The Full Text of “Waves”
The Full Text of “Waves”
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“Waves” Introduction
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Kayo Chingonyi's "Waves" focuses on a group of young Black people at the turn of the 21st century who wanted to do their hair in fashionable "waves"—a finicky, elaborate hairstyle that required them to fight their natural hair texture. This attempt to control their "rebellious" hair, the speaker remembers feeling, was simply what they had to do if they "wanted / to be wanted." The speaker's half-nostalgic, half-sad reflections on this past hairstyle provide a snapshot of the way that a racist culture stigmatizes Black hair and Blackness more generally. This poem first appeared in Chingonyi's 2017 collection Kumukanda.
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“Waves” Summary
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The speaker remembers that, in the year that waved hair came into style (a year when everyone was shamelessly singing the song "Sweet Like Chocolate"), everyone had a styling technique to subdue even the curliest, most unweildy hair into a smooth, wavy surface like crazy paving.
The style was done to honor the look of the R&B stars whose huge faces appeared on billboards, or were glued into diaries or notebooks, and whose lyrics kids wrote on their hands.
Kids like the speaker wanted to be desired just like those singers were, so they put on their mothers' head wraps when they went to bed, trying to keep their artificial waves in perfect condition.
Some people taught themselves to use clippers in order to clean up their own edges in the bathroom.
Others got help from barbers, razor-wielding specialists who could turn a simple trim into something eye-catchingly and gloriously beautiful.
But the speaker recalls that no matter how much they tried to hide their natural hair texture (something they were so ashamed of), it kept on coming back whether they liked it or not, as if each of their hair follicles knew that the next look they'd hanker after would be lines shaved through their sideburns or eyebrows—anything that would make them look different and hide their real heritage.
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“Waves” Themes
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Black Hair, Racism, and Shame
“Waves” explores the ways that, in a racist society, young Black people’s internalized shame plays out in their style choices. The poem’s speaker looks back on the elaborate, high-maintenance hairstyle—the “Waves” of the title—that lots of Black teenagers were wearing in the late 1990s, mimicking the “R&B stars” they idolized. All they wanted, the speaker reflects, was “to be wanted.” But the fact that they felt they had to fight against their hair’s “natural grain” to achieve that goal makes it clear that, to these kids, being desirable and being themselves were incompatible goals. Hair, the poem suggests, can be a battleground: Black teens’ struggles with their hair reveal the ways that the culture around them deems Blackness to be unacceptable.
In trying to keep their hair in “waves” that their natural hair texture simply didn’t want to hold, the speaker says, these kids were fighting against their “roots” in more ways than one. In trying to control and disguise their Black hair, they were also trying to control and disguise their Black heritage and identity. They were “ashamed of the hair’s natural grain,” feeling that they couldn’t possibly be “wanted” if they let the kinky “pepper grain[]” texture of their hair grow out. Ironically, even the rich and famous Black “R&B stars” the kids model themselves after in their quest to be “wanted / like that” seem to be conforming to a beauty standard that looks down on natural Black hair.
The poem never directly states that a racist white-dominated society was what made these kids feel “ashamed” of their natural hair—but it doesn't need to! The very fact that they feel the need to “betray their roots” to get the hair they think will make them desirable speaks for itself. By drawing a connection between the “roots” of hair and the “roots” of Black identity, the poem explores the way that Black hair becomes a place where the burden of racism plays out—especially in young people (and, implied in this poem, young men in particular) who are trying their best to find their place in the world and feel good about themselves.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-12
- Lines 19-24
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Black Style, Skill, and Pride
While this poem's speaker looks back sadly on the way that kids felt they had to work against their natural Black hair texture if they “wanted / to feel wanted,” it also celebrates Black hair and Black hairstyling. Skilled Black barbering, the poem says, produces results of “head-turning, transcendent beauty,” becoming a source of pride and a way that young Black people can feel cared for and beautiful.
