Names and Naming

 I may not be Charles Dickens but I do try to pay attention to the names I give characters. My friend JC criticized some of my Indiana stories while we were in prison in New Jersey for the similarities of names. Particularly, female names. Thing is we had a lot of Shellies and Terries and Kellies and Debbies and I thought and I still think the similarity of names, the actual commonality of names tells something about Indiana. We also have two Blue Rivers and two Sugar Creeks.

I found some support for my thinking in  recently reading Victoria Princewill's What’s in a Name? on the Granta site

Naming, I realised, as an interactive experience, is neither neutral nor finite. Beyond the introductory exchange, names resurface, they recur, in organic conversations. How we name each other echoes how we see each other, and can convey recognition or respect. Intimacy is delicate by design, the bonds that determine it can be fragile. Naming, an embodiment of the two, can be fraught

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 Renaming is not always benign. What does it then mean to rename someone publicly, without their consent or even foreknowledge? For Thandiwe to become Thandie, and for it to be easier to simply acquiesce? When refashioned by others, through lazy fumbling or comfortable ignorance, one is remade by the unthinking tongues of strangers, and perhaps this is where the crime of it all lies.

For many, the recognition of a name is symbolic. It carries an expectation, and often an intimacy.

Not in that moment, but in one’s history. One’s name is fundamentally also a memory, a reflection of an intimate historical moment, at which an individual was given a symbol through which to be at home within the world – naming as recognition.

For a stranger, be it a school nun, in Thandiwe Newton’s case, or the head teacher giving out prizes where she simply omitted the surname, of a student, she couldn’t pronounce, to replace a name is to reset a power relation, shift the balance against the person with the name and state quite literally, to them but also anyone listening, that you are not, you are never who you believe yourself to be, if I think otherwise. In a world where everything can be debated, names are contingent on whether the speaker decides they wish to honour your authority over your body, or not.

Safia Elhillo's Searching For the Words to Describe Myself from Harper's Bazaar shares similar themes about the power of naming others and one's self, but in a context wholly unfamiliar to me: the relations of the Sudanese to Arab speakers.

As a poet, I tell myself that language is my great obsession. But I think what I mean is that precision is my great obsession. I feel most powerful when I can say exactly what I mean, when I can reach for meaning and find the exact words with which to make it. I’ve built worlds for myself this way. But the one place it has always eluded me has been in talking about my own identity, in trying to name it. The larger terms I know: I am Black. I am also from the Arabic-speaking world, but I do not identify, racially, as Arab. I’m still trying to find language to harness the intersection—maybe Arabized African, Arabophone African, something to hold the fact that I am an Arabic speaker, with an identity shaped by this Arabic, but a race independent of it. But these terms do not satisfy me. They do not light up the part of my brain that brightens when I hit the exact word I need to describe something. These terms land on me with a dull thud, a cruel almost.

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Or sometimes, I immediately identify myself as Sudanese, and experience firsthand the way Sudan and Sudanese people are perceived in the Arab imagination. It’s the same ugly stereotypes that you’d recognize in Western anti-Black racism. “So it’s true that Sudanese people are lazy!” I hear a Saudi girl giggle, almost flirtatiously, to my brother at a party. Lebanese singer Ragheb Alama said during an interview that he believes Sudanese women to be the ugliest in the world. And every Ramadan, on the soap operas out of Egypt, there always seems to be a character in blackface speaking broken Arabic who is meant to be Sudanese. And usually that is the extent of the joke—that they are Sudanese, Black mouths unsuited to the Arabic language, intruders in the space.

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The terms we have for race are flimsily constructed to begin with, but I am not here to make the case for dissolving them altogether. I am asking, of language, of myself, to go back in and build more words, more specific ones to accompany the looser ones we already have. The language of Blackness gives me a name for who my people are, the larger global collective I am part of: who I celebrate with, who I seek out in every room, who I mourn with. My question is not about who I belong to, but about my specific name within this collective. I do what I can to identify myself primarily by this belonging, rather than the shared experiences of violence, but my clearest examples for the intersecting identity that is being of Sudanese origin in the United States are the stories of Ahmed Mohamed and Yassin Mohamed (no relation, to my knowledge). You might recognize Ahmed Mohamed’s name from the “clock incident” that catapulted his name and face into the national news conversation in 2015: a 14-year-old boy arrested for bringing a homemade clock to his school in Irving, Texas. Because of his Muslimness and the way his identity was read in that space as being from the Arabic-speaking world, the clock was suspected to be a bomb. Five years later, Yassin Mohamed, a Sudanese-American man experiencing a mental health crisis, was shot and killed by a police officer in Atlanta after Yassin threw rocks at the officer, who could have subdued him in a range of other nonlethal ways. In this case, Yassin was read as so many other Black men in such encounters with police have been: imagined to be so dangerous, so physically overpowering, that police officers respond with lethal force despite the many nonlethal alternatives at their disposal. The intersection of my identities also contains the intersecting dangers of anti-Blackness, xenophobia, and Islamophobia (though not all Sudanese people are or identify as Muslim). In searching for a name, I want to name that feeling, too, the one where I line up my hurts and take inventory of the things that keep me in danger until this country I live in, country I was born in, is no longer anti-Black, xenophobic, or Islamophobic. My language. My religion. My Black hand pressed to my Black mouth to keep the tears in.

Where there is power there must be responsibility or there will be harm; those using words have such a power. If I did not capture the words used by the people where I am from, then I would think of myself as having misrepresented them.