name
“They were women who, in Friedan’s words, were ‘told the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll’s house by Victorian prejudices.’”
What’s in a name?
During my first year at Harvard, I am convinced that I have said my name no fewer than 1000 times. I’ve said it shyly (accompanied with a mild wave), screamed it as I walked across the Yard, slurred it at parties, and written it on dozens of sign-up sheets. And in each instance, I rush through Nora as quickly as possible – brushing past the “n,” simply squawking the “a” — hoping that if I move on from Nora, other people will too.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged: “J” names are red flags, celebrities get overly creative on birth certificates, and “new additions” – whether they be a human infant, a pet, or a succulent – are named. Naming is one of humanity’s most crucial philosophical undertakings – they are so ingrained as linguistic artifact that they feel natural.
Western naming is underpinned by the ancient Latin proverb, “nomen est omen” – or “name is a sign.” As named-beings we are expected to (subconsciously) understand that names represent our individual power. Names endow our value and prophecy, carry our heritage and familial psychology, and act like a symbol, a proxy for the “self.” And, to the Western mainstream, to be in conflict with your name, is to be in conflict with your identity. It is expected that an individual embraces this linguistic symbol of personhood – to reject your name is to reject your prophecy.
I’ve always hated my name, even before I could articulate why. When I was younger, I thought it was boring – monosyllabic, un-ostentatious, and unusual. But as I grew up, the conflict with my name became more fundamental: I hated the assumptions, the tropes, and the history that came with my name.
The Noras of popular American culture are often writers (think of the ranks of Roberts and Ephron). They tend to be feminists, but their work and activism caters to a specific class – usually middle class white women. These were women who didn’t look like me, who stood against the liberatory values I held, yet defined me.
And, ironically – but terrifyingly – from being marked by their name, I possessed (some) of their linguistic privilege. Culturally, “Nora” can pass for a stereotypical white name – by omitting my traditional Vietnamese middle name, and being just “Nora Mitchell,” I could pass for a white woman. And now, as a student at Harvard, I must grapple with a new dimension to this privilege – to (linguistically) pass as white and be an Ivy League student.
Nora originates from the Anglo-Norman, Honora – or “Woman of Honor.” But for me, Nora doesn't represent honor. Nora represents linguistic colonization, a severing from my culture. Nora represents not feeling “Black” or “Asian” enough – to feel whitewashed. Nora represents a propensity to harm – an exertion of privilege that could disadvantage another. Existing as “Nora” at Harvard represents new fears – the fear of becoming unbound with my values; the fear of disconnecting from my community; the fear of betraying my commitment to anti-oppression.
“‘Mr. Garner,’ she said, ‘why you all call me Jenny?’ “Cause that what’s on your sales ticket, gal. Ain’t that your name? What you call yourself?’ ‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘I don’t call myself nothing’”
Naming is not always affirmative – there is a centuries long history of “naming as violence.” Names can be suffocating. They gender us against our will. They chain us to spiny family trees. They have been mechanisms of enslavement – long a tactic of erasure. And they have been tools in the afterlife of slavery – an indicator white institutions use to discriminate and devalue.
My mother did not mean me harm when she named me – she made me Nora to spare me her own pain. My mother came to this country as a Vietnam War refugee – her birth name, Phuong, was too hard for her classmates to pronounce – so in America, she became Fawn. “Fawn” worked to become a successful scholar – but not without being constantly underestimated, being judged in academia because English was not her first language and her name, although anglicized, still did not belong to a white woman.
I believe she wanted my name to be easy for white people in the hopes it would make life easier for me. She never wanted me to be underestimated on first impression. On the papers that have (and will) control my future – the university applications, the scholarship essays, and the endless resumes – she wanted the white institution to accept me. And, thus far, I have benefited – unlike my mother, my name has never prompted me to prove my “Americanness” or “competence.” She spared me the viciousness of constant mispronunciation, the aggression of “your name is so hard to pronounce!,” and the exhaustion of having my name constantly disrespected. My mother’s task was not easy – she had to name a daughter who would not look like her, who would be impacted by racism in different ways, and would navigate life on the edges of Blackness and Asianness – she was trying to spare me pain. But in doing so, she may have also stripped a piece of my cultural pride.
