Poetry to me and I’m sure to most of us is seen as something directly related and derived from our thoughts. With the use of visuals of my very own hair, A Tangled Mess of Lines is an Ekphrasis series intended to reflect the symbolic sense of the relationship between our hair and our minds. Brushing and running one’s fingers through their hair to sort or collect thoughts is an act of poetry. Our minds are invisible barriers and our strands of hair are mere extensions of those thoughts trapped within. This is represented by the transparent plastic visible in some pictures and the hair released from them in others to express the releasing and freeing of thoughts. The approach I took for this experiment was intended to show a writer or a poet’s process and struggle in trying to give life to the thoughts that are already wild in their heads. This series can be read in any order with the intention to represent the process of how thoughts can be shifted, moved and jumbled and the art of detangling those knots to form words that may at times fail us. At times, thoughts can often only remain beautiful within our minds and never out of it. Hence, words are not the only way to express ourselves, the shedding and dropping of hair often is often dismissed as uncomfortable but many tend to forget that our hair and our strands are our signatures that mark everywhere we go and everywhere we leave. The irony of hair is that it is the life of our thoughts and that in itself, is poetic.

Sarah Farheenshah Begum