Finally, Aisha finished with her customer and asked
what colour Ifemelu wanted for her hair attachments.
“Colour four.”
“Not good colour,” Aisha said promptly.
“That’s what I use.”
“It look dirty. You don’t want colour one?”
“Colour one is too black, it looks fake,” Ifemelu said,
loosening her headwrap. “Sometimes I use colour two,
but colour four is closest to my natural colour.”
[...]
She touched Ifemelu’s hair. “Why you don’t have
relaxer?”
“I like my hair the way God made it.”
“But how you comb it? Hard to comb,” Aisha said.
Ifemelu had brought her own comb. She gently combed
her hair, dense, soft and tightly coiled, until it framed her
head like a halo. “It’s not hard to comb if you moisturize
it properly,” she said, slipping into the coaxing tone of the
proselytizer that she used whenever she was trying to
convince other black women about the merits of wearing
their hair natural. Aisha snorted; she clearly could not
understand why anybody would choose to suffer through
combing natural hair, instead of simply relaxing it. She
sectioned out Ifemelu’s hair, plucked a little attachment
from the pile on the table and began deftly to twist.

ADICHIE, C. Americanah: A novel. New York: Anchor Books, 2013

A Minor Bird
I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;
Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.
The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.
And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

FROST, R. West-running Brook. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1928.

A Mother in a Refugee Camp

No Madonna and Child could touch
Her tenderness for a son
She soon would have to forget...
The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,
Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs
And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps
Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there
Had long ceased to care, but not this one:
She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,
and in her eyes the memory
Of a mother’s pride... She had bathed him
And rubbed him down with bare palms.
She took from their bundle of possessions
A broken comb and combed
The rust-colored hair left on his skull
And then — humming in her eyes — began carefully
[to part it.
In their former life this was perhaps
A little daily act of no consequence
Before his breakfast and school; now she did it
Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.

ACHEBE, C. Collected Poems. New York: Anchor Books, 2004

Disponível em: www.csuchico.edu. Acesso em: 11 dez. 2017.

Disponível em: https://sites.psu.edu. Acesso em: 12 jun. 2018.