‘Rat’s Nest’
— Reneé Bibby
Woman’s bodies are the landscapes we map. There’s an assumed societal privilege to dissect and comment on the way a woman occupies space that is echoed in the microcosm of family space, where sometimes societal preferences are pressed up on a young person by the very people who could have inoculated against those external pressures. Within the constant swirl of the body, measured and weighed by family and society alike, no part of the female body, for me personally, is as fraught as hair. As a mixed-race woman with curly hair, the life-long micro-aggressions against curly hair, the curly-haired-shaped void of representation in media cannot be undone so easily with an “oh, but I love your hair,” whenever the issue comes up in conversation. What is needed, what Monica Rico delivers in ‘Rat’s Nest,’ is art about hair. A woman’s mane that defies everyday convention because it is a conduit to nature, to life, to power. Rico may not have curly hair. But she’s written a poem that I want to share with everybody I know, because hair is not cute, or neat. It’s wild, uncontained; it’s everything. It “something so wondrous your fingers get caught in this hair / that causes the very teeth of combs to break and bow.”