Don’t Be Silly, Mister, Names Do Matter!

Let's not be stolidly, and stupidly, sesquipedal(ian) about the meaning and significance of names or nomenclature, as the process of naming is technically designated. And talking about names, perhaps, I am the best qualified in this forum to speak to this topic in the context of culture, having also earned not two, but three undergraduate degrees from the City College of New York (summa cum laude) in English, Communications and global African Studies, as well as master's and doctoral degrees in African and African-American Literature, History and Culture from Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Interestingly, though, it is in the disciplines of English and Journalism that I have most emphatically announced my presence to the global community. Needless to say, anybody who facilely attempts to trivialize both the psychical and psychological impact of names ought to be promptly ostracized from the civilized community of global humanity! And on the latter score, let me hasten to add that one of the maiden assignments that I give my College Composition students every semester, and have been doing for the last 11 years, and still counting, is: “What is the symbolic, cultural and political significance of names? And what does your own name mean to you? Discuss.”

And so, when any intellectual toddler barges in and rudely decides to hog the precious Ghanaweb.com cyber space, in order to slobber and volley unpardonable drivel about the supposedly patent insignificance of names, knowing what we know in these United States of America and being as immutably Black as most of us are, at least in this august forum, that unfortunate SOB is likely to raise the totality of my existential, cultural and intellectual temperature by hundreds of thousands of degrees.

Intriguingly, even as I write this mini-essay (theme, that is), in the middle of a dinner of cooked ripe plantains and peanut-butter soup, with my TV set tuned in to CNN, the gravity of having a particular name, rather than another, could not be more inescapable. And on the latter score, of course, the unmistakable allusion is to the raging Democratic campaign on the lurid and outright invidious politics of identity. And for those of our readers who may not readily recall what I am alluding to, for the past several months, mainstream (or white) America has been exposed to the sort of boorish political spectacle that is almost invariably and routinely associated with saturnine and sanguinary places like Rwanda, Bosnia-Croatia, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan. And the afore-referenced spectacle has to do with some sneaky journalist with a sinister agenda having “serendipitously” discovered to his “horror” that, indeed, Senator Barack Obama, of the windy state of Illinois, and a historically unlikely Democratic Party frontrunner for President of the United States of America (that is until now), has, of all abominable names, the middle name of “Hussein.”

Indeed, what has even raised greater suspicion than all else is the fact of Mr. Obama deciding to keep his middle initial of “H,” even while decidedly not using the name as spelled in full. Intriguingly, even long before Mr. Obama's middle name was exposed to scorching and downright racist media scrutiny, the candidate's political opponents and detractors had resorted to riffing “Osama” (as in Bin Laden) onto his surname of “Obama.” Ironically, however, nobody seems to be interested in the equally ideological undertones of the name “Barack,” which is Mr. Obama's first name, obviously because “Barack” is also answered to by such prominent Jewish politicians as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak!

In essence, for those of us who are proud of our “autochthonous” identities, and who have been all too willing to carry them as significant narratives of our evolutionary and cultural histories, the significance of our names also inheres in the heavy burden which Western civilization, in particular, has cavalierly imposed on us. And so we deeply resent this nonsensical assay by some African water buffaloes with Western nominal masks, who have been comfortably shielded from the abject and criminal abuse (and exploitation) which those of us who have bravely borne the leaden heft of our African historical and phenotypical identities, lecturing the rest of us about the unproven political insignificance of human names. These cynics and hypocrites, it is significant to observe, invariably want to have it both ways. Recently, for instance, an American survey of names and employment opportunities, predictably, indicated that those of us with non-Western names are the least likely to be gainfully employed!

Indeed, it is highly likely that any Ghanaian who has a parentally conferred middle name but flatly refuses to use it – and here, I am not talking about “Edinhunu” or common-names like Kofi, Yaw and Kwame – might be suffering from a psychically mordant bout of inferiority complex. Even more peevish is the sophomoric assumption that Ghanaians sporting wholly English or European names could only be found in only one or two regions in the country. You see, the problem with these Little Boys presuming to be more intelligent than both their intellectual and cultural superiors has been for them to also presume themselves to uniquely possess an ex-cathedra edge on the subject of nominal/nomenclatural episteme.

Would Mr. Two-Undergraduate-Degrees-and-One-Master's, for instance, also claim to know about the entire composition or membership of my familial background? It is also interesting for Mr. Two-Undergraduate-Degrees to rightly tell his readers that: “Basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabber[sic] was born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor,” without also emphasizing the fact of such nominal change being the direct result of the advent and revolutionary success of the Black Power Movement (BPM), in much the same manner that Cassius Clay, through the revolutionary influence of Nation of Islam (NOI) cleric and scholar Malcolm X, became Muhammad Ali. Needless to say, for these “Black Muslims,” such renaming ritual from Euro-American and slavocolonial to Islamic was synonymous with continental African self-rediscovery, notwithstanding the fact that historically speaking, Islam is no more indigenous to the African than is Christianity.

In our own Ghanaian society, of whose indescribably ruthless dictator Mr. Two-Degrees and “My Beloved Niece” (actually, I would rather that she were my nemesis, knowing what I have now come to know about her) are the out-riding apologists, three Supreme Court justices were brutally assassinated on June 30, 1982, primarily because these slain judges bore Akan names and could not speak the sacred language of our former Divine Dictator (a.k.a. Junior Jesus). We know the preceding to be incontrovertible because another judge in the company of the three slain judges, who could both speak the sacred language of Junior Jesus, and whose name belonged to the same language, was promptly let go as soon as these cultural markers became evident. That judge's name was Mr. Adzovie, and his son was my classmate, the youngest of my high school classmates, to be certain.

Then again, isn't it rather unforgivably criminal for somebody who routinely carries a royal Akan name in Ghanaweb.com cyberspace to make an ironic avocation of ceaselessly attacking Akans for merely being ourselves (Ms. AKANOCRACY?) In the case of distinguished African-American clerics like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, such well-measured anti-white tirades are perfectly understandable; after all, Rev. Wright's name was forcibly imposed on his ancestors. In the case of Ms. AKANOCRACY, however, no such imposition ever occurred; which makes those of us who pride ourselves in the delightful burden of our ethnicity wonder whether, indeed, Ms. AKANOCRACY is not simply sporting an Akan, unofficial, name (for we can rest assured that her Ghanaweb.com name is not what appears in her Ghanaian or British passport) in order to thumb her SACRED nose at us?

Not long ago, my primary physician, an Iranian-born general practitioner called Dr. Mansoor Berookhim, politely asked why I hadn't changed my name from “Kovame” to something more mainstream like “Williams,” in view of the blistering social and occupational discrimination routinely perpetrated against “traditional” Africans in America. I guffawed almost unstoppably, knowing how Dr. Berookhim thought and felt about the significance of his own name. At the end of it all, I sighed dramatically and asked, in turn, “Dr. B, do you know somebody at the United Nations called Kofi Annan?” He promptly nodded, “Oh, Yes! Are you related?” I did not tell him that Mr. Annan and I share the same birthday, a little over twenty years apart. Instead, I added: “See how successful he has become without changing his name?” The man tilted his head down slightly over his chest, just as I triumphantly took my leave.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 13 books, including “Abe: Reflections on Love” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].