Through all my years of visiting the barber, I became privy to the poisonous things that men only hissed around each other. | George Haddad
When I was kid, Mum used to take me to Con’s barber shop - the type of place run by a persevering immigrant for decades - to have my hair cut. I’d sit in the chair after he slotted in the booster, and Mum would tell Con what to do. Then she’d leave me among the timber-panelled walls, the ’70s posters of dapper men and the sounds of the Greek radio station, and go off to the bank or the deli.
George Haddad: “For much of my childhood, I didn’t know how to be around men... and, increasingly, I felt this way in barber shops, too.”I have five sisters, a mum and a dad, and we all lived in the same house. While my dad has been present my whole life, I naturally gravitated towards the women in my family – primarily my mum, who even when I didn’t let her nap for fear of being alone, never made me feel like a nuisance. And still, she is the only person I can safely say I don’t annoy.
For much of my childhood and adolescence, I didn’t know how to be around men: how to sit, how to speak, what to say, where to look. And, increasingly, I felt this way in barber shops too, which are small rooms packed with men and, which I have come to realise, are a microcosm of consecrated masculinity.In barber shops, men are relaxed and uninhibited. That might sound like a good thing, but it’s not in the loving and safe way that the women at Maria’s salon were relaxed.
There was one particular shop that undid it all for me. I lived close to Marrickville Metro for some years and would walk to one of the barber’s in the shopping centre for a haircut every two or three weeks. Whenever I was in there, I experienced abhorrent behaviour and nauseating things said about women, queer people, other cultures and ethnicities. The barbers were all Arab at the time. I speak Arabic and so, unfortunately, I was able to understand them in two languages.