Twists in the tale: Jaja’s African Hair Braiding explores immigrant experience through a day at the salon

6 hours ago 3

It is an uncomfortably hot morning in Harlem, New York, as two women open the shutters of a braiding salon. It appears to be a day like any other, as a band of hairdressers turn their customers’ intricate visions into reality. But, according to playwright Jocelyn Bioh, by nightfall “we end in a very different place than where we started”.

Bioh’s Tony award-winning 2023 play Jaja’s African Hair Braiding takes theatregoers through 12 hours at the eponymous salon. Its staff are predominantly from west Africa, now navigating a country where immigration is often misunderstood and politically weaponised. Their conversations often address “how difficult it is to come to another country, particularly a western one like America,” says Bioh.

This month, the play opens at Lyric Hammersmith in London, directed by Monique Touko, who had a hit with Bioh’s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play at the same theatre. “The opportunity to work with Jocelyn for the second time was something I couldn’t say no to,” says Touko. “The legacy of School Girls lives on!”

The cast of Jaja’s African Hair Braiding on opening night at Manhattan Theatre Club, New York, in 2023.

While School Girls explored colourism and beauty politics through the lens of young girls in a Ghanaian boarding school in the 1980s, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding peeks into the lives of an older generation, in 2019, having emigrated from the same part of the continent. Both plays probe Black female identity using a single setting yet this one takes it a step further by confining the story to one working day. “I knew the play was going to start at 9am and end at 9pm – a really life-changing 12 hours,” Bioh says.

The salon’s location, just off 125th Street, is significant. Also named Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, the thoroughfare is known as a central point of African American culture and politics. Bioh lives in Harlem, and was keen to “show the diversity of who we are”, especially at a time when the Trump administration was tightening laws around immigration. For Bioh, the play brings life to “the people behind the policies”. She wanted to show the multiplicity of the women in the salon alongside the “complexity, humour, joy and difficulty in the immigrant experience”.

While a British audience might have a different relationship to some of the story’s material, Touko notes that many (especially Black women) will find an acute sense of familiarity with the environment depicted. “The equivalent is Peckham or Brixton,” she says. Both areas in south London have long been key hubs for Afro-Caribbean people living in the UK, with Black salons that attract people from across the city, often run by African women.

Karene Peter and Dolapo Oni in rehearsals for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.

“We have a responsibility to get it right,” Touko says. “Audiences are going to know if we’ve got it wrong because of how much it’s part of our culture.” She hopes that theatregoers will feel like customers themselves by the end of the production. “I literally don’t know a single Black woman who’s never had their hair braided at least once in their life,” Bioh adds.

Mostly absent, Jaja, the shop’s owner, is spoken about by the other characters. “There’s a lot of talk about how she gave them all an opportunity,” Touko explains. The character of her teenage daughter – who helps run the shop and is at the top of her class at school despite unstable documentation – also offers an insight into Jaja’s life beyond the salon’s walls.

When Jaja does finally walk in, she is dressed in an extravagant wedding dress, ahead of marrying a white landlord. “This will be my last dress as an African and my first as an American,” she exclaims, excited to “get all of this nonsense immigration stuff out of the way so I can really make a name for myself here”.

Jaja embodies an American dream that Bioh suggests doesn’t exist. She explains that the ideal has “been canonised as money, 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, a beautiful house, and that you just live and never have a care in the world”. Yet she says she doesn’t know “a single American” who has achieved that.

As customers and locals come and go in the play, there is a clear tension not only in what it takes to live in the country but also between African Americans and African immigrants. By the end, many audience members will wonder whether Jaja’s bid for a better life within a system seemingly set up for her to fail might ultimately lead to her – and others’ – downfall. Landing in the UK at a moment when immigration in the US again dominates the headlines, the stark reality the play offers feels even more urgent than when it was written. “The American dream is questioned here,” says Bioh. “I don’t present it as the American dream, period. I present it as the American dream, question mark.”