Dread beauty
published: Thursday | April 5, 2007

Melville Cooke

Me sey fi stop spread propaganda pon de dread.

Because de dread no have no forty leg in a him head.

- Prince Mohammed (George Nooks)

Dreadlocks have come a long, long way, from something that instantly marked the wearer as a target for a 'check' from the police (and not a friendly check at that) to being on the head of someone who will represent the country in an international beauty contest.

That person is, of course, Miss Jamaica Universe 2007, Zahra Redwood, who has generated more press in the short time she has been on her figurative throne than most get in half their reign, all because she is a Rastafarian. And while I still put a small fire on beauty pageants I am happy that, since the contests do exist, this is the lady who has won this particular one.

You could say, in Jamaican street parlance, that she "have it lock". And hey, coming on the heels of Sara Lawrence's announcement of the baker having left a bun a rising upon withdrawal from the oven, Redwood's victory made that particular occurrence a three-day wonder in a country of nine-day wonders, where the Trafigura payment is all flogged out before the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) can use it as an election card. (Talk about they that labour and labour in vain.)

'Dread' or 'locks'

There is a tendency, though, much as Bob Marley is sometimes sanitised from Rastafarian convictions to be presentable to an audience as a loveable minstrel who sings One Love and Three Little Birds, to separate the 'dread' from the 'locks', to make the matted hair more fit for polite company. Because to say someone wears dreadlocks has a very different impact from saying that they wear locks.

'Locks' is a style that a perky young professional woman or a musician huddled over a guitar can wear to announce their hip rebel stance while working hard at conforming to materialism; 'dreadlocks' has overtones of fierce men in crocus bag clothing calling down lightning and thunder on Sodom and all they who dwell willingly therein.

I cannot help but think about how far locks have come when I see pictures of Redwood, who has not, I must note, positioned herself as a crusader for the Rastafarian movement. She is who she is before she won the title and, based on the level of intelligence in her discourse, she will be who she was before the competition when her year is over.

But hair is here or there, when one considers that not too long ago it was mumbled that Rastafarians used cow dung in their hair to get it to lock up. Then there were the rumours of creepy crawly critters infesting the nasty masses of hair (hence Prince Mohammed's Forty Leg) and I can still remember, as a child, how there were some adults who did not want locks to touch them. And this was long after Bob Marley died, long after the 'consciousness' of the 1970s.

Locks as an option

The 'Sisterlocks' style of locking hair, which hit Jamaica in the very late 1990s, presented locks as an option - an expensive one - to the professional woman who wanted her hair groomed from the get go. An there are some Rastafarians who took issue with that systematic system of locking hair, I believe that it helped set the stage for the 'dread beauty'. Locks became more visible in the workplace, on women whose positions made them pre-approved for acceptance (you know, like how Courts pre-approves credit), changing the image of the ropy strands and generating a higher level of acceptance.

A higher level that has given us a Zahra Redwood, with dreadlocks.

You don't have to be dread to be Rasta.

- Morgan Heritage