Barbershop is a movie set in a predominantly Black neighbourhood on Chicago's South Side, where cutting and styling hair becomes part of what holds a community together. Watching it, I recognised something of my own life. For as long as I can remember, I have gone back and forth between the salon and the barbershop like a ball over a tennis net, except my head was the one being passed between the two chairs.

From the time I started school, cornrows, a hairstyle that has adorned African heads for centuries, were something most of my friends seemed able to wear neatly and effortlessly. On me, they never sat quite the same. When plaited, my cornrows seemed to start behind my ear and peter out just beneath my kisogo, the Kiswahili word for the back of the head.

A kind of defect I didn’t quite understand. Maybe, like the rest of me, my hair was still finding its way. Maybe it was the effect of the relaxer applied every Christmas from a fairly young age to make my afro sleek, smooth and "easy to manage," as though its density, curl and complexity were defects to be corrected. Whatever the reason, my hair seemed to stagnate while everyone else’s grew.

Eventually, it became a running joke at school and at home, earning me the nickname "Alwero," a twist on Akwero, my middle name, which in Acholi means something close to thinning hair, or hair loss. Even though a family member said it only a handful of times, it lodged itself in me the way certain words do, replaying long after the person who said them had forgotten. It shaped a twisted self-image that followed me through most of my teenage years and well into adulthood. While most girls experimented with different hairstyles, mine never seemed to grow fast enough for me to play with. It became a small but constant reminder that I was missing something every other girl seemed to have effortlessly.

Looking back, I am somewhat grateful that I attended a secondary school where everyone, boys and girls alike, had to keep their hair short. From a bird’s-eye view, we probably looked like military recruits. The school's location directly opposite the country’s main prison added its own layer of dark humour, and I only had to survive six years of it. Or so I thought.

When I finished secondary school, I could not wait to grow my hair out. That first holiday, I tried plaiting it myself into small three-strand twists (matutas in Kiswahili), hoping that by the time I started university, I would finally have enough hair for a proper salon experience, something stylish and grown. Then, only a few weeks into university in Kenya, I received a scholarship to study abroad in a transcontinental country I knew almost nothing about. And so there I was again, renegotiating my relationship with my hair in another context, this time among people who seemed to have been handed hair as a birthright.

In Istanbul, I became both an extra in a film filled with women with all kinds of lush hair and the token African friend every new Turkish acquaintance questioned about afro hair.

Why don't you wash your hair every day?

Why do you cover it at night?

Why does it shrink when it gets wet?

And the question that stung most, because I had asked it myself for years: Why isn’t your hair getting longer?

My classmates and roommates would sometimes ask, out of genuine curiosity, whether all African hair was like mine. To which I always answered quickly: NO! A painful admission. Because unlike my cousin, who had lush hair since childhood, or my closest friend from secondary school, whose hair was so thick it now looks like a natural wig. Mine simply wasn’t the reference point. It was strange being expected to represent a "type” of hair I didn't feel I possessed. I became an accidental spokesperson for Afro hair, pulling up pictures online and explaining textures, braids and shrinkage to people encountering them for the first time, all while still trying to make peace with my own.

Alongside a new city, a new language, a new life, I found myself searching for my own version of the barbershop: a community of people with a shared experience who understood the very particular ache of managing afro hair. In 2013, options for afro-textured hair in Istanbul were scarce, and I knew few people of African descent. So I resorted to braiding my own hair. I had watched hairdressers back home taper the ends of extensions before braiding, but apparently I hadn't paid close enough attention, and at my first attempt I ended up with braids whose ends resembled cat whiskers. Most Turks didn't notice. But that Sunday at church, the pastor's wife, a professional hairdresser, took one look at me and gently asked who had done my hair. When I confessed that I had, she kindly offered to do it properly next time.

But my visits to her chair were short-lived. Soon, the old salon comments returned: how soft and fine my hair was, how far apart the strands seemed, and, eventually, the familiar question of why it still wasn't growing. Each observation reopened a childhood wound. So, partly as an emotional defence mechanism, I taught myself how to prepare extension hair properly and returned to doing my own hair. It saved money, but more importantly, it kept me away from the conversations I had grown to dread.

