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Hair mostly appears in the story “Foreign Soil,” where it symbolizes how place affects the power dynamic in Ange and Mukasa’s relationship. Hairdresser Ange, a white Australian woman, meets her future boyfriend, Mukasa, when he walks into her salon for a haircut. Mukasa is a Black man from Uganda, and he admits to Ange that day that her salon is the first place where he’s managed to find anyone who will agree to cut his hair—everywhere else hasn’t doesn’t have the skill or experience to cut Black hair. Mukasa’s hair thus symbolizes how, from very beginning of the relationship, Mukasa and Ange do not interact on a level playing field. In Australia, society accepts Ange and sees Mukasa as an outsider. Though Ange doesn’t consider herself prejudiced in the way her parents (Ange’s mum and Ange’s dad) are, she is complicit in that she benefits from living in a place where being white and native-born gives her certain privileges—privileges that Mukasa, as a Black outsider—does not have. Ange is generally happy in her relationship when she and Mukasa are living in Australia together, but this changes when she follows him to Uganda.
In Uganda, the tables are turned: suddenly, Mukasa has the privileges that come with being Black and native-born, and Ange is the outsider on “foreign soil,” and therefore totally reliant on Mukasa to navigate the social landscape of a strange, unfamiliar place. Before she left Australia, her coworkers at the salon gave her a special farewell haircut, but due to humidity, it quickly deflates into an unfashionable, sorry mess. Ange’s flattened haircut symbolizes how the power dynamic in her relationship has reversed; indeed, the longer Ange spends in Uganda, the stranger Mukasa becomes to her (he begins to belittle and abuse her), and the unhappier she becomes in her relationship. Though at first Ange thinks that it’s Mukasa who has changed, she finally understands that they’ve never been on equal footing in their relationship, since they’ve only ever lived in a place where one of them is an insider and one is an outsider—where society accepts and empowers one of them while ostracizing and disempowering the other.
Hair Quotes in Foreign Soil
The Foreign Soil quotes below all refer to the symbol of Hair. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Railton Road
Quotes
The other girl had offered him a lift home in the car her father had bought her, the leather seats cold under his furious hands as she batted those long brown eyelashes at him. They’d parked behind the Tech. He’d gone at her gentle, not like the other one, but it soon became clear it was all an experiment. Egyptian eyes, she’d called them, Medusan hair. Until Solomon had felt dissected, scalpel-carved on the ethnographer’s table and no more than the sum of his African-originated parts. He had been a foreign country she was apprehensive about visiting but itching to explore. He’d felt her filing the fuck away to reminisce about when times were dull, postcard snippets of the exotic.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Foreign Soil LitChart as a printable PDF.
Hair Symbol Timeline in Foreign Soil
The timeline below shows where the symbol Hair appears in Foreign Soil. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Foreign Soil
...narrative flashes back to the day Ange met Mukasa, when Mukasa he came into her hair salon. Penelope, Ange’s coworker, doesn’t want to cut Mukasa’s hair, since she’s never worked on...
(full context)
...Mukasa explains that it’s the first place that would even agree to cut his Black hair. After Ange finishes Mukasa’s buzzcut, which was actually quite an easy job, he asks her...
(full context)
Back in the present, it’s miserably hot and humid at the airport, and Ange’s trendy haircut, a “farewell present” from her coworkers at the salon, has fallen flat. Ange and Mukasa...
(full context)
Ange gets dressed in an outfit that Mukasa loves, and then she trims her hair; she’d asked Mukasa to find a salon that does Western cuts, but he says they’re...
(full context)
...across the room, then he throws her to the floor and grabs her by her hair. Ange is frozen with terror, and she struggles to breathe. Mukasa moves close to her...
(full context)
Shu Yi
...is listening to Salt-N-Pepa—but not the narrator. And she hates her brother’s MC Hammer-inspired flattop hairstyle. Instead, she longs for hair extensions and “straightening goo.” She wants to look like a...
(full context)
