This is Elizabeth Acevedo’s performance of her poem, “Hair.”

She begins by saying, “My mother tells me to fix my hair. And by ‘fix’ she means straighten, she means whiten. But how do you fix this shipwrecked history of hair? The true meaning of ‘stranded.’ With tresses held tight like African cousins in ship bellies; did they imagine their great grandchildren would look like us, and hate them how we do?”

She goes on to say, “You call them wild curls, I call them breathing,”

“I let my curtain of curls blanket us from the world.”

“Our children will be beautiful… I will braid pride down their backs so from the moment they leave the womb they will be born in love with themselves.”

Then later,

“My mother tells me to ‘fix my hair,” and so many words remain unspoken. Because all I can reply is, ‘you can’t fix what was never broken.'”

I can’t recommend highly enough taking two minutes and thirteen seconds to hear Elizabeth Acevedo recite the full poem.