A Dark Tale of Severed Hair

Rapunzel, by Kay Nielsen.

“O wicked child,” cried the witch, “what is this I hear! I thought I had hidden thee from all the world, and thou hast betrayed me!” In her anger she seized Rapunzel by her beautiful hair, struck her several times with her left hand, and then grasping a pair of shears in her right — snip, snap — the beautiful locks lay on the ground. And she was so hard-hearted that she took Rapunzel and put her in a waste and desert place, where she lived in great woe and misery.

In the story of Rapunzel, a girl is locked away by a controlling witch to punish the girl’s parents who stole salad leaves from the garden. Her hair — her glory, her agency, the rope by which love and the world might reach her — becomes the very thing the witch destroys to punish her. Shorn and exiled, Rapunzel is left in the wilderness, stripped of beauty and dignity in one violent stroke.

Why am I recounting a fairy tale?

This week, Armenian customs officers, working a checkpoint at Agarak, found something stuffed inside pillows in a truck arriving from Iran: 143 bundles of human hair, weighing 26 kilograms. It wasn’t an isolated find. Since January, there have been eleven separate smuggling attempts, totalling over 135 kilograms of human hair crossing that border alone.

Where has this hair come from? Two explanations are circulating. The first is poverty: that impoverished Iranian women are selling their hair simply to get by. The second is darker. Some believe the hair may belong to women killed during January’s protests — protests the regime crushed, and whose dead it has a long record of refusing to return to their families.

Credit: Panorama

We may never know for certain, thanks to a regime built on enforced disappearances and secret execution. The silence in Iran is so total that piles of woman’s ponytails can vanish across a border without anyone being able to say, with confidence, whether their owners are alive.

And there is a third possible explanation: it may be propaganda.

But if it is true, it is as dark as the Brothers Grimm. It is also grotesquely ironic.

In Iran, a woman’s hair must be hidden, by law, while she is alive. It is deemed so dangerous, so morally corrosive, so threatening to the social order, that women have been arrested, flogged, and even sectioned in psychiatric institutions for letting it show. Yet that same hair, once severed from a head that can no longer object, can apparently be smuggled across a border and sold to be worn, openly, by women in other countries who have never given it a second thought.

Hidden while alive, but trafficked once dead, or once destitute enough to sell the only thing left. Either way, the hair only becomes visible, a commodity no less, once the woman it belonged to has been erased from the equation entirely.

The Iranian regime is as tyrannical and monstrous as the witch in the fairy tale. Women have been arrested, flogged, deemed insane and incarcerated for revealing their hair. Iran’s constitution is built on Sharia, and the mandatory hijab is justified as both a religious and a legal duty. Opposition to the hijab law becomes, by definition, opposition to Islam itself. The judges and morality police can tell themselves they are not cruel dictators but servants of God.

Rapunzel’s fate is grim — a cautionary tale to warn against the insatiable desire of the lovers as much as the parent’s craving for salad. But it is also a story of the danger of strict controls. The witch locked Rapunzel away and cut off her hair as punishment. Iran’s regime locks women’s hair away by law — and may be cutting it from women it has already destroyed.

When Rapunzel expressed her desire and agency she was shorn and cast out into the wilderness, but she ultimately survived. The fear is that those women in Iran did not.