Inua Ellams on the art of the barber shop confessional

I can’t recall the first time I had a haircut. Neither can my father. When I ask, he says that, because we lived in northern Nigeria at the time, I was probably taken to one of the nomadic barbers who work in that region. These were men of fine combs and razor blades that could cut stone.

They would sit under the largest tree in a village and men would gather before them for hours, waiting their turn patiently, gossiping loudly in Hausa, Fulani, Arabic, Yoruba or one of the more than 500 languages spoken in Nigeria. “It was probably like that,” my father says, smiling. Then he reminds me that my name, Inua, means “shade under a tree”.

The earliest haircut I can remember was when I was four years old, round-faced, bronze-cheeked, chattering away as my father drove to the barber shop in the city of Jos. This time it happened indoors, under fluorescent lights, with posters, hair creams, running electricity and water. I giggled as the barber hoisted me on to the cushion, then his chair, so he wouldn’t have to bend too low. I remember looking at my face in the mirror and the sudden jolt of fear when the clippers roared into life, the terror as he brought them towards my head, the pain of first contact, the eruption of tears.

We were a family of six: my father, mother and three sisters. For my father and I, this would become our ritual. In a household ruled by women, it was the only space for the pair of us. We loved going to the barber shop, my father thriving in the company of men sharing ridiculous stories and holding court. I would listen intently, intensely, trying to decipher what was being said. There would always be music, food, soft drinks and loud, rolling laughter.

For a complex set of reasons — social, sectarian and political — my family and I were displaced from our home in the 1990s. We became migrants, firstly from Jos to Lagos, and eventually emigrants, from Lagos to London. In the summer of 1996, when I was 12, I began school in west London, and my father tumbled from the high-paying jobs and middle-class glory he’d enjoyed in Nigeria to working as a pizza delivery man.

We could no longer afford haircuts at barber shops, he informed me; we’d have to do them ourselves. I picked up the clippers, trying to steady their pulsing mechanical heart in my 12-year-old hand, aiming at every curl until my father’s head was clear. He did the same to me, and this became our new ritual. Gradually barber shops and the special space they held began to retreat from our world, until I forgot them utterly.

Some of these memories return when I look at the Salon Paintings of the Jamaican-British artist Hurvin Anderson, a man who has never forgotten barber shops. In 2006, he painted one in his home city of Birmingham and returned to the scene in his art for more than 15 years, repeatedly capturing the form, colour, rhythm, architecture and structure of this one space. Sometimes we see nearly everything: the detritus of hair clippings on the floor, hair products on the table. Sometimes we see only abstract forms and shapes, as if peering through a fogged-up window from the outside.

Pasted on the wall of the salon are images of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, heroes of the Civil Rights movement, whose ideas and legacy remain so important. And we also see figures of clients, silhouetted or blurred, as if Anderson is protecting their identities, preserving the confessional relationship between barber and client in this city. The pots and bottles of creams and products themselves resemble a city skyline.

Fourteen years after barber shops retreated from my world, a girlfriend suggested I return to them to research a project in London that gave black barbers counselling training. She pointed out that black men were 17 times more likely than white men to be diagnosed with a mental health illness and four times more likely to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. “They don’t ask for help,” she said. “But feeling safe in barber shops, they let their guard down.”

So in 2013, I began visiting a barber shop near my home in Nunhead, south London, returning to the scene over and over again, just like Anderson. I’d sit among men, refamiliarising myself with the music, food, soft drinks, the loud, rolling laughter. With permission, I also made audio recordings of these encounters and obsessively listened back to them, looking for form, colour, rhythm, architecture, structure in their conversations. The stories would be about football, discipline, fatherhood, political legacies. The project eventually became a play called Barber Shop Chronicles, which debuted at the National Theatre in 2017 then went on a tour around the US and Canada. It’s now part of the GCSE curriculum.

Anderson’s are detailed works that require the viewer to witness one barber shop over and again, to step into that world repeatedly. Why? What is the artist’s intention? For me, it isn’t such a conundrum. Black barbers and the important work they do should be immortalised; Anderson does exactly that, but in making space for the viewer he also asks who you would invite into the barber’s chair. How would you tend to their hair? And what stories might fall out?

“Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings” is at Hepworth Wakefield May 26-November 5

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