At Last
I
By Leah Diouf
can’t say that I’ve always accepted my
ethnicity. As a matter
of fact, I had trouble accepting the fact that
I was different in terms of my origins and my
physical appearance. When I mention physical appearance, I’m mostly talking about my
hair. I’ve always had thick, voluminous hair;
my mom told me that that was my main African heritage from my father’s side. The fact
that she had very thick hair didn’t help my
“condition” at all; it actually worsened it.
Growing up in the suburbs of Paris,
I attended an elementary school where all
various ethnicities were gathered: Algerian, Lebanese, Senegalese, Egyptian… I was
considered more of an outsider not because
I was raised by an African father and a white
mother, but because I was American. At that
young age, I believed that people would
actually be impressed of the fact that I could
speak two languages and have a notion of
two different cultures.
However, the other children proved
me wrong. They didn’t think it was interesting that I spoke two languages or was multicultural, but rather found fault in my hair,
which led to my long search for personal
identity. I knew perfectly that my hair was
not flat like the other girls’: it was short, almost as curly as Diana Ross’s, and it made me
look like a boy. I didn’t really have a problem
with it until a girl deliberately pulled it, asking me why my hair is so weird. I didn’t ansBilingues Et Artistes - N*13
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wer; I never considered asking my parents
about it, because I didn’t believe it would
be important. Then an avalanche of questions invaded my mind: why is my last
name an African one and not a French or
American one? Where does all this hair
come from? One night, I asked my mother
that last question and she naturally responded: “Honey, as you noticed, Papa