Culture Corner: The story of the Kardoune
How hair is wrapped in ribbon and heritage.
The hands of my ancestral women had long adorned the hair of their daughters with the red and orange silk weaves of the kardoune ribbon. For centuries, daughters sat between their grandmothers’ and mothers’ legs, quietening to the silence of the night, tuning to the chatter, harking to the stories, as the kardoune coiled against the length of their hair.
The practice of the kardoune amongst Algerians is embedded in the sacred nature of womanhood—where the pride of women’s hair rivalled the boast of the men’s battle scars. A practice originating from the Indigenous Amazigh people of the Maghreb, it involves tightly wrapping a piece of fabric around the length of a woman’s hair and is intended to smooth and protect the hair during the night.
Like many before me, of whom I only know of in retellings, I, too, once sat idly waiting for my grandmother to gather my hair in the patterns of the kardoune. The tedious wrapping of the silk ribbon was always accompanied by stories. The gentle lilt of my grandmother’s touch always stood in polarity to the violence of the war she recalled to me.
Through the years, the kardoune became a symbolic nightly routine, a bonding moment of nostalgia that etched itself into a memory of home when I was away. A nostalgia that women in Algeria tended to their hearts when torn away from their mother’s hands by the weaves of marital stability.
When my grandmother began to lose her sense of self to Alzheimer’s, when I became new and nameless and extinct, I vowed to absorb her memory, desperate for late-night kardoune-wrapping and her stories. Although I had mastered the kardoune wrap myself, I sat by my grandmother’s feet, correcting details of stories when her memory hazed.
And when my grandmother passed, I cut my hair, for I no longer found sense in its length or care. It became a burden, a futile mess that longed for my grandmother’s hands, longed for her meticulous twists, and her whispers. So, when asked about my heritage, I know its breath stands beyond the words woven into the fabrics of language.
Rather, it embeds itself in the tender hand motions, treading the futures of my people through memory. It finds itself in the cold floors under the daughters and the stark colors of silk entwined around their mother’s fingers. It sets itself in a secret of beauty, a pride of stories, passed through generations and across the land. For the patterns of the kardoune are defiant, much like the women of its care.
As my hair grows from its years of grief, I revisit the kardoune’s adornment, hoping that one day, as the sun shines and the moon crawls, my grandmother’s stories find themselves murmured in the cadence of the wrap.
Copy Editor (Volume 53) — Greetings, everyone! I am Yasmine Benabderrahmane and I am delighted to join The Medium’s Volume 53 as one of your Copy Editors. I am currently a History graduate student at the University of Toronto, specialising in decolonial African history. As a former staff writer, Associate Opinion Editor, and V52’s Opinion Editor, I am honoured to continue to be part of a community that upholds the journalistic integrity of student voices. In my spare time, you might catch me starting (and never finishing) crochet projects, hiking with my camera, or reading.