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 is 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 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, instead of simply relaxing it.
She sectioned out Ifemelu's hair, plucked a little attachment
from the pile on the table and began
deftly to twist.
ADICHIE. C.
Americanah A novel New York: Anchor Books. 2013
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