Chemical Hair Straightening Politics

Before I cut my hair and created an afro, people thought my Arabic was perfect and that I had resided here in the Occupied Territories all my life. But when I embraced my curls and the nest that rests upon my head, I suddenly became a foreigner. It just does not make sense in my mind, how it can be that when I do accept my natural hair, my natural being in my natural homeland, my new conceptual being creates me into a foreigner. This place is just full of paradoxes.

Today I visited the apartheid wall, and I realized my identity was not the drawings painted on the cement slabs. It was not the landscape that was separated by the barrier, the hills, and valleys, and villages. My identity was the space between each slab, inches deep in the massive barrier. It did not bleed, but hid between massive entities, people who spoke on my behalf, made decisions, drew boundaries. It was that tiny space that society left for me. I could speak, but it would be between two worlds. My hair would be indigenous yet at the same time alien. When the wall does come apart, and there is no space, no cement, no guns, and just freedom, when there is room for my giant hair, what would Palestine be?