Naming myself

Photo credit: Eduardo González Cueva, 2002

Like many teens of my generation, I covered my note books with citations: quotes from novels or plays that resonated with me. I suppose those were the memes of our time.

One quote I regularly reproduced was this one from Erica Jong:

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.

I didn’t know at the time that I would be spending more than 3 decades repeatedly renaming myself as an immigrant. In London I was Mary Ann, in Madrid Mariana, in Lima Marian. When I ended up in New York City in my mid-thirties, I had partially stopped caring. I was whomever people thought they could read into the original spelling of my name: Marianne.

And then a colleague actually asked: what do you want us to call you? My first answer was non-committal. You can call me whatever you want. But they insisted. No, we can figure it out. Tell us how to pronounce your name. And so the anglicised version of my Danish name was born. I became MyAna and started introducing myself with helpful pronunciation hints: like Diana with an M, or like I am your personal Ana. “My Ana”.

In many ways, it felt like I was actually naming myself in the sense Jong had meant. Like an individual, a poet, a revolutionary, someone owning myself. People commented on the uniqueness of my name, its poetic qualities, its cadence and rhythm. I liked it too, and, in any case, it became who I was.

And then I moved back home.

I have no words to explain how alienating it feels to hear my name pronounced as originally intended and not really recognise myself. It is as if I need to hear it twice, every time, before I realise the person speaking means me.

This is definitely not the reverse culture shock I expected, but there it is. As I return to myself, I feel like I am losing part of who I have chosen to become. I know, of course, that this is part of the process, the ebb and flow of always just being exactly where we are.

And so I sit.