Feminist Author Feature: Laetitia Ky
Love and Justice is equal parts memoir, artwork, and feminist manifesto. Ky's striking words, combined with 135 remarkable photographs, offer empowerment and inspiration. She emerges from her exploration of justice and equality with a message of self-love, showing readers the path to loving themselves and their bodies, expressing their voices, and feeling more confident. Through this celebration of women's empowerment, Ky extends a generous invitation to love ourselves, embrace our unique beauty, and to work toward a more just world.
“There is no subject that Laetitia Ky can’t address in her art with openness and insightfulness. What she creates with her hair and body brings beauty to the universal freights that plague women of color. I found it impossible not to fall for her striking beauty along with her gorgeous heart.”
Q: What is your personal mantra?
Laetitia: Be the change you want to see!
Q: Can you share something you've learned from creating this body of work that would resonate with our community?
Laetitia: I've learned that art is a strong therapy. People feel empowered by what I create, but it even helps me. Creating those images and voicing all my opinions helps me deal with the trauma I have experienced in my life as a woman in Africa.
Q: Talk about the first time you felt you defied beauty standards with your art?
Laetitia: When I started with my hair sculptures, it was for fun and for the beauty of the images, until my first photo series went viral—me with my hair sculpted as a second pair of hands. I started to receive messages from a lot of Black women saying that seeing my pictures was helping them to feel better about their hair and their Blackness. Seeing the same type of hair that society considers ugly, showcased as art, made them feel beautiful! This is when I had my click. This is when I realized my work was powerful and could serve a better purpose than just fun and aesthetics. When I knew I was defying beauty standards. If without even trying I was able to make people feel good about themselves, what if I was trying? I knew I could use my art to share my convictions about feminism and self love and to help people. At this moment, it became political!
Q: Since you embarked on your journey to tell your story, has a cultural shift in the Ivory Coast taken place? Do you feel your community is growing?
Laetitia: It is growing a lot! Slowly but surely! We are starting to collectively love ourselves and appreciate our Blackness a little more. When I went natural in 2012, no woman around me had natural hair. Today, almost every woman I know keeps her hair natural! There is a sense of pride about what we represent that is slowly growing within us, and I am so happy about it.
Q: Tell us about your work process in creating your images! “Falling in love with my hair made me fall in love with my Blackness.”
I love this line in your book.
Laetitia: Thank you . It depends! It all starts with the idea! Unless it is for a special collaboration, I don’t think too much before having an idea. It generally comes to my mind alone. For the book, I’m not gonna lie—I had to think a little bit because I had a deadline, but on social media everything is spontaneous! When I have the idea, I try to do a sketch, and after that I just sculpt. I use wire and hair extensions, and it takes me from 30 minutes to 3 hours, depending on the style. After that, I take the pictures myself using a tripod and my camera. When I am not able to do it myself, my little sister helps me take the picture!
Q: Can you tell us about how this revelation evolved into hair sculpting?
Laetitia: When I went back to natural, to help myself deal with the lows of managing my coils, I was following a lot of accounts on social media that were showing the beauty of being Black. It helped me to stay motivated and not to go back to hair relaxer. One day, one of those accounts posted a photo album of the hairstyles African women were wearing before colonization, and I felt inspired. Beautiful sculptures and shapes decorated with gold, pearls, shells. I was impressed and felt the need to experiment with my own hair. So I did it, and my first sculpture was just a high pic of 3 feet tall, standing on top of my head. I posted it on Facebook, and all my friends and family were impressed. I received a lot of encouragement, and it made me continue. Each time I posted, I was trying to make a more complex shape with more details. Every time I posted, I would receive more likes, comments, and shares, until the day one of my photo series went viral.
Q: Can you talk about the intersection of reconnecting with your african heritage turned you toward feminist activism?
Laetitia: Reconnecting with my African heritage helped me to start the process of loving myself! It’s like a domino effect. You start to love one thing and it makes you love another thing and then another thing. It started with my hair, then my skin, then my nose...when I learned to love all those aspects of my Blackness, I started to love another important part of me: being a woman. Before that, I can recall moments I wished I was born as a boy because of endless harassment and discrimination. But when I started to love being a woman, I couldn't stay silent anymore in front of all the discrimination that I and other Ivorian women were living through. Loving my womanhood made me understand I was valuable enough to aspire to live a life free of pain and abuse. And the only way to be able to have it is to fight.
Q: How do you use your power to empower your community?
Laetitia: My art and my words are my main tool! I share my opinions on social issues and illustrate them with hair sculptures or painting! Everyone can say the same thing, but depending on the way you say it, your message will be heard or ignored. Because my art is quite unusual, it has the tendency to really touch and empower, and I am really proud of it.
Q: Do you have a favorite portrait in the book, if so which one and why?
Laetitia: This is really hard for me to choose, but I would say the picture of me with the female bust having her period. It is an old work of mine that I posted before, and the reactions of women were incredible! It is a celebration of the woman’s body, and in a world where our body is stigmatized, celebrating it can be therapeutic. When the world makes you hate your body and biology, being able to appreciate it is the first step toward self love and happiness.
Q: What does being a Feminist mean to you?
Laetitia: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has the best definition, according to me: “A feminist is a person who believes in social, political and economical equality of sexes.”
She is a strong African feminist, and I relate so much to her! I am inspired by the way she is voicing the African perspective of feminism, that is way too often demonized, silenced, and forgotten. Our African experience as women is very different from the Western one. We live through horrible abuse that is directly related to our body and biology, like female genital mutilation or breast ironing. We can’t ignore the importance of our sex and biology in this fight! For me, feminism is about the liberation of the female sex, because it is what my experience led me to. I respect others’ perspectives of feminism, but I think we should allow the possibility of every perspective being voiced.
the Author
Laetitia Ky is a one-of-a-kind artist, activist, and creative voice based in Ivory Coast, West Africa. With the help of extensions, wool, wire, and thread, Ky sculpts her hair into unique and compelling art pieces that shine a light on, and ignite conversation around, social justice. Her bold and intimate storytelling, which she openly shares with her extensive social media audience, covers issues like: sexism and internalized misogyny, racial oppression, reproductive rights and consent, harmful beauty standards, shame and its corrosive effect on mental health, and more…
