The Sampson Complex: the Power of Hair

We may not often think about mythic archetypes the way we used to, or consider them relevant when we do, but lately, I've been thinking a lot about Sampson, the Biblical hero whose strength came from his hair.  Recall that Sampson got played by Delilah (she cut off his hair while he slept) and lost his awesome strength.

In my lifetime, and in my life, I've witnessed the ways in which hair, and how we wear it, continues to convey surprising power and meaning in our culture.  Having come of age in the 70's, I remember the arguments and tension at home surrounding how long we got to wear our hair.  My father was from the "greatest" generation (i.e. the ones who did what they were told) and he believed that hair on men and boys should be short.  Long hair was part of the counter-culture then, and I remember my father referring to the Beattles’ mophead days as a time when they “looked like men”.  I guess relative to the White Album and Abbey Road days, the mopheads were tame.

At least my father had moved beyond the 1950's peach fuzz summer cuts, but in my childhood view of hair and how everyone was wearing it, he was cutting it too close for comfort.  It made matters worse that he was my barber for the first 12 years of my life.  He actually had a high chair in the basement just for haircuts.  He kept all the tools in a zippered leather case:  the scissors, combs, clippers and whisk brush.  I remember those minutes in the chair that seemed like hours, the shfft sound of the scissors cutting through hair and the metalic click of the scissors opening and shutting rapidly between snips--my father's rhythmic tic that sounded like the scissors themselves gaging which locks needed to go next.  More than anything that sound made me feel like jumping out of my skin and right out of that chair. If only I could have slept through it like Sampson.

In all fairness, as I look at the pictures of myself, my father did a pretty good job cutting hair.  That somehow was beside the point.  The real issue with me and hair was that mine happened to be curly (different) at a time when everybody's was pin straight.  White people wouldn't begin perming their hair curly until the mid to late 70's and in the meantime I suffered the consequences from the moment I entered first grade.

I was called Curly-Q-tips.  I was asked if I stuck my finger in an electric socket.  I was asked if I was a boy or a girl.  The kid who asked me that on the way to school one morning had one hell of a nerve, given that he was as close to an albino as you can come without being one.  He had snow white hair at age 6, pink skin, and only his blue eyes set him apart from the pigment free coloring of albinism.  Yet, somehow my curly hair trumped his straight snow white hair.

By the age of 15 I had a Jackson Five scale afro and used an afro pick on my hair.  That was 1978.  By the next year times had changed and I started to wear my hair shorter but also stopped picking out the curls of my childhood.  This new look was a more modest compromise, my parents didn't seem to mind it, but I still managed to get a nickname from one of my high school classmates:  the sponge.  Because of the cushiony spring of the curls.

If the 70’s were problematic for me in the hair culture war, the 80’s would prove equally treacherous.  Using hair gel and cropping my hair closer on the sides led to further culturally charged remarks.  A certain person, who shall remain unnamed, thought my short hair made me look gay.  Well, maybe it wasn’t the hair as it turned out.  And from other quarters came the complaint that I was using stuff that “black people” used on their hair.

The battle over what I did with my hair had become as archetypally meaningful as Sampson’s:  people were trying to control who I was and what I did by controlling how I wore my hair, as though they had zeroed in, like modern Delilahs, on the source of my power, as though once they had my hair, they had me bound—the way Sampson ended up chained between two pillars.

If hair is somehow tied in our minds to personal power and freedom, then power and freedom often have sexual overtones.  So it is in cultures where only a woman’s husband gets to see her hair; or in our own culture, where a full head of hair on a man is a symbol of virility, thus all the hair regrowth formulas and hair replacement procedures offered to the balding.  Likewise a dark head of hair absent of gray is a sign of youth, while many men shave parts or all of their body hair, not only to show off their gym work, but to look boyish.  Women shave their legs and arm pits to appear more feminine.  And is anybody really ever happy with their hair?  Have you known anyone who didn’t think there was something wrong with theirs?  Too limp, too thin, too dull, too frizzy, too straight, too curly, too nappy, to thick, too coarse, too fine.  While we may sporadically battle our cellulite, muffin tops, beer guts, love handles and saddle bags, we quietly and persistently battle our hair every day of our lives.  From decade to decade, trend to trend, style to style we wage our private battles, and those of us with “different” hair battle the forces of culture of conformity.  There are occasional truces, but the war is never over.

By the mid-90’s when my hair started to get too thin on top, I decided to get out of the hair wars forever and began buzzing my head down every few weeks so nobody really could tell what kind of hair I had or have, what color or how much.  I balded by choice.  In the decade to come, even in the immediate years after I gave up hair, it became a popular look, even for young men with a full head of hair.  Finally it was the best of both worlds.  No hair products, no expensive haircuts, no combing, no gels, no styling, no teasing (in any sense), no nothing.  And it was cool besides! Life without hair was pretty sweet.

But, last winter when I got really busy one week I didn’t shave my head and beard at the usual time, and then a few more weeks passed and soon I was confronted, tempted, by the idea of growing a beard for the rest of winter (the first full beard for me in 25 years) and that meant growing my hair too, because I hate beards with bald heads.  I warned those who had never seen me with hair that it was curly when it got long enough, and I even brought in pictures of me with my afro, and my sponge look and my modest curls with the close cropped sides.  I knew as soon as it got long enough to start to curl it would stick out first.  That meant hair gel again.  Sigh.  And as it lengthened in early spring toward a full-fledged curly head, the hair gel served to give it shine and keep the curls from frizzing out.  Many seemed to like it, mostly women.  I was ambivalent for the very reasons I went bald in the first place:  it was too thin on top.

Then the whispering began, and it came back to me one day that someone said that I had to be coloring my hair, because it couldn’t be that dark, and that I was perming it also.  Even though I had shown pictures of my curly hair.  There it was again.  The battle over my hair:  what it was, what it meant, what I did to it.
I had planned to buzz it off by Memorial Day, but I took it off two weeks early, and that’s how it’s going to stay.

Consider that in my lifetime, the war over how long, what style, and what I put in my hair had raised fears to the point where most of the major isms in our culture had gained utterance.  Early on it was sexism, then racism, homophobia and finally ageism.  How did my poor, doomed, genetically-programmed-to-go-bald, head of curly hair end up being about all those things?  Maybe, like hair, all those isms, if allowed to grow, just can’t help coming to the surface. It has something to do with human expression, and hair has been a form of expression for thousands of years.  As it projects from our heads, chests, legs and arm pits, we seem to project so many of our fears onto its portentous growth.  The Bible has it right.  Hair is a powerful thing.