{"id":208625,"date":"2021-06-17T15:27:53","date_gmt":"2021-06-17T19:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/?p=208625"},"modified":"2024-09-17T11:30:37","modified_gmt":"2024-09-17T15:30:37","slug":"irish-nigerian-writer-emma-dabiris-visit-to-montclair-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/2021\/06\/17\/irish-nigerian-writer-emma-dabiris-visit-to-montclair-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Irish-Nigerian Writer Emma Dabiri\u2019s Visit to Montclair State"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI had so many people tell me I was the first black person they\u2019d ever met, and while for them that was the first time they were saying that, for me it was something I was dealing with constantly, and it was quite exhausting.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On April 21st<\/sup>, Irish-Nigerian writer, BBC presenter, and academic Emma Dabiri visited Professor Lucy McDiarmid\u2019s class in Contemporary Irish Literature for two-and-a-half hours of interview and discussion with students and guests from the Montclair community.\u00a0 Dabiri\u2019s highly acclaimed 2019 book Don\u2019t Touch My Hair<\/em> (retitled in the 2020 U.S. paperback Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture<\/em>) was the final text assigned in the class.\u00a0 Eloquent, passionate, and dryly witty, the book is a memoir of Dabiri\u2019s youth in Dublin, a cultural history of\u00a0 African \u2013 especially Yoruba —\u00a0 hair traditions, and a manifesto about Western racism.<\/p>\n

No one else in the Ireland of the 1980s had a background as unusual as Dabiri\u2019s: her white Irish mother, the daughter of socially conservative parents from Ireland\u2019s County Mayo, was born in Trinidad, where her father was working at the time; her black Nigerian father travelled to Ireland to attend University College Dublin, where her parents met.\u00a0 Dabiri was born in Ireland but as a small child moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where she and her parents lived in a house with many of her Nigerian relatives.\u00a0 There she got to know her paternal grandmother, who wore her hair in the traditional braided Yoruba style.\u00a0 Moving back to Ireland at age four, Dabiri suddenly found herself living in a homogeneously white society where people told her she \u201cwasn\u2019t really Irish.\u201d\u00a0 And, she said, \u201cI also had an American accent, so I was very much an anomaly.\u201d<\/p>\n

When, in 2019, Don\u2019t Touch My Hair<\/em> became the number two best-seller in the British and Irish bookstore chain Waterstones, Dabiri was wryly amused, because as a nine-year-old girl, quietly absorbed reading a book in the Dublin Waterstones, she was wrongly accused of shoplifting.\u00a0 Her mother blew up at the security guard and the sales people, and young Emma was given a \u00a320 book voucher.<\/p>\n

More than her skin color, Dabiri\u2019s Afro-textured hair made her stand out among Irish people, and as a child she prayed every night that she would wake up with the kind of smooth, bouncy hair that all the other girls seemed to have.\u00a0 In those years, there were no hair products or stylists for African hair in Ireland.\u00a0 In Dabiri\u2019s Dublin youth, trauma followed trauma.\u00a0 When her classmates elected her \u201cclass captain,\u201d the principal of the school marched to the classroom, sent Emma out to the hall, and gave the students a lecture on the mistake they had made.\u00a0 Listening through a crack in the door, Emma heard her say, \u201cWhen milk is fresh, cream rises to the top.\u00a0 By electing Emma, you have prevented the cream from rising to the top.\u201d\u00a0 So, Dabiri told us, \u201cI never knew what the class captain was supposed to do, because I was not allowed to be captain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"author<\/figure>\n

When it came time to go to university, Dabiri was eager to live in a city where she would not be the only black person everyone knew.\u00a0 What she discovered in London, however, was that she was Irish.\u00a0 Having been told for so many years\u00a0 in Dublin that she couldn\u2019t possibly be Irish, Dabiri observed, \u201cI came to see that lots of things that I thought everybody did were specifically Irish \u2013 my outlook, my sense of humor, my sensibility.<\/strong>\u00a0 I had a long journey of making sense of that, of reconciling being black with being Irish.\u00a0 Cultivating an integrated sense of myself was a long process and took me years.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Woven into Dabiri\u2019s autobiographical remarks was a history of racialization in the Western world and comments on the different racialized histories of the U.S., England, and Ireland.\u00a0 Students were eager to find out more about Dabiri\u2019s ideas and experiences, asking questions about the books she read growing up and the various hair treatments she had tried, and (in Dabiri\u2019s words) \u201cthe stigma that still exists around Afro-textured hair.\u201d \u00a0When, in London, she \u201cwent natural, the energy around me shifted.\u00a0 I started hanging around more black women with natural hair.\u201d \u00a0She has taught her young son, the older of her two boys, to value his hair and to enjoy all its stylistic possibilities.\u00a0 \u00a0Her second book, What White People Can Do Next<\/em>, has just been published in an American paperback.<\/p>\n

By the time Emma Dabiri had answered every question, it was already Thursday in London.\u00a0 The Zoom meeting ended, and the audience was left with much to ponder, and with great admiration for a new kind of Irish writer.<\/p>\n

Story by Professor Lucy McDiarmid<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI had so many people tell me I was the first black person they\u2019d ever met, and while for them that was the first time they were saying that, for me it was something I was dealing with constantly, and it was quite exhausting.\u201d On April 21st, Irish-Nigerian writer, BBC presenter, and academic Emma Dabiri […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":208633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-57_english-department","category-7_homepage-news-and-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208625"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":208636,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208625\/revisions\/208636"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}