrote in the intro. You were recalling a woman’s story and said, “I can’t remember her name, but the night her story aired I began growing out my relaxer.” And it really made me think about the way a Black woman [inspired] another Black woman miles away. Is that similar to what you intended to do with this text?
Wanzer: That wasn’t intentional, I just wanted people to understand when I decided to go natural myself and why. It was not an aesthetic decision, it was really a political decision. [I was] sitting and watching this story on television about this woman in Boston being fired because she changed her hair, and I said, “You know that is just ridiculous. There’s not much I can do. But here’s one thing I can do, go natural in solidarity with her.”
Rumpus: What do you recommend for somebody trying to put together an anthology of shared experiences maybe pertaining to policy or social interactions in a way that’s well-rounded?
Wanzer: I would emphasize representing many sections of the country, unless you’re deliberately publishing a book with a local focus or a state-wide focus. Try to get as many voices as you can from different areas of the country. And that might mean you have to do some reading in order to find the writers that would be a good fit for your anthology. You’ll have to get referrals from the writers you already know. That will be time-consuming, but it’ll be worth it.
I definitely knew from the beginning that this had to be a national story, so that people would understand how universal this is. So few of us get out of girlhood without already having received a plethora of negative messages about our natural state. I would encourage folks to put that extra work in and read articles in the topic area online and find people who are making videos on the topic on YouTube, then do the research so that you can reach out to them and make a proposal to them about joining your project.
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Author photo by Adrianne Mathiowetz
