Zulaikha — hair power!
I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite like it.
“Take us all,” she said, for half a dozen girls at the school. “They want to take us prison take us all.”
I watched the video on a loop on Instagram. Stolen moments from a protest that left me breathless. I think it was five times before I dared to blink. And still, there was an artistry in the execution of their defiance.
A calmness that betrayed possible consequence.
Their actions
were undeterred by mortgage payments and outstanding car loans. Unconcerned about the impact of her actions on “her career” or “that promotion”.The photo of her standing tall with steely eyes, arms outstretched and fists folded above her irresistible afro in a defiance of an antiquated, warped and racist policy will be studied and fluttered over for years to come.
Her sister said she was continually mocked, her hair described as “exotic” and looking like a “cabbage”. She would come home in tears. It is remarkable then that she didn’t look for ways to mend the “problem”.
I know I turned a blind eye to any whispers or condescension from teachers or classmates at both primary and secondary school reserved for the few brown and black faces in the former Model-C schools I attended.
I know I put on a purported Civilized face each morning I entered that school and showed my true Colors each afternoon back home or with fellow brown savages at the local madrassa.
Then, as profiling at airports or certain cities continue to proliferate, so many of us are shifting our behaviors, assimilating, changing the way we curl our tongues so we fit in, or
We are all in awe of Zulaikha, because we wish to hell we could have all been her, growing up. We wish we could be her, as a grown up.
We’ve been left so insecure and desperate to “make it”, we’ve been wired to forgo anything, including ourselves.
It would not have brought the school to its knees, its policies into the spotlight. It might not have brought politicians and policymakers into the discussion. Zulaikha might have found herself immediately suspended, or expelled, maybe jailed. It might have all been in vain.
We don’t know, as per her sister’s admission, how all of this attention will impact on Zulaikha. She is just a 13-year-old after all, acting on her own accord. And this is not a fight she was ever meant to fight.
And it’s apt, that it would take a child to make us remember that.