By my third year abroad, I was finally ready financially and emotionally to make my first trip home. Before returning to Istanbul that summer, I needed to get my hair done. For the first time in a long while, I handed my hair over to a "beautician" and chose crochet braids, then fashionable and widely promoted as a quick, low-effort "protective" style.

As the salonist braided the cornrow base, my scalp protested with every pull. I told myself it was simply tender-headedness. Beauty is pain, I reminded myself. But when he began crocheting the extensions through the cornrows, the discomfort became unbearable. By the time I reached home that evening, the pain had intensified into a pounding headache. "It’ll ease up; give it time," my sisters told me. I couldn't take it and by then I was crying, so they gave in and took the hairstyle down. Removing the braids brought immediate relief, though I was frustrated that I'd wasted both time and money. That evening, while freshening up in the shower, chunks began falling out as water and a comb moved through my hair. Years of nurturing my hair into that little afro were literally going down the drain. And as the water poured, so did my tears.

Afterwards, I braced myself to look at the damage. I knew I had lost hair, but nothing prepared me for seeing that part of my hairline had been pulled from its roots. The tension had affected roughly two inches along the front. What remained looked raw, almost burned. I wailed like someone who had lost a loved one, not just over the hair, but over what it meant: something I had done in the name of beauty had left me feeling less beautiful, especially to myself.

The next day, I flew back to Istanbul without any of the excitement I'd felt before. I kept my head covered because I couldn't let anyone see what had become of my hair and, worst of all, I didn't know how to explain what caused it. For months, I disguised it under bandanas while it slowly and only partially recovered. Even today, that section remains noticeably thinner.

This wasn't my first experience with traction alopecia. Years earlier, a hair-tie bead had lodged in my scalp during playtime, stalling hair growth at the back of my head for much of primary school. An equally excruciating experience. But this time the damage was at my hairline, the first thing people notice. The experience forced me to confront what repeated manipulation, and one particularly aggressive hairstyle, could do to fine, fragile hair. Tight cornrows, braids, weaves, and crochet styles can put enormous tension on the scalp, even though many Black women grow up learning to see them as inherently "protective."

After that setback, I decided that if my hair was going to grow again, I would manage it myself. Cutting it all off still felt too drastic. Ironically, I was living in the hair-transplant capital of the world, Turkiye, a country where there was clearly a fix for hair loss, just not one I could afford. So I learned to work around a thin hairline, hiding the thinned sides under specific braiding styles until I graduated.

Then, in 2019, I finally did the big chop. A friend came with me for moral support, but also because she wanted to cut off her own hair. Hers was thick and healthy, and she was tired of managing it; mine, on the other hand, was barely manageable, and I was tired of it too. Same chair, opposite reasons. So we found a barbershop in one of Istanbul's rougher neighbourhoods, the only place nearby with barbers who actually knew how to cut afro-textured hair. We walked out feeling as though we had channelled Wakanda itself. Black Panther was still fresh in the cultural imagination, and we tapped into our inner Dora Milaje; the confidence came not from what was on our heads, but from somewhere underneath.

A few years later, my hair had grown enough for me to begin plaiting again, this time on a fresh head of natural hair. I started wearing matutas, twists and other natural styles, the kinds sometimes dismissed as “unkempt" in certain African settings. A few of my African friends assumed I was struggling financially and could no longer afford to have it braided "properly." But this time, it was deliberate. From 2019 onward, I sat in a salon chair only once, during a 2022 visit home.

Then came an epiphany. After more than twenty-five years, my hair had not fundamentally changed, no matter how carefully I treated it. For years, I assumed that if I found the right routine, the right protective style, the right product, the right oil, and the right amount of patience, my hair would eventually become "good hair". It never did. I began to understand that genetics, hair-growth cycles, strand thickness, and other factors could simply mean my hair would never behave like the hair I had spent years comparing it to. I still don't have a formal diagnosis for my kind of hair, but I finally understood something more important: it was short. Fine. Fragile. And constantly forcing it to become something else was costing me more than accepting it ever would.

