ENEM 2020

Finally, Aisha finished with her customer and asked

what colour Ifemelu wanted for her hair attachments.

“Colour four.”

“Not good colour,” Aisha said promptly.

“That’s what I use.”

“It look dirty. You don’t want colour one?”

“Colour one is too black, it looks fake,” Ifemelu said,

loosening her headwrap. “Sometimes I use colour two,

but colour four is closest to my natural colour.”

[...]

She touched Ifemelu’s hair. “Why you don’t have

relaxer?”

“I like my hair the way God made it.”

“But how you comb it? Hard to comb,” Aisha said.

Ifemelu had brought her own comb. She gently combed

her hair, dense, soft and tightly coiled, until it framed her

head like a halo. “It’s not hard to comb if you moisturize

it properly,” she said, slipping into the coaxing tone of the

proselytizer that she used whenever she was trying to

convince other black women about the merits of wearing

their hair natural. Aisha snorted; she clearly could not

understand why anybody would choose to suffer through

combing natural hair, instead of simply relaxing it. She

sectioned out Ifemelu’s hair, plucked a little attachment

from the pile on the table and began deftly to twist.

ADICHIE, C. Americanah: A novel. New York: Anchor Books, 2013.

A passagem do romance da escritora nigeriana traz um diálogo entre duas mulheres negras: a cabeleireira, Aisha, e a cliente, Ifemelu. O posicionamento da cliente é sustentado por argumentos que