Your Hair, Your Family - First Story

Your Hair, Your Family
A creative-writing exercise adapted from From Poem to Poem:
A Creative Writing Guide to the Forward Prizes by Kate Clanchy
     MBE, available from the National Poetry Day website.
 This resource takes inspiration from Rachel Long’s poem ‘The
Omen’. It uses hair to find (or not find) the connections we have
    with family, with identity, and with the world around us.

Warm-up
Read Rachel Long’s poem ‘The Omen’ with your students.

   'The Omen'

   Dad said that when Mum first walked into class
   she wore a question mark on her head.
   A question mark? We laugh.

   Yeah, it was sort of all brushed up on top of her head,
    a plait thing sticking up, and she would pin one end down
    like a question mark − on top of her head.
   Ignore that man! Mum shouts from the kitchen.

   Rachel Long
   From 'My Darling from the Lions' (Picador), shortlisted for the
   Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020.
   Also in The Forward Book of Poetry 2021.

 Rachel Long’s poem is engaging for so many reasons: it’s direct, witty
 and cool; it captures speech on the page; it tells us about a living
 relationship; it’s about black identity; and it captures the essence of a
 family myth, one of those stories almost all families treasure and pass
 down the generations.

 This is also a poem that can inspire directly because of its subject
 matter. Almost everyone has something to say about hair, especially
 hair and parents. Hair is political too: an important part of racial and
 ethnic identity, a marker of age and class, a battle line in the gender
 wars.

Task: Ask your students how they feel about the poem. Then open up the
discussion to examine hair more generally. Ask them to tell stories about
times theirs has been touched or cut.

Extension: Try asking your students to search for some other poems about
hair – Raymond Antrobus’s ‘Ode to my Hair’ and Sharon Old’s ‘35/10’ are
powerful examples – and explore how these poems make them feel. In what
ways does these writers’ hair connect them to the world?

Main task

Then try writing a poem. Ask the students to think of some images they
associate with their hair: if it were an animal what would it be? A plant? A
landscape? A piece of punctuation? They could build a poem round these
images.

Or they could try thinking of a family member they associate with their hair
and tell the story that comes with the memory, as simply as they can, but
centring on an image like Long’s question mark. The title needs to work as
well as hers, too.

Below is an example from a young writer, the poet Mukahang Limbu. This
quiet, elegant poem is in very short couplets so that the snips of the scissors
can be heard and felt.

Because it's yours              over her child – and no
                                work that will thin your
I tell my mother asking
why my hair grows so            hair, she says, but we
                                know this is more a
thick it catches the heat
as she sits with her shears     question for my empty
                                university room filled
leaning in. She wonders if
we could have exchanged         with an early summer
                                and some oversized jade
our fast-growing hair
for some of my father’s         curtains, not the same as
                                what do you want to be, or
love – because to grow
bald so young, forehead         grandad’s dream I’d be
                                a doctor? I let these
hidden with a dragon
bandana, is to live             questions fall through
                                my body like the cut
incomplete, that’s why
my mother says, no politician   strands and stand up, look
                                at myself in the mirror
no lawyer, in-between
stories about her mother        at the lips she says my aunty
                                says are my father’s, at a boy
breaking nits with her
thumb nail maybe sat out        shorn of her, reborn
                                as if for the army.
in the sun the way we
are – a mother crouching        Mukahang Limbu (19)

ABOUT THE AUTHOURS
Rachel Long (b. 1988, London) is the founder of Octavia Poetry Collective for
Womxn of Colour, based at the Southbank Centre. She began writing poetry after
attending a workshop with Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, a transformative experience she
describes as ‘radically intimate, and yet simultaneously expansive. I’ve been writing
poems since I left that room.’

Long writes on love, the family, sexual politics – broad subjects, treated with a pin-
sharp attention to the local and specific (an estate ‘built like Tetris’, the ‘lit throat of a
candle’).

Her advice for poets starting out is to ‘listen to the poems more than the noise
around you; find good teachers, honour them, make good friends, create a space for
yourself and for them.'

Kate Clanchy is a poet, playwright and teacher, as well as being the Forward Arts
Foundation official Education Advisor. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me
has been described by Philip Pullman as 'the best book on children and teaching and
writing that I’ve ever read'. It is the companion volume to England: Poems from a
School, an anthology of poetry by her students at Oxford Spires Academy, a state
secondary school where thirty-two languages are spoken.

She won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1996 and was Oxford’s first
City Poet, from 2011 to 2013. She’s also written many radio plays. Clanchy was
awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2018. Her new book, Grow Your Own
Poem: A How-To Book, was published in September 2020.

Mukahang Limbu is Nepalese. Over lockdown, he found himself looking back and
writing about his family and his Gurkha heritage.

At the same time his usually very fashionable hair grew out until he had to allow his
mother to cut it, revealing someone who looked more like his soldier father than a
poet.