From the September issue, Alia Hamada’s “Moustache Girl.”

1. In what ways is the razor a rebellion?

The razor is a tool for adolescent rebellion: becoming a woman too soon, at least sooner than a mother wants. All hairy women I know wanted to shave their legs, faces, arms, armpits, chests, as soon as possible, including me, and this character. Not only to be “purified” and “white-like”, but also that shaving is a way to act out against the mother. To shave, in this voice, is freedom.

But, as the poem continues: this freedom (bleaching, shaving) is shown to be a guise for ethnic erasure. The young woman in this poem wants to be grown-up, just as all young people do at some point in their youth. Grown-ups get to eat dessert before dinner, stay up late, shave, be beautiful, wear whatever they want. This can also be a false freedom.

2. This poem tackles a mass of definitional issues: about gender, nationality, sexuality. At what point is identity subsumed by cultural pressure?

At birth. Once a baby is born with dark curly hair, wearing blue or pink, that baby’s guardian is asked about all three of those issues. Throughout life, identity is being built and pulled, pushed in & out- but it is felt (painfully, most of the time) internally during adolescence.

This poem is about a brown girl in a white neighborhood, whose mama is also white. Raise your hand if you’ve been made fun of because of your appearance, especially from 5th-9th grade. Right? How torturous, being a brown girl, being asked where she’s from, where she’s from. I remember writing a poem as a middle-schooler that stated: “they’re trying to shape me / re-arrange me”. I believe the last line to this poem was “fucking popularity.” Ha! This character would write that same poem. Unfortunately for this character, she thought the razor would change something inside her, more than it actually did. She realizes she’s got to take on pressure from all sides- the brown side, the white side, America, gender binary structure, pop culture, music. Continue reading →