Naming

lost and found

by Jeneen R. Garcia

published September 10, 2005

 

 

My kid--if I ever have one--will probably grow up nameless.

 

I do not think it a lack of creativity as much as fear--a fear of naming. While my favorite neighbor Ana calls her black cat Caesura, her car Colette and her laptop Justa, and my online friend Kahlil sleeps with a camera called Thirdy, I cannot even bring myself to call some close friends by name to their face.

 

Names for me are both convenient and frightening. A name singles out your pet askal from a hundred other dogs on the street. It distinguishes one fish from another; if they once all looked alike to you, knowing their names makes it easier to remember which one’s better for kilaw, which one’s good for sugba. It certainly helps in finding your kid at school, or visiting a sick relative at the hospital. Names keep conversations from getting confusing, as in THAT guy and THIS guy and THAT other guy.

 

Names are the official bridge from being strangers to friends. You may smile at a person every day, but until you exchange names, you will forever be to each other “that girl who smiles at me every day”. Once you know a person’s name, an ordinary word suddenly becomes a particular face, comes to mean a host of unique memories and feelings you associate with the person.

 

And this, I think, is what scares me about naming. Names define people and things, define their character; in naming, you declare to the world what these people and things mean to you. Calling a person by the name he calls himself means accepting all of him as he is, making him your own, a permanent part of your vocabulary and experience. Assigning him another name (“huggabunch”, for example) won’t make it any different: we become responsible for what we name. We cannot help but have a relationship with the named, cannot ignore the individual who soon becomes more and more unique in our eyes.

 

There is vulnerability in naming, but also in being named. By giving your name or letting yourself be named, you allow the namer to define who you are. My mother has four or five names from different stages of her life, given by various people. Just before she turned 40 and after 22 years of using a nickname her sister gave, she switched back to the childhood name given by her father.

 

MY name has always been awkward for me. When I was in college, a priest even told my mother, “You should change her name. It’s confusing.” It’s hard enough making people understand it (getting them to spell it right is another hurdle) without me being unsure about how to pronounce it. I think I only finally decided for myself how my name should be spoken when I was 17. Still I hesitate even now.

 

And unlike my brothers, who had nicknames even before they were born, I never got one from my parents until I was in high school. I still give my full name when people ask for my nickname. It’s interesting for me to see if they’ll eventually slip into “Jen” or “Neen” or any of the ten variations those two have evolved into. Some people still use the full “Jeneen”, no matter how long they’ve known me. That’s interesting for me, too. I believe how people call me reveal how they see me.

 

Maybe it’s my own uncertainty about what to call myself that makes me resist defining the things and people I love. By giving them names, they will be truly mine; they and the rest of the world will know it. And losing them might break my heart. But perhaps it is time to find the courage to name. Strange though the syllables feel in my mouth, it will be better to have named and lost, than to forever lose all that matters to anonymity.