Hair Hair Hair

I just recently wrote a critical response paper on a chapter in Sag Harbor, more specifically the chapter titled "To Prevent Flare Ups." Right at the beginning of this chapter Ben reflects on his hair and also more subtly his relationship with his father. Benji cut his hair for the first time without his father's help, signaling a sort of coming of age.

Now, I got to thinking about what really hair means. How can it be such a strong symbol of growing up? It's just a lifeless thing on our body, why does it hold such powerful meaning for some people? I automatically thought of the movie Hair, a 1979 musical war comedy-drama and film adaptation of the 1968 Broadway musical of the same name. This movie follows a group of hippies who despise the Vietnam War and disregard the draft. The plot is significantly more developed than what I'm describing, but the most interesting aspect of this movie is the role that the hippies' appearances and hair play. Their hair is what describes their identity, identifying them as deviants of society.

In this movie, the hippies' 'coming of age' comes from disregarding their family's wishes and creating their own individual identity. The same happens to Benji in Sag Harbor. Cutting his hair signifies that he is ready to separate himself from his less than ideal father and create his own identity.

Image

My favorite kind of writing is the intricate and vivid kind. But only if it satisfies two conditions: it has to be modern and given to me in small doses. I'm sure many of us are struggling with reading Sag Harbor. It seems to stretch out much longer than Black Swan Green or The Bell Jar. Like Darren mentions in his blog post, probably because Sag Harbor is set in a much shorter time frame.

One of the things that intrigues me about Colson Whitehead's writing is the images he evokes with his writing. While reading our most recent chapter "To Prevent Flare-Ups" I noticed a few sections that stood out to me:

It was a weird black amoeba testing the edges of itself, throwing out nappy pseudopods here and suddenly there, an unpredictable new direction every day. I swear it lived, and have come to believe that its ever-shifting lumps and tendrils were a doomed attempt at communication with the humans.

Ordinary hair is described in such a vivid and colorful way. I almost pause in my reading and imagine the snake-like movement of the blob-ish amoeba. The same imagery and metaphor-like language was in The Bell Jar. I'm sure many of you don't need to read the following paragraph again because it is one of the most vivid and memorable pieces in the novel. But I wanted to revisit the imagery of the fig tree.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. 

 Although different in substance and image than the passage from Sag Harbor, I still imagined the fig tree winding slowly up and displaying all of Esther's potential futures. In my mind it was alive and movie-like.

How do you read passages rich with images? Does it pay like a movie in your head?