Crowning glory - ‘Bumpy Head Gal’ Hutchinson stays rooted in culture despite backlash, discrimination
Published:Thursday | February 4, 2021 | 12:17 AMJanet Silvera/Senior Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
Three books, seven CDs, remarkable work as an international motivational speaker, even inspiring hundreds of Jamaican children to perform her work at Festival annually, Joan Andrea Hutchinson remains the ‘Bumpy Head Gyal’.
A quarter of a century has passed since the Jamaican public chastised the dark-skinned, kinky hair Negro broadcaster for daring to appear on their television sets wearing Nubian knots – an Africa-originated hairstyle many locals refer to as ‘Chiney bump’.
The venomous responses from viewers – “Tek dat dutty bumpy head gal off di TV”, “Tek off da Rasta-looking gyal off di TV”, “If my maid came to work looking like that, I would have to send her home” – were a stark reminder of how mental enslavement had kept Jamaicans caged more than a century and a half since abolition.
Hutchinson said that by the end of her programme on the fateful night, the television station received 28 phone calls.
A woman also called Hutchinson at her daytime job at the radio station and said that she had heard her reading news on radio and she was impressed, but now having seen her on TV, she was a total disgrace to Jamaican women.
“She described me as dirt,” Hutchinson told The Gleaner.
SCATHING REACTION FROM FRIENDS
Some of the reaction from friends were even more scathing after she returned to Jamaica from Europe and North Africa, where she resided.
“I returned in 1996 wearing twists, and some of my friends told me I could not go on the street looking like that,” Hutchinson recalled. “One friend I met in the parking lot at her office because she was too embarrassed for me to come upstairs as her boss had described my hairstyle as buttu.”
Scorned for embracing her cultural heritage, Hutchinson, during an interview with The Gleaner in celebration of Black History Month, said she was also stereotyped for mastering and embracing Patois.
Maybe nothing was more condescending as at a banquet she was chairing, she was introduced to a company chairman, who whispered, “You are going to speak English, right?”
And Hutchinson never allows the treatment to get the better of her.
“Naaah! Some of these poor people are perhaps only exposed to my comedic work in the Jamaican language, and my Nubian knots suggested to company chairman that perhaps I am a strict Jamaican creole speaker.”
Another woman she encountered at a pharmacy once told her she didn’t expect her to look as she did.
“She said she hoped I did not feel offended, but she thought I was brown skin, long-haired, and slim,” Hutchinson said.
The stereotyping only served to marginalise her further, even when she applied for jobs in corporate Jamaica, where it seemed many people forgot she started her career as a broadcaster, holding the record for being the youngest television news anchor in mainstream media, reading evening news at age 18 on the Jamaica Broadcasting Commission TV.
Questions like “Will anyone take the organisation seriously if she comes here?” and “So you entertainment types, would you be able to get up and come to a regular job every day?” were common.
Hutchinson credits her late parents for her indefatigable strength and sense of identity.
“They told me that I was awesome and an achiever, and so the boundaries in my life are the ones which I have created for myself.”
Today, Hutchinson says there definitely has been a reduction in the discrimination meted out to women who are black and choose not to chemically alter their hair.
In 2018, when Hutchinson was inducted into the Order of Distinction, she donned Nubian knots with her business suit – a bold show of resistance that she would not be turning her back on her culture.