In 2023, after years of growth serums, protective styles, denial and hope, I finally raised the white flag. Not in defeat but in willing surrender. I accepted that the abundant, flowing crown I had imagined for myself might simply never be mine. The sooner I stopped treating that as a loss, the sooner I could stop treating myself as though I were lacking something. Surrender turned out to be freedom. Cutting my hair meant trading a definition of beauty I could never satisfy for one spacious enough to include me.

So I returned to my regular barbershop in Istanbul and asked for a zero trim, a full buzz. All of it once and for always. That day, I decided to stop starting over, and since then, a bald head or very short hair has become my default "hairstyle".

I have spent years moving between the barber's chair and the salonist's. For much of that time, I carried an insecurity from one chair or the other, shaped by conversations about "good" hair, "bad" hair, and what women are supposed to look like. Since going bald, much of that noise has quietened.

What I've had to figure out since is what beauty looks like for a woman who doesn't wear any of the more familiar crowns. I still get asked why, as a woman, I cut my hair so short, or why I choose to go bald when I don't "have to." There are smaller, stranger frictions too. People sometimes assume I am a boy, a reality I first experienced at ten, when a shopkeeper addressed me as one, not long after one of the haircuts I got while recovering from a playground injury. It was a tiny moment, but it carried a larger message: without hair, perhaps I wasn’t feminine enough to be immediately recognised as a girl.

These days, I mostly find such mistakes funny. Once in Istanbul, a little Turkish girl insisted on calling me "abi," Turkish for big brother, while her mother repeatedly corrected her to "abla," big sister. In a culture where women rarely shave their heads, I could hardly blame her. Other times, I've caught concerned looks from people who assume a completely bald woman must be battling a severe medical condition, or felt them quietly wonder about my sexual orientation, as though a haircut alone could reveal all there was about a person.

Is everything okay?  Is a question asked in some African cultures, where a woman cutting her hair short is often associated with mourning. Something I hadn’t factored in when I got my routine haircut in May 2026, the same week my father passed away. Amid funeral arrangements, with our compound full of mourners, I quietly slipped away to get my hair cut. Perhaps I also needed a few moments away from everything. When I returned, some people assumed the haircut expressed grief. Which could have been, subconsciously, just not the reason I had in mind at the time.

Here in Juba, my regular barber has more than once jokingly asked whether I keep my hair short to discourage men's attention, as though a woman's hair, like the rest of her body, must ultimately exist for men's approval. None of these guesses has ever quite reached the truth. Hair carries meanings in almost every culture I've lived in: beauty, status, identity, rebellion, belonging, grief, even respectability. The natural-hair movement, relaxed hair, wigs and weaves, extension braids: all are valid ways of expressing beauty through hair.

But what about the women who've tried them all and still find none quite fits? The women who cut their hair because of genetics, alopecia, chronic illness, culture, or simply because they want to? Do they get left outside the beauty standard? If a woman's hair is her glory, her covering, her crown, does the absence of that crown mean the absence of worth too?

What I have come to understand slowly and the hard way is that the crown was never only about the hair. Perhaps it is how a woman carries herself and what remains of herself when the things she was taught made her beautiful are stripped away.

"He believed and understood that something as simple as a little haircut could change the way a man felt on the inside." Eddie reflects on a quote from Calvin's dad in the Barbershop,

Come to think of it, I too have come to believe that a haircut changed, and continues to change, how I feel within. My hair was the most visible battlefield where I tested that understanding. Losing it, regrowing it, fighting it, and finally accepting it forced me to find a kind of beauty that didn't have to change form to be considered worthy. And perhaps confidence is the crown I was looking for all along.

Dear Crownless Queen,

The one without the soft, silky, curly, thick, long, shiny crown

Hair was never the only thing that made you worthy.

It was only ever one part of what a woman is.

And not having it doesn't mean you lack anything.

For your beauty is what remains when everything you were told you needed is stripped away. 

Perhaps you were never crownless after all.

A huge thank you to all the beautiful women who helped bring the Crownless Queens vision to life.