This Kill Bill Scene Has Me Thinking About Weave and Girl-Fights

The camera lingers for a moment on the black
flame of O-Ren Ishii’s hair in the snow, just sheared
by the bride’s Hatori Hanzo, and I think
about what it means to draw hair in a fight. To hitch

a braid or a track from another woman’s scalp.
What would our grandmothers say if they knew
we’d forsaken the old proverbs—where is my Vaseline?
or Bitch, hold my earrings. These days, victory depends on:

·      Grip-strength, how well we crook our nails
beneath the cornrows, how much we loosen
the black thread holding the extensions

·      The strength of the first tug

·      Drag-distance

·      The size of the hole the asphalt eats
into the other girl’s jeans.

Somebody yells out Worldstar, starts recording,
and the crowd’s collective flash is hot as stage lights.
Someone’s nose is knuckled to spit and blood.
A lip bellies around a cut. A black girl’s bruises

grey under white light. And when they’re pulled
apart, pieces of themselves left behind
on the other’s shirt like O-Ren’s slit of blood
in winter’s fresh down, the judges must decide

on a loser. The phones record a tracking shot
to the clump of hair or braids on the pavement,
zoom in. The cameras linger on the weave yanked
from owner and updo, and the crowd’s uproar

is something like exit music. But we know
this is no samurai’s death. No one lives this down.

---

Taylor Byas is a 23-year-old Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received both a Bachelor's Degree with Honors in English and a Masters in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is now a first-year PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.