In order to maintain their complicated hairstyles, the speaker remembers, Black teens in the late ‘90s had to learn some serious skills. Some of them taught themselves “the grace of clippers” so that they could keep their edges sharp at home in the “bathroom mirror.” This image combines a sweet, funny image of teenagers obsessively fixing up their hairstyles in the bathroom (perhaps while other family members bang impatiently on the door) with “grace,” a word that can suggest both elegance and holiness. There’s something beautiful and even sacred about the care that these kids bring to their skill with the clippers.
Similarly, the “counsel of barbers” (the advice of barbers, that is) offered skill, beauty, and expertise. (The turn of phrase “the counsel of barbers” could even punnily suggest a council of barbers, a gathering of wise figures you go to for important advice.) These “technicians of the razor blade” were so good at what they did, the speaker remembers, that they could “elevate a trim to a thing / of head-turning, transcendent beauty.” Here, skilled hair care makes young Black people feel great about themselves, and even rises to the level of art.
While the politics around Black hair are complicated and fraught, the poem thus suggests, Black haircare can also be a “thing of […] beauty” and a joyful celebration of Black pride.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 12-18
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Waves”
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Lines 1-6
The year waves ...
... to R&B stars“Waves” starts by setting a nostalgic scene:
- The speaker remembers “the year waves came in”—that is, the year that a wave hairstyle, a look involving arranging one’s hair into elaborate and precise waves that lie flat against the scalp—became fashionable.
- This was also the year when everyone “sang / you’re sweet like chocolate, boy / without shame,” the speaker remembers, a detail that helps readers to put a pretty precise date on the poem: the song the speaker alludes to, “Sweet Like Chocolate,” was a UK Number One hit in 1999.
- The speaker's memory of people singing that song “without shame” also hints that he and his peers might feel a tiny bit of cringey embarrassment looking back on a song that doesn’t feel as cool now as it did then.
In just a few lines, then, the speaker establishes the poem's setting: it takes place in the UK around 1999, back when the speaker was young and, apparently, obsessed with what was in style. (Kayo Chingonyi was himself a young man in the UK at this time, and readers can guess that the poem is autobiographical.)
In those days, the speaker goes on, everybody “had a method” for getting their hair to stay in fashionable waves. They needed a method, too: apparently, this was not an easy hairstyle to make happen! That was especially true if the person trying to wear waves had a “rebellious head / of pepper grains,” the speaker says, referring to natural Black hair that forms a pattern of tight, distinct coils when it’s cut close to the head.
It takes a lot to get from very tight, coiled hair to the “slick, crazy-paved” look of waves. (The “crazy-paved” metaphor here refers to crazy paving, a kind of decorative, irregular paving often used in garden design.) But “deference to R&B stars”—that is, respectful obedience to the R&B musicians who set this trend—demanded that the speaker and the kids around him do their best.
The poem’s speaker, then, is a kid living in a world where style rules: “everyone” is trying to figure out how to get their hair to do the cool thing. But this style is also one that doesn’t really jibe with the nature of a lot of these kids’ hair. Transforming “pepper grains” into “waves” is a hard task, but one the teenagers feel they somehow have to take on, if they’re going to fit into their world.
The sadder implications of that dilemma will become one of this poem’s big themes. Black hair and Black hairstyling, this speaker will reflect, are places where a lot of anxiety and shame about Black identity plays out. However, they're places where pride and care shine through, too.
The shape of these first stanzas mirrors the teenagers’ hair dilemmas:
- On the page, this free verse poem looks as orderly as the stylish waves do: its lines are all about the same length and all arranged into neat tercets (three-line stanzas).
- But the poem’s sentences overflow all these boundaries. Frequent enjambments mean sentences leap easily across line breaks and stanza breaks. The transition between the end of the first stanza and the beginning of the second provides a good example:
[…] everyone had a method
for taming even the most rebellious head
The poem thus embodies the feeling of trying to fit something natural and free into a rigorous, measured, restrictive shape!
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Lines 6-9
looming large ...
