Witney Bashaw: Can you explain the premise of Black to My Roots? What’s the story?

Kathya Alexander: Black To My Roots is a choreopoem which means that it's a series of monologues strung together to create the play. It's all about African American women and our relationship with our hair, be it personal, political, emotional. It was written originally in 1999 and it actually came about because my co-writer Reneschia Brown was thinking about locing her hair at the time, and her grandmother just went crazy about it, saying “you can't do that, that’s awful.” Now she's a writer and started writing about the emotions that all this stuff was bringing up in her. And her brother, Tyrone Brown, who is the director and kind of the creative force behind Black To My Roots, thought this could be a play. Here we are 25 years later. And so last year the producer was like, “I think we should do another revision of this and present it for the 25th year anniversary,” which I did. I wrote some new pieces, revised some old pieces.

WB: I’m really curious about the story writing process. Did you interview people or take from your own experiences, a blend of both?

KA: Initially when we wrote it, it was kind of all over the place. We adlibbed some stuff that ended up in the stage play. You know, Tye, the director, would ask us questions like, “if your hair was a song, what would it sing?” AndReneschia wrote about her experiences and I wrote about my own, basically. She was born and raised here in Seattle. I was born and raised in the South. And so those experiences were not really different but also very different, you know? So it was a collaborative process. And then when we decided to do the 25th year anniversary edition, I was like, oh no, I need to put this in, and I need to put that  in. The three  pieces of Reneschia’s that are still in the show  have aged beautifully over these 25 years.

WB: How has your perspective on the work changed in the last 25 years? How has the world changed?

KA: There are a lot of things that are different since we did it in 1999, of course. What has stayed the same is the emotional impact of the show, for sure. The memories and the heartbreak it evokes. The happy memories that people talk about in the talkback, like, oh, I remember when my grandmother did exactly that same thing.

And what's heartbreaking is that 25 years later, we're still trying to push a bill, the Crown Act, that stops discrimination based on the way you wear your hair. What's so ridiculous to me is like, what difference does it make how you wear your hair in terms of the job you can do, where you can go to school, how you interact? Hair has nothing to do with that. I don't know, it's mind boggling to me. One of the things that I included in the play this time, is a lot of research about Black women and our hair and how that affects jobs, medical treatment, all of the places that women get judged and treated differently based on how they wear their hair. And one of the things that came out in the research is how Black women judge other Black women. Which is how the play started - from Reneschia’s grandmother judging her. We delved into this big, huge survey, that we actually put up on the screen at different times. And one of the things that they found was that Black women who wear their hair natural are a lot more accepting of other women’s hair. And that was the one thing that came out of the play 25 years ago, to me, was “just do you.” I don't have any judgment about your hair. It's ridiculous. But I think when I first started to write it, I probably believed if you wear your hair natural, it means that one thing. If you wear a weave, that means something else. And now it's like it's just a style choice. And we all get to make our style. So, you know, just accept people as who they are, where they are.

WB: Yeah. This exists in so many situations where marginalized or oppressed people internalize the dominant culture to assimilate in order to survive so then they’re repressing their own needs and then it projects outwards into judgment.

KA: We  are threatened by people who are not like you. But even among other cultures, white cultures, for instance, blondes are seen as dumb. There’s all this projection that we do about people, particularly women, based on their hair, it's like this ugly projection as opposed to just seeing it as a choice.

Also, the internet is used a whole lot more now. We were doing the play this weekend, and one of the pieces, called “Hair Mothers,” is about white women who are raising Black children. And it's a plea to not separate ourselves. There’s a line, “We're so afraid of each other, and I find that so very sad.” And as a result of that, somebody in the audience– because we always do an audience talkback at the end– said, “if white women have Black children they should know how to do their hair.” And, you know, nowadays you can do that on the internet. There's no excuse to not know how to do your child's hair

WB: What revisions have you made to the work for this remounting?

KA: We've included music called the “Hair’s Breath” which is a separate performance, but it's all based on Black women and our relationship with their hair. My favorite song out of that is “You Can't Tell Me a Goddamn Thing When I Get My Hair Done” And it's a jam, you could dance to it. And there's a lot more dance in this version of the show than there was 25 years ago. Justice Beitzel and Robin Campbell are the choreographers, and they've choreographed some really great dance pieces to integrate into the show. They also act as assistant directors so they’re working their butts off. They're keeping all the balls in the air.

