Hair, Sex and History
“Mama, what style do you want?” Modupe would ask my grandmother. Mama would respond, “Ko Idi soko.” With pretense and mild irritation, Modupe would say, "What do you mean?" Mama repeats the same “ko idi soko.”
Whenever such a scene was unfolding, I immersed myself in whatever book I was reading or thing I was doing. I knew Modupe was up to her usual theatrics, trying to induce Mama to say those words as many times as possible for the pleasure of hearing them. We made hairstyles with names like "shuku," "police cap," "two steps," and "patewo"; that a hairstyle would have such a name was fascinating to Modupe.
Then, Modupe would drop the comb and hair cream in pseudo-mild annoyance and say, "Mama, when you are ready, tell Aunty Seyi (that is, me) what style you want, and she can explain it to you." Now she is trying to expand this theater to include my uninterested self. But I will look at Modupe with that facial look that says, "Keep me out of this."
I have seen this scene too many times. My grandmother did not let on quickly that this scene was intentionally always scripted and curated by Modupe for the fun of it. My grandmother would then say, "You should use a cotton bud to clean your ears. I want ko idi soko." By this time, all the children and whoever was around would join Grandma in telling Modupe that “Mama wants Ko di soko.”
At that point, for whatever reason, my mother always appeared. If my mother appears, because of her conservative Christian sensibilities that abhor naming sex or sexual actions, she would mount a sermon on why making hair is always a hassle between Modupe and Mama and why Grandmother can't come up with a name for hair without using sexualized words. At this moment, that popular saying that “the child is the father of the man” becomes true. At other times, if another person appeared, they got to hold that over my grandmother by promising to tell her daughter.
As I deepened my research on sexuality, I remember this story one day and found myself laughing. Why do all of the protest songs of women from the 1929 Women's War to the Abeokuta Women's Union (AWU) have what we may consider a blemish to our colonized Christian sensibility? For example, the AWU women said the Alake's penis was small, like a cat. Could these words explain why my grandmother described things in ways that unsettle my conservative mother's sensibilities? Why does every reference to the erotic invoke sex when people walked naked until capitalist voyeurism created an economy for the exploitation of Black bodies, from Saartjie Baartman and many other women that space will not allow me to mention? When and how did clothing and civilization become linked?
And, to be honest and in retrospect, I realized she didn’t say those words to be obscene. This story made a line by Audre Lorde meaningful to me: "The erotic is so feared and so often relegated to the bedroom alone when it is recognized at all."
I say all of these for many reasons, but I will mention one: the history of sexuality matters