... backs of hands. -
Lines 9-12
We wanted ...
... facade in place. -
Lines 12-18
Some taught themselves ...
... head-turning, transcendent beauty. -
Lines 19-24
But for all ...
... betray our roots.
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“Waves” Symbols
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Hair
The teenagers’ untamable, resistant, “rebellious” natural hair might be read as a symbol of an untamable, resistant, rebellious identity: the Black heritage with which these kids have so complex a relationship.
Keeping their hair in the stylish waves that late-90s teenage fashion demanded, the poem's speaker reflects, was a serious chore. “Everybody had a method,” the speaker recalls, for “taming even the most rebellious head” of natural hair into “slick,” smooth submission—and those methods took a lot of work, whether kids were wearing their “mothers’ head wraps” to bed to keep their hair in place, obsessively clipping their “edges,” or seeking the professional “counsel of barbers.” Kids threw piles of time, money, and effort at the project of making their hair do something it simply did not want to do.
But their hair, the speaker says, had other thoughts. However hard the kids “tried to hide [their] stubble,” their hair “came back unbidden,” stubbornly growing the way it wanted to grow. Trying to force natural Black hair to do something it doesn’t want to do here becomes an image of trying to fit a Black identity into a cultural mold that doesn’t value Blackness. And the hair’s persistence in growing out naturally suggests a hopefully "rebellious" defiance and persistence. Blackness and Black pride, here, won’t be kept down for long.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 1: “The year waves came in”
- Lines 4-6: “taming even the most rebellious head / of pepper grains into slick, crazy-paved / deference to R&B stars”
- Lines 19-24: “But for all we tried to hide our stubble, / ashamed of the hair’s natural grain, / it came back unbidden as if each follicle / knew that soon we would covet shaved / lines in sideburns, eyebrows, anything / to set ourselves apart, betray our roots.”
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“Waves” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Pun
The poem closes with a meaningful pun. All through the poem, the speaker remembers the lengths Black kids went to in order to keep their hair styled in elaborate waves—a finicky process involving lots of careful barbering and sleeping with their "mothers' head wraps" on. They were locked in a perpetual battle against their "hair's natural grain," working against the way that it wanted to grow in. In short, they wanted to "betray [their] roots."
The word "roots" here has a double meaning. The kids trying to get their hair to do something their hair simply does not want to do naturally are "betraying their roots" in the sense that they're turning against the actual, literal roots of their hair, fighting what their hair does on its own. But in so doing, they're also betraying their metaphorical roots, their heritage. Their tightly-curling hair is part of their inheritance as Black kids.
By drawing this punny connection, the speaker makes the point that natural Black hair is often the site of a lot of shame. The pop culture world of "R&B stars" (not to mention the racist world in which white people's hair texture is considered the norm) is one in which natural tight "pepper grain" curls aren't considered stylish—and so impressionable Black kids end up fighting an unwinnable war against the way they naturally are. This problem, the poem hints, is not limited to the world of hairstyles.
Where pun appears in the poem:- Line 24: “betray our roots”
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Metaphor
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Assonance
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Enjambment
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"Waves" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Waves
- Came in
- You're sweet like chocolate, boy
- Pepper grains
- Crazy-paved
- Deference
- Hoardings
- Exercise books
- Head wraps
- Facade
- Counsel
- Transcendent
- Follicle
- Covet
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “The year waves came in”)
A hairstyle involving combing the hair carefully into a regular pattern of ridges, like waves.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Waves”
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Form
"Waves" is a free verse poem (a poem that doesn't use a regular meter or rhyme scheme) arranged into eight neat, tight tercets, or three-line stanzas. All of those stanzas' lines are about the same length, making the poem look orderly and rigorous on the page—a fitting effect in a poem about Black teenagers going to great lengths to "tam[e]" their hair into fashionable waves.
But like the teens' hair, the poem's language won't be held back quite so easily. While the stanzas look neat and contained, the lines often overflow their boundaries: enjambments carry sentences not just across line breaks, but across stanza breaks. (The first three stanzas, for instance, are almost all one long sentence.)
