Zaynab Khuder bares her soul for Grapeshot this issue, as she explores the sacredness of a person’s name – beyond its letters.
What's in a name? That dreaded, awful utterance of syllables and letters that I’d spent too long hating. The first memory of my name, as something that really belonged to me, was when I was young. Single-digit-aged young. Propped up next to my mother on the couch, she held in her lap one of those magnetic drawing boards and with my hand in hers, guided the pen across the surface to spell out: Zaynab. I wish I could pinpoint the exact moment in which I felt a shift, a change in the air that flipped the switch in my brain to let me know that actually—this name, this thing that was tethered to me, was wrong. I had come to an awful realisation that I hated my name. I hated it, in so many trivial ways that I never truly realised just how deep that hatred went. It burrowed deep in my marrow and insisted on staying, it was cruel and parasitic.
I hated many things about it. I had made it a sport to hate, and I played well. I hated the way it looked. I hated the way it stuck on the edge of my tongue when someone would ask for my name. The look of dreaded confusion that always plagued people’s faces when I’d introduce myself. A glowing uncertainty that would flash seconds before they said my name with an unsure “Zee-nab? Zaa-nab?”
I had a particular hatred for those name keychains you’d find hanging around shopping centres or novelty stores. It’s like they stood there to mock me. I hated my name so much that I would often ask my mother to call me by another name in public as if it harboured something sinister like I was Voldemort or something.
There were many times in my youth where I’d jump at any opportunity to escape my name. I created aliases, and false identities that took a starring role so that I could feel the semblance of belonging in the sphere of Western society. It’s not to say that I wasn’t myself, or that I was fake in any sense of the word. It just felt like, looking back at it now, that I had gotten too accustomed to wearing a mask of shame. I’d let everything my name represented—my culture, identity, my uniqueness, my ancestry, slip away in the cracks of this facade and take a backseat in my life. I’d become too comfortable in hating something that was meant to be sacred, something that was bound to me. A name is many things, but it’s the first thing we can truly say is ours. It belongs to us, whether we give it to ourselves or it's given to us. But I was young and filled with so much rage and confusion that it was hard to stand proud in a world where I already felt like an outsider, peering in instead of participating.
I look back at my youth now and how I filled my time with so much hate that it had become second nature. I started to think to myself, when did this mask of shame become more than just a mask? When it had become just as a part of me as the blood in my veins and the lines etched into my palms. I’d become unrecognisable in the midst of my own hatred. And it sucked, for lack of a better word. But I’m glad that the foolishness and hatred of my youth is so far behind me that I can speak about it now. It's so far, barely teetering in the distance because now I can sign my name, say it aloud, hear it, speak it and type it without feeling ashamed or like it makes me any less than who I am.
So the question begs: what’s in a name? Well, everything. But, for now it can be as simple as two syllables and six letters. Zaynab. And it's not fucking pronounced Zee-nab or Zaa-neb. ZAY. NAB.
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