Susan Zakin Does Not Regret

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 12:57:57 -0700

“I’m thinking of dyeing my hair again,” I said to my husband a few years ago, adding quickly: “For professional reasons.”

He’d mentioned that he liked me blonde, rather off-handedly, and I didn’t want to suggest I was bowing to the male gaze, Goddess forbid.

His reaction wasn’t what I expected. He looked puzzled.

“Why?” he asked. “People respect you if you have grey hair.”

“Have you been in America? Oh, that’s funny. I thought you had lived here for the past seven years.”

I could hear the anger in my voice, but it wasn’t directed at him. Did I mention that my husband is African? Kenyan, to be precise. Older people are listened to in Kenya, because they know stuff. Here, not so much. In fact, quite the opposite. I’d always been rock and roll, but I was in my fifties and he’d watched me struggle, not quite believing that doors were suddenly slamming in my face.

This conversation came back to me a few weeks ago when a hairdresser who had started a little magazine told me she was killing a story about our safari business. It had nothing to do with how we operate: we donate one percent of our pre-tax revenues to environmental causes and we’ve supported women’s groups and schools in Africa for nearly a decade.

According to her email — she didn’t have the integrity to call me on the phone — it was because I was old-fashioned. I didn’t know how to use social media correctly. To be more specific, I was ironic. As an environmental writer, I’d been compared to Hunter S. Thompson, known for his caustic wit and hyperbole. My first book, Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement, launched a minor celebrity for me as the bad girl of environmental writing, an outlier in a genre usually considered earnest and humorless.

But I’d grown...Read More