Mother is Not Brown

Abstract

In this performance autoethnography the author explores the simultaneity of telling and resisting stories of lived experience. In the process the author constructs the notion of “resisting stories” as autoethnographic performance narratives that both resist and demand telling in the process of making themselves public. Through his memories, the author tries to show the in-possible performance of brown-bodied, curlier hair woman, his Mother, in her yearning to Whiteness. However, the author too, cannot escape the stories his own hair tells. Please, keep your “hair straight.”