Nora feels like a burdensome prophecy – and arguably, that prophecy has already been fulfilled. Nora has achieved her mother’s dream – Nora got the Ivy League education, she has received the validation of her intellect from the white academy. Nora and I may no longer coincide. As trite (and dramatic) as it sounds, I can’t help but feel that I have no name – I may be no one.
But nothingness is not always a negative state – paradoxically, it can be liberating. To have no name is “the refusal of legibility” within the hegemonic institutions – it is, in the words of Halberstam, “an art of unbecoming.”Nothingness may be the crucial plane towards freedom – in Sartrean philosophy, “consciousness depends on nothingness” because “it nihilates what is in order to be – it transcends the world and itself in order to know them.”
States of namelessness and nothingness have always been critical to Black thought – look no further than Morrison’s Beloved or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In Beloved, Baby Suggs must exist in “nothingness” – the point of having no avowed name – before she transitions from her enslaved name, “Jenny,” to her chosen name, “Baby Suggs.” And in Invisible Man the main character’s namelessness is his assent to Du Bois’ double-consciousness – namelessness is the refusal to be distorted by white epistemology. Although my life, in no way, is comparable to the experiences of enslavement or of the Jim Crow era – I relate to the desire to be self-defined. “Nora” was a map for youth – and she vanished in a blast of pixelated, crimson confetti. To rename would be to set forth on a new route, plant new signposts, and dream of a new destination (Wilkinson). Whatever name I may choose, it would be a new definition of myself – an invitation to be known for my soul, my own innermost hopes for my life – and not be defined by the pompous, self-prided “definers.”
“I didn’t realize that my attempt to rewrite the past would be as thwarted as was my mother’s. Saidiya was also a fiction of someone I would never be—a girl unsullied by the stain of slavery and inherited disappointment… I realized too late that the breach of the Atlantic could not be remedied by a name”
But the state of nothingness is not viable in the everyday – “someone’s soul” can’t be articulated into a phone contact. For now, I am like everyone else – stuck with the name my parent gave me. One day I may decide to officially become someone else: to self-name and self-define. But there are structures at play whose power is far greater than my loose desire to “be myself” – renaming may never erase the Western history of naming or the generational history of Empire. In the meantime, I must reconcile with the positionalities and the inadequacies that Nora imparts.
Nevertheless, it is feasible for us to be more conscious of names’ power: to understand that this power can be affirmative and violent; to prompt us to to question our Selves; and to remind us that our perceptions should not be contingent on symbols over souls.
I can interrogate my own assumptions about my name – question how racializing my name, treating my name as a cultural indicator, is also formed by white supremacy. How has my upbringing in the South, surrounded by white media, persuaded me that to be “Nora” is only to personify prolific white women? Perhaps I give language too much deterministic power – of equal importance is the society that interprets and theorizes about our names. And maybe there are still possibilities in “Nora.” Nora could be someone who acknowledges her privilege – the privilege that previous generations have worked tirelessly for – and leverages her positionality for good.
But, in the meantime, I must concede that the question of names – mine and everyone else’s – is yet to be definitively resolved. Our experiences are incredibly personal and individual – we are each the philosopher of our own souls, theorizing how every facet of ourselves can coincide. So, for now, I conclude – in a very philosophical fashion – with a question. What’s in a name?
references
Ellison, R. (1995). Invisible Man. VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL.
Morrison, T. (2023). Beloved. VINTAGE CLASSICS.
Speight, A. (2017). “What You Call Yourself?”: Nothingness, Naming, Abjection, and Queer
Failure in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Aisthesis, 8, 1–13.
Wilkinson, C. (2019, August 12). The namelessness of lives: What’s not in a name?
E-International Relations.
https://www.e-ir.info/2019/08/08/the-namelessness-of-lives-whats-not-in-a-name/