The Night in My Hair: Henna, Syria, and the Muslim Ban

The night the United States launches fifty Tomahawk missiles on the Syrian Shayrat airbase near Homs, I am washing henna and indigo out of my hair. The tub is splashed with tourmaline blue, speckled like the delicate markings on a sparrow’s egg, and from the living room I can hear the newscasters referring to margin of error, airpower, and the “perils of the region.” The water runs down the drain.

When I was little, I used to pore over the photo albums of my parents’ wedding and their honeymoon in Syria, tracing the shots of my cousins and aunts and great-grandparents lined up in the courtyard for family photos, dozens of demitasses of Turkish coffee and laughter over backgammon. How young and strong my father still looked in the eighties, fifteen years before the doctors saw a constellation of powdered glass strewn across the wide basin of his lungs.

The reporter drones on, and the night bursts open on the other side of the world. I squeeze the last of the muddy water from my hair, riming my fingernails with blue.

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The first time my mother spread a warm, moss-colored pudding of henna on my hair, it was because my father had some left over from dying his own. Henna, a powdered herb that comes from the plant has been used in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia to color and condition hair for thousands of years. Many religious groups—including Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Christians, Hindus, and Zoroastrians—also use henna for body art, particularly for weddings, in regions where henna is traditionally