Diligent Candy

Poetry has long been a terrain where power structures are challenged, reimagined, and sometimes dismantled. Within this tradition, underrepresented and marginalized poets—particularly women, queer writers, and those of diasporic communities—have used the body, and often its most intimate and symbolic parts, as a site of resistance and reclamation. Among these embodied symbols, hair emerges as a particularly potent motif, laden with sociopolitical connotations. Poets deploy the body, with a specific focus on hair, in their work—not merely as a metaphor but as an act of agency, reclamation, and spatial assertion.

The Body as Text, Hair as Language

For marginalized poets, the body is not just an object of representation; it is a locus of power, a contested space where historical erasures and cultural impositions collide. Hair, in particular, occupies a liminal position in these dynamics. It is at once intensely personal and overtly public, often weaponized as a tool of both oppression and self-assertion. Black poets like Audre Lorde have written about hair as a marker of racial identity, while queer poets like Richard Siken transform bodily fragments into visceral symbols of desire and disorientation.

Hair is inherently mutable, a feature that marginalized poets use to their advantage. It can be cut, grown, braided, or even shed—a reminder of both impermanence and regeneration. In poems, hair becomes a repository for memory, a battleground for autonomy, and an extension of selfhood. The cutting of hair, for instance in Sherman Alexie’s ghazal, might signal a rejection of conformity, while its deliberate braiding might reclaim ancestral traditions.

The Ghazal as a Form of Embodied Resistance

The ghazal, with its origins in Arabic and Persian poetry, serves as an especially evocative form for exploring embodied resistance. Its couplets, or shers, are self-contained worlds that create a dialogic tension within the poem, reflecting the fractured yet interconnected realities of marginalization. Traditionally preoccupied with themes of love, loss, and longing, the ghazal becomes an ideal form for poets grappling with the simultaneous burdens and freedoms of embodiment.

Consider the late Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazals, where the body becomes both a site of exile and belonging. In “Even the Rain,” the recurring refrain becomes a metaphorical braid, weaving the speaker’s grief with the inevitability of loss. Similarly, contemporary poets like Fatimah Asghar use the ghazal to interrogate diasporic fragmentation, with hair often serving as a symbol of cultural disconnection or reclamation.

Hair, in such works, is not merely an ornamental detail but a central figure—a tangled map of history, identity, and resilience. The ghazal’s formal constraints mirror the binds of societal expectations around bodies and their adornments, but its thematic fluidity allows poets to resist and redefine these constraints.

The Politics of Visibility and Space

For marginalized poets, writing the body is also about claiming space—both physical and literary. The act of describing a braid, a curl, or a shaved head becomes a form of protest against invisibility. In poetry, hair often resists being flattened into a mere metaphor; instead, it asserts its presence as a living, tactile part of the self.

Poets like Warsan Shire have written vividly about the intersections of hair and trauma. In “Your Mother’s First Kiss,” Shire invokes hair as a site of inherited grief and resilience, threading generational stories through its strands. By centering hair, she transforms it into a vessel of collective memory, a marker of survival and continuity in the face of erasure.

Toward an Embodied Poetics

In the hands of underrepresented poets, hair—and the body more broadly—becomes a language of its own, an assertion of agency in a world that often seeks to render it invisible. Whether through the braided couplets of the ghazal, the fragmented forms of free verse, or the lyricism of spoken word, these poets use their bodies to carve out space in the literary landscape.

By writing about hair, they do not merely reclaim an object of oppression; they transform it into a living archive of resistance, a testament to the indomitable power of self-definition. Their work reminds us that poetry is, at its core, a deeply embodied act—a way of inhabiting the world, of taking up space, and of refusing to be silenced.