The tension between long, reflective, freewheeling sentences and a rigorous stanza shape mirrors the poem's emotional tension between the kids' efforts to control their hair and the "natural grain" that pushes through regardless of how they try to hold it back. On the one hand, the clipped stanzas (like the waves) feel neat and stylish; on the other, they feel like a repression the poem's language struggles against.
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Meter
"Waves" is written in free verse, so it doesn't use a regular meter. Still, there's a meaningful interplay between the poem's shape and its actual rhythm:
- On the page, the poem looks very regular, with its lines all roughly an even length. Just glancing at it, readers might expect it to sound pretty regular, too.
- But in fact, those clipped lines are often just segments of long, long enjambed sentences that leap line breaks and stanza breaks alike. Often, the enjambments fall in unexpected places, too, creating surprising rhythms.
For instance, take the enjambments in the second stanza (itself just a section of a longer sentence): "[...] taming even the most rebellious head / of pepper grains into slick, crazy-paved / deference [...]". None of those line breaks fall at a place where you'd naturally pause in everyday speech, creating a rhythm that feels abrupt and energetic; readers have to hop those line breaks quickly to keep the flow of thought going!
This effect gives the poem a lively, rebellious quality that suits a "rebellious head / of pepper grains," a head of irrepressibly tight curls. Just as these kids tried to tame their natural hair texture into slick waves, the poem's short lines seem to try to tame the poem's rhythms. Both kinds of repressive effort don't fully succeed.
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Rhyme Scheme
There's no rhyme scheme in "Waves." However, the poem does use occasional moments of internal rhyme, as in this passage (lines 11-13):
[...] to keep
the facade in place. Some taught themselvesthe grace of clippers, [...]
The effect here is pretty unobtrusive; with the stanza break, the link between "place" and "grace" might almost swoop past without readers noticing. But this little flicker of rhyme still gives the poem some quiet music. There's a similar effect in the assonance and slant rhyme that links important words in lines 3-4:
without shame, everyone had a method
for taming even the most rebellious head
Here, a long /ame/ sound subtly links "taming" hair to "shame." And the slant rhyme between "method" and "head" underscores the idea that the kids' hair needs to be managed.
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“Waves” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a Black man remembering life back around the year 1999, the "year waves came in" (that is, the wave hairdo came into style) and everyone was singing "Sweet Like Chocolate." (Kayo Chingonyi was a young teen in the UK at the turn of the 21st century, and it's fair to assume that he's drawing from his own memories here.) Looking back on this time, he remembers just how urgently he and his peers wanted to shape their hair into "slick" waves, an elaborate and time-consuming process that meant spending a lot of time in front of the mirror with clippers, sitting in a barber's chair, and sleeping with their "mothers' head wraps" on to preserve the "facade" of smooth, tamed hair. If they could get their hair into waves, these boys believed, they'd look like "R&B stars"—and maybe feel "wanted like that," too, desired the way those stars were desired.
The problem, for a lot of these teenagers, was that their naturally tightly curling hair simply didn't want to fall into line! The "hair's natural grain" always "came back," the speaker remembers; there was no repressing how their hair grew.
The speaker looks back on these memories with a mixture of rueful humor, tenderness, and sorrow. He clearly feels there was something sweet about how much he and his friends "wanted / to be wanted," but also something heartbreaking about the idea that they had to "betray [their] roots" to do so. That suggestive pun on "roots" reveals the speaker's deeper thought about this situation. The boys, in an effort to be loved, were trying to fight both their Black hair and their Black heritage, "ashamed" of a background that the world around them simply didn't value. Even Black stars were trying to hide or control hair deemed "rebellious" and shameful.
