Photographs showing Armenian women with long, braided hair were mostly taken before 1915. After that date, in cities such as Aleppo, Beirut, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cyprus, Syros, Athens, Piraeus, and elsewhere, surviving Armenian women, orphans and widows alike, appear with their hair cut short or completely shaved. The hair of children, in particular, was often shaven off. Cutting the hair of women and young girls was seen as a precaution against an invisible threat.
AYLİN VARTANYAN-TAMAR SUCİYAN
Photographs showing Armenian women with long, braided hair were mostly taken before 1915. After that date, in cities such as Aleppo, Beirut, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cyprus, Syros, Athens, Piraeus, and elsewhere, surviving Armenian women, orphans and widows alike, appear with their hair cut short or completely shaved. The hair of children, in particular, was often shaven off. Cutting the hair of women and young girls was seen as a precaution against an invisible threat: to make them appear less “desirable” to outsiders, to prevent their abduction or enslavement. In other words, women’s hair had become a matter of security. For this reason, it is exceedingly rare to see Armenian women with long hair after 1915.
The security threat, however, did not only come from the external gaze. When one could no longer protect one’s integrity and boundaries, the body itself seemed to respond through infestation, most commonly through lice. Shaving the head was also a way to manage this condition. Infestation was one of the most ordinary, most familiar costs of survival on the endless roads of exile, where exposure, death, and loss were constant companions.
I remember lice infestation during our school years as an experience that terrorized us all (Talin). As if the crawling and itching of a parasite on our heads weren’t enough, being blamed, isolated, and even forced to display the lice inside transparent boxes as part of so-called “creative” pedagogical methods made long hair feel like either a rare privilege or a curse. Yet even in countries with the most advanced hygiene standards, lice still occur but children’s hair is not automatically cut short or shaved off.
The discourse around lice frequently takes on racial dimensions, positioning hair as a site of direct intervention, including in the United States. For instance, during one of my visits from Turkey to the USA as a young university student (Aylin), when I realized I had lice and went to the university clinic, the white male doctor told me to “go to the pharmacies in Harlem.” In his language, lice were not a health issue but a racial one, marked as the disease of Black people.
In The Dawn of the Prisoners (Mahkumların Şafağı), Zaven Biberyan describes his three-year-long compulsory military service with the Nafıa corps, where lice were not merely a hygiene issue but a moment of existential collapse: “If someone were to ask me what the worst thing about military life was, I would say without hesitation: lice. I was helpless against them; I felt genuine terror, as if facing an invisible, invincible enemy. I would stay awake all night, itching, feeling them crawl across every part of my skin, knowing I could do nothing. Exhausted and sleepless, I couldn’t even rest. My nerves were shattered by these tiny creatures: so small, so easy to crush yet they defeated me.”
Biberyan experienced this not in Istanbul, but in the provinces. Under harsh conditions, in unfamiliar towns, facing countless illnesses, deprivation, and humiliation, he was invaded by lice and insects. His bodily and psychic integrity began to disintegrate. This invasion was not only a reflection of external hardship, it also exposed the body’s permeability, the fragility of its boundaries. Illness, misery, and humiliation seeped inward. The body could no longer protect its wholeness; it lost its capacity to set limits and became a living archive of pain, degradation, and trauma.
Shaving the heads of women and young girls may appear as a “preventive measure” against such invisible threats, yet it was in fact a profound violation of their bodily and spiritual integrity. It was an act of violence aimed at the dignity of the self, at the very symbols of identity. In this sense, it closely resembles the interventions suffered by Native American children in boarding schools, where they were forced to cut their hair, forbidden to speak their languages, and prohibited from wearing their traditional clothing.
Across all these examples runs a shared thread: long, shiny, and thick hair is what the dominant power seeks to eradicate, for it is likely perceived as a sign of a healthy sense of self. Long, thick, vibrant hair is not merely an aesthetic feature. It is a symbol of vitality, resilience, and rootedness. A healthy sense of self cannot be humiliated, violated, trampled upon, or erased.