We've also added a version translated into Swahili. One of the actors is from Kenya, and she was struck by how so many of the pieces resonated with her as a Black woman growing up on the continent. We did a staged reading of that on June 1st. And the audience was mostly Swahili speaking women who had grown up on the continent. And it was so profound. At the talk back the stories they told were kind of horror stories about how their hair had been weaponized against them because of colonization, and if you didn’t do your hair like the teachers told you, they just came and shaved your hair. And things like that are still going on, even in America. That’s the thing that stands out the most and probably one of the reasons why I wanted to do this 25th anniversary edition. Just recently there was a high school student, male, in Texas who kept getting suspended because he wore his hair in locs, and they suspended him over and over and over. This is crazy! It's hair, people. Reactions about our hair from the dominant culture is often really cruel. 

WB:  Were you surprised at their stories? Did you think it would be a little different for people living on the continent? 

KA: I wasn’t surprised because I know the effects of colonization all over the world. But it was very different to hear these heartbreaking stories from these women who have been traumatized. At one point women were getting up, giving each other hugs. It really got to be very intense. I wasn't surprised, but I certainly was a lot more affected by it than I was expecting to be. And it just made it so clear to me how this is a story that needs to be told worldwide. 

Reneschia and I both wrote about white people coming up and touching your hair. She's like, I'm not a pet, you don’t get to do that.” People ask you, “can I touch your hair?” But they're saying it at the same time that they do it, if they ask at all. The Kenyan actor just had this experience. She has this huge, beautiful afro, and they were in the Olive Garden or something, and this white woman just came up and put her hands in her hair. I mean, what gives you the right to just come and touch me? You know, that's assault.

WB: That was kind of my question about the Fringe Fest. Scotland is pretty white and I was curious if your audience was primarily white? 

KA: I was actually quite surprised at how diverse Europe is. There were a lot of immigrants. Yes, the festival itself is overwhelmingly white and so are the audiences. But when we won the Fringe First award there was this big write up about it in the newspaper and our audience definitely got more diverse after that. When we did it in Edinburgh in 2002, this young Black girl came up and handed me a piece of paper, then ran off. And when I read the paper, it was heartbreaking. She was growing up in Edinburgh, and she was usually the only Black kid in her class and her hair was always a topic of discussion. It just shows the importance of theplay. Every time I see it, I'm more convinced that it needs to be told.

WB: You’re raising money right now to bring the show back to the Fringe Fest this August, why bring it back?

KA:  Well, I think it did start out just because of the 25th anniversary, thinking let's do something really big to celebrate that. But as I said, the more I hear people’s stories, the more I'm convinced that it needs to be on a worldwide stage. And since the Fringe Festival is the largest and longest running international festival, and there are people from all over the world who are there, putting on their shows, I think it'll be a great opportunity. People find this show healing after they watch it. It can also be triggering, but ultimately, people find it to be healing. And I think we certainly need worldwide healing right now. But, that could be another whole discussion.

WB:. What do you want the audience to take away from it and, after seeing it mounted as a play many times, what do you think audiences take away from it?

KA: Well. I think I'm kind of surprised very often by what individuals take from it. I'm an author, I'm a playwright, I'm a storyteller. I'm a teaching artist and everything that I do is to reflect African-American culture, for Black people to be seen, for our voices to be heard. And of course, as a writer, you want everybody to see your stuff, but I write particularly to the Black voice.

I just had a book come out last year, Keep A’Livin’, and I had a white editor who had many years experience as an editor, but she never edited a book with Black Southern dialect and we always fought and fought and fought because she thought it’s not something white people are going to understand. But Black people know exactly what I'm talking about when I say these words. I tell people all the time that Shakespeare writes crazy and he's considered brilliant, and if you don't understand what he says, you dig into it, you figure it out. You know, it's like, why should I be any different? And that’s what I told my editor, if I write a compelling enough story, people will stick with this to get the meaning right.

I really like to explore how Black culture affects America and how America has affected Black culture as well. So I think that Black To My Roots is kind of a perfect example of that.

Black to My Roots will run July 26th 7:00pm and July 27th 3:00pm at Common Objects (2601 1st Ave).

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

July 2025