The Crown, The Cage, The Skin in ‘cultures’
I am no OG. I am not a practitioner, nor a cultural purist. I have not yet formed a settled opinion on how Flea transitions from Red Hot Chili Peppers to jazz trumpeter — the man contains multitudes, and I will leave him to it. I hold no fixed verdict on Rock, Punk, or Rap. That last one is a bias I wear openly: I am an AWGE fanatic, and I understand, in the marrow, the artistic language of A$AP Rocky and Ye's particular brand of beautiful aggression. These artists speak to something cellular in Zillennials like me — a generation caught between the analogue warmth of the nineties and the cold scroll of the algorithm, perpetually nostalgic, perpetually cool, perpetually arriving.
And the culture — that diluted, magnificent, exhausted word — it is carried by Millennials and Zillennials who are always, always bringing a new wave. We are the ones who made things cool. Gen Z, with all their charisma and their certainty, are curating what we built and calling it theirs. That is not an accusation. That is just how the tide works.
But this conversation — this conversation — begins in Taiwan. With a question.
"Can I touch your hair?"
When I lived in China, no one asked. The older women, in particular, were not shy about pulling out their phones to photograph or film you in secret — a Black body in their peripheral vision, a curiosity to be captured and posted without consent, without consideration. Because Black bodies still do not fully matter in this world's accounting, even as we are taught, in whispered corners and Afrocentric classrooms, that civilisation itself began with us. That the Black woman is god. That we are the original people.
I was not offended, exactly. I was tired. There is a specific fatigue in being perpetually perceived as different — different and beautiful, yes, but different first, always different first, the distinction arriving before the person does.
After the woman asked about my hair, I said, "Yeah, sure, it's hair." But inside, I was a civil war.
Are they not taught about us in school? About the nine, the spiral, the Fibonacci sequence written into our coils? About the Isis Papers? About how we have evolved — not despite our bodies but through them, in the most extraordinary biological and spiritual mathematics?
If I say no, don't touch my hair, I become Too Sensitive. Too Stuck Up. Unengageable. A difficult woman wearing her crown like a weapon. The narrative closes around me: the caged animal who does not want to be looked at, even though she has been placed there precisely to be looked at, precisely to be touched. And if she speaks — if she rebels — she disrupts the small, tidy story the world has written around her stillness.
Andy Warhol's image of Grace Jones comes to my mind: her body emulating a tiger in a cage. Her regalness cannot be caged, and yet there she is — caged, and still the most powerful thing in the room. That image is not just art. It is a dispatch from reality. It is the conversation I want to have about the frigidity and fluidity of culture: in the street, in the home, in the skin.
Which brings me back to the question I should have answered differently.
"Can I touch your hair?"
The honest answer — the answer I have since reconstructed in the privacy of my own chest — should have been: No. Or: the world has already touched so many parts of me without asking. Why do people still bother to perform the courtesy?
It is the hair. The nails. The music. The fashion. The styling. The walk and the talk. The confidence that arrives in a room before the body does. The slang that seeps into every mainstream playlist and marketing deck until it has been laundered clean of its origin and packaged back to us at a premium.
I want to be careful here, and careful means honest: I have also watched how queer men — particularly queer men of certain performance traditions — have been portrayed. The sassy register. The "Yes, Queen." I feel safe enough to say that I recognise that root. I have seen it growing, alive and vernacular, in Black women — specifically in the kind of Black women who have generated enormous cultural and commercial capital for franchises like Real Housewives. When a queer man shouts "Yes, Queen," I receive it. I relate to it. I also know it is an accented feature, a borrowed frequency, rooted in Black culture. And I love that Black people give the othered permission to exist more fully. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, everything.
But here is the question that cuts through all of it: of all those who move through and profit from this culture — who wear it like a second skin, a better skin, a skin with more currency — how many would actually swap? How many would take the whole package: not just the aesthetic, but the weight, the surveillance, the stopped cars, the touched hair, the invisible grief, the stolen archive?
The conversation shifts, as it always does, from hair to something harder.
Recently, an artist went viral for a song whose title — MONICA — rings uncomfortably close to the sound of the N-word. The culture is built on love, on uplifting those who feel othered, on making something luminous from what the world tried to bury. But this artist touched every entry point of that culture and then, when he stood on his soapbox and announced to the world "I just went Blacker," he touched the skin. Not metaphorically. He reached for the deepest and most dangerous part of the inheritance and tried it on.
He is not the first. Hip-hop has functioned as a gateway for many who wished to remove their own skin and wear another — a darker one, a more dangerous one, one that comes pre-loaded with cool — in order to accumulate capital. I will not turn this into an ode to purity or a list of names. That is not the point.
The point is this: a South African woman cannot peel back her skin to ever truly fit the world's preference for lightness. And why should she? They may touch every surface, every style, every sound. But the spirit? The spirit is not on offer. The spirit never signs the release form.
What we make and produce is visual and immutable. It translates into every landscape. Our culture checks in on what people are feeling in their most unguarded moments. It is emotive — violently, gorgeously emotive — and that is precisely why people of every creed feel the compulsion to put it on like a coat, like a costume, like a key to a room they were told they deserved.
I flirt with culture. I am charmed by the ego of it, the audacity, the way it refuses to apologise for being the most interesting thing in the room. But I also leave space to pause. To return to myself. To style myself in stillness, unabashedly, without an audience.
And in that stillness, I wait.
I wait for the artist — whoever she or he or they may be — who puts on the skin not to profit from it but to speak from it. Who uses the platform not as a costume but as a confessional. Who says: here is what was taken, here is from whom it was taken, and here is what it cost the people it was taken from.
Where does the bare rawness come from — the rawness from which everything cool and swaggering evolves? I hope art continues to play dangerously, but with the kind of danger that pays homage to the original wound. To the people who came before us. To the raw. To the imperfectly beautiful and stubbornly leading culture that the world keeps taking and hiding because it cannot bear to admit how much it needs it.
Put your crown on.
You were never the curiosity.
You were always the civilisation.
