Your Hair Is Light Black

I taught colors to my Intro English class today. The girls had a lot of fun trying to distinguish and pronounce the colors I pointed out. However, colors are not as easy to teach in a foreign classroom as one might think. I pointed to my hair and said: "what color is this?" One girl said that it was green, another one said that it was black blond and another one said it was light black! My most serious student just sat there in the corner shaking her head as she usually does. She is the oldest in the class, surrounded by young teenage girls who love being silly and loud. She mumbled, "Brown, it's just brown." 

I didn't think that there would be so much controversy over colors in the classroom. They seriously couldn't come to a consensus on my hair color. None of them, with the exception of my serious student, really had a concept of brown being a hair color. So, I moved on to skin complexion. This was obviously a topic they enjoyed. Afghan girls like talking about appearance, but in a very honest way. I did a lesson on comparisons and of course we talked about descriptors. Nazilla pointed to one of the other girls and said, "she's fat." I told the class that it isn't polite in English to say that someone is "fat". Somaya then raised her hand and said, "well that's not how you say things, but we do." This is the kind of stuff that we American girls go home and cry about.

All of the girls described themselves very accurately. It seems like there's very little self-delusion among the ladies here. We talked about complexion and the same thing happened as it did with the comparisons. "Her skin is too dark." "Your skin looks like a ghost." As I observed my students, it struck me just how strongly our culture shapes the lenses through which we look at the world, funneling all the way down to the colors we see. Our perceptions of one another are also subjective. It is a good reminder not to take one another's comments and thoughts about us so seriously. It's refreshing to witness a culture of women that places little value on external beauty. They really don't take it very seriously. I like that.