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Chika Unigwe's 'Growing My Hair Again'

1208 Words5 Pages

Growing hair and freedom again. In the short story “Growing My Hair Again”, the author, Chika Unigwe, brings us into the world of one family, where people has to be strong and survive through all trouble to get rewarded by their desired wishes. The central theme of the story is to describe how a weak person can become strong to get his freedom back to his hands. The hobby of the main character has its part in telling us that if the individual is interested in doing something that he likes, this will help him to regain his confidence to get his future path sorted and clear. Nneka’s hobby is her hair, and it symbolizes the different levels of freedom she experiences in her marriage and after her husband death. It appears in various scenes of this story, such as the wedding, daily life and after her husband’s death. Before the marriage, Nneka was an independent woman with her freedom. The author gives us a description of her before the wedding: “I had an excess of everything. Education. Beauty. Relatives. Hair. Sure to bring any man down.”(75) From that quotation can be understood that her hair was one of the important aspects of her life. Usually, people describe themselves just saying that they are beautiful, here author wanted us to see that her …show more content…

Nneka survived numerous bad experiences and seems to have earned her freedom in a very hard way. Her hair has symbolized the different levels of freedom she experienced in her marriage and after her husband death. She finally achieved the level of liberty that she desired at the very start of her life when no one can order or control her decisions. From that point, Nneka became “an independent woman with her boutique.”(80) And because of the social system, she can run her own business and be free. Now she could start everything from the beginning, new relationship, new way of life, and new

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Due to the false perception they projected to the society by covering their faults. In her excerpt she says, “A women who has taken off her false locks to comb the short hair that remains” (Shōnagon, Pg. 276). During this period “ how one appeared in the eyes of others was the never-ending concern of the members of the court circle” (Hane, Pg. 61). One of the main physical attributes women needed to obtain was long hair to be considered beautiful. Shōnagon is using satire to show how women who didn 't posses long hair wouldn’t be considered in this society and thus had to conform by obtaining “false locks”.

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