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“Waves” Setting
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"Waves" is set in 1999, though the speaker never says so directly. Instead, they drop a clue in the lyrics that everyone "sang [...] without shame" in the "year waves came in": the words "you're sweet like chocolate, boy" come from a hit song called "Sweet Like Chocolate" that came out in the spring of that year. The kids' idol-worship of "R&B stars"—not to mention the wave hairstyle itself—are distinctive period details, too.
The poem's language ("hoardings" for billboards, "exercise books" for school notebooks) also reveals that this story takes place in the UK. This, readers might therefore guess, is an autobiographical tale: Kayo Chingonyi was himself a teenager back at the turn of the 21st century.
For all the (complicatedly, ruefully) nostalgic memories of '90s fashion and music here, though, the poem is still clearly relevant today: the politics of Black hairstyles remain just as complex. The speaker's tone as they look back on their younger self—a mixture of affectionate teasing and reflective sadness—suggest conflicting feelings: fondness for their younger self and their teenage buddies, sorrow that they felt they had to repress their "hair's natural grain" if they "wanted / to be wanted."
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Literary and Historical Context of “Waves”
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Literary Context
Kayo Chingonyi (1987-present) is a Zambian-British poet. He came to the UK with his family as a small child and has since lived in London, Sheffield, and Durham. “Waves” appeared in his first collection, Kumukanda (2017), which was awarded a Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award, among other honors. The title poem of that collection explores a speaker’s feelings about a traditional Zambian coming-of-age ritual that he never experienced, and like “Waves,” it serves as a good example of Chingonyi’s work: he often writes reflective autobiographical (or semi-autobiographical) verse about identity, memory, and the power and meaning of art.
This poem’s mention of the “R&B stars” that the teenaged speaker and their friends idolized touches on another of Chingonyi’s preoccupations: “Music is the first art form that moved me as a small child,” he explains. Popular music, especially the elaborate rhymes and rhythms of rap, are a huge force in his poetic style as well as his themes. Of his influences, Chingonyi has said:
My work is always trying to achieve a balance between the written and oral traditions of literature, and so it makes sense to bring together traditional canonical poetic forms with forms which are a part of their own canon, to create a canon of my own.
Chingonyi became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022 and currently works as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University.
Historical Context
This poem explores the meaning and politics of Black hair in the UK at the turn of the 21st century—an issue whose roots run deep. White-dominated cultures have long stigmatized Black hair, especially very tightly coiled or kinky hair. “Good hair,” in these terms, was hair that more closely resembled white hair textures (or could more easily be made to resemble them); “bad hair” was the “pepper grain” texture this poem’s speaker describes, kinky hair that “rebel[s]” against smooth white styles. As this poem hints, such discrimination had an internal effect on Black culture, too, creating divisions between people with “good” and “bad” hair (much like similar divisions that set in between lighter- and darker-skinned Black people).
After centuries of such discrimination and internalized shame, Black activists began to rebel. Natural hairstyles became a symbol of resistance during the civil rights movements of the 1960s and ‘70s; wearing an Afro, for instance, became a way of expressing an irrepressible, joyful Black pride and Black identity. (The speaker’s pun on “roots” at the end of this poem gets at that symbolic connection between Black hair and Blackness more generally.)
Nonetheless, natural Black hair remains a flashpoint for racism. White employers and school administrators, for instance, still frequently discriminate against Black hair, stigmatizing styles like braids, twists, and locs as “unprofessional” or “messy”—racist judgments that make it harder for Black people to get a job or an uninterrupted education. The problem remains so pervasive that many US states have recently passed an act outlawing hair discrimination.
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More “Waves” Resources
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External Resources
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Chingonyi's Website — Learn more about poet Kayo Chingonyi on his personal website.
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An Interview with Chingonyi — Listen to Chingonyi discussing his work.
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Waves — See images of hair styled into the elaborate waves this poem describes.
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More on Chingonyi — Read a Guardian article about Chingonyi, his work, and how he draws from the rhythms of music like hip-hop in his writing.
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The Politics of Black Hair — Learn more about the complex politics of Black hairstyles in this article from Teen Vogue.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Kayo Chingonyi
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