Genuine Human Hair

by Sharma Taylor

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

**Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize**

'Me name Petal. Mi pretty except fi mi picky-picky hair. Mi nah tell nuh lie. Mi head tough. It bruk comb. Well, is a good thing God invent weave.'

Petal is a young woman trying to make a life in the Kingston ghetto.
Flower is a girl taken by force to a Uyghur re-education camp.

In a short story that spans two worlds, Petal and Flower are connected through the most intimate of ways: their hair. Shocking, beautiful and empowering, Genuine Human Hair reveals the cost of racism in two very different ways, and how two women overcome it.

Read Sharma Taylor's exciting first novel What a Mother's Love Don't Teach You now!
'Outstanding' Cherie Jones
'Cacophonic, alive, heart-breaking' Kiran Millwood Hargrave
'Rich and exuberant' Claire Adam

Release date: June 30, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 16

Sample

Shaking her hand, I introduce myself and tell her it’s my job to translate her words for an article on a human rights NGO’s website. She sits, saying nothing for a while. After a deep breath, she tells me her real name, but let’s call her ‘Flower’ – the meaning of her name in the Uyghur language.

She’s a refugee from China’s far northwest Xinjiang region. Xinjiang’s desert has pockets of oasis towns. She lived in grassland plains. Closing her eyes now, she tells me she doesn’t see this grey room in Australia anymore, but lavender and gold sheets of wildflowers spreading across valleys.

Like many other young Muslim women, Flower covered her hair with a headscarf. As a child, her Papa allowed her to go unveiled. Her mother died young. Her father, Kussaiyn, was the best naan baker in their village. He said she had beautiful hair, like her mother’s. Her parents had met and fell in love in Kazakhstan. She often imagined her long hair blowing in the breeze, like the yellow blossoms of wild cole flowers caught by a March wind.

In March 2017, two days after Papa’s return from visiting an uncle in Afghanistan, authorities came and took them to the camp and she never saw those wildflowers again.

***

Me name Petal. That’s mi nickname ‘cause the man dem say mi pretty like . . .