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“Give your daughters difficult names.
Names that command the full use of the tongue.
My name makes you want to tell me the truth.
My name does not allow me to trust anyone
who cannot pronounce it right.”
— Warsan Shire
Truer words have never been spoken than these by the award-winning British writer, poet, editor, and teacher, Warsan Shire, who was born to Somali parents in Kenya.
Unfortunately, I had yet to learn about Warsan and her battle cry when I was wrestling with the impossible responsibility of naming my first daughter. I wanted her name to connect to the red earth, ancestral legacy, communal connectivity and rhythm of her African father’s heritage. At the same time, since she would spend her formative years in the United States, I didn’t want to burden her with the self-esteem-bruising load of Americans’ lazy tongues and bigoted hearts.
I wrestled with the decision to the point where my sweet girl didn’t have an official name — other than her playful in-utero name, Waffles — until three days after she was born. I finally marshaled the courage and embraced Warsan’s motherly mandate to give my daughter a difficult name, one with culture and melody.
Thankfully, my daughter will come of age in an era of powerful Black women role models with difficult names who are destined to transform the U.S. and the world as we know it.
For the past two years, we’ve all been Debo’d by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly every element of life has been disrupted in some form — good and overdue, bad, and devastatingly ugly. When political and public health leaders threw down the gauntlet to beat this virus at its molecular level, who came to our rescue? Dr. Kizzmekia Shanta Corbett.
Stop.
Allow that “Ki” to enter your palette, followed by that double “zz” zizing between your upper and lower teeth; feel your cheeks widen into a smile as you utter “me,” ending with the melodic “kia.” Kizzmekia! And don’t get me started on Shanta!
If you don’t know, you need to know that Dr. Corbett is a research fellow and scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccines & Immunopathogenesis Team at the National Institutes of Health, and the inventor of the Moderna vaccine. Dr. Kizzmekia is the glowing embodiment of Warsan’s visionary admonishment. Her name “commands the full use of the tongue” and mouth, and you bet’ not tell her any mistruths prompted by the politicization of vaccines.
This past week, President Joe Biden nominated the Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. She is a long-time public defender, former Vice Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission and U.S. Court of Appeals jurist. Now, on its own, Ketanji, with that commanding Ke and indulgent n and j bumping alongside each other, is a name dripping with cultural pride and self-possession. Fitting for her birth year of 1970, Ketanji is reminiscent of the late-1960-70s Black pride era where Black people adopted names that reclaimed our African culture after the futile, decades-long effort to assimilate into and be accepted by mainstream American culture.
“Ketanji Brown” was already entrusted with making the potato salad for the cookout, but she went and upped the ante. Judge Ketanji married surgeon Patrick G. Jackson, picking up a name that ripples throughout Chocolate Cities across America. Ketanji Brown Jackson is a bonafide hot-sauce-in-my-bag, Blackfisted-Afropick, reclaiming-my-time name trifecta power punch! And once confirmed, Judge Brown Jackson, with her dynamic name, decorated career and luxurious sisterlocks will ascend to the highest bench in the land.
At a critical time when the U.S. desperately needs to excise the demons from the (in)justice system, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will walk and lead within the corridors of power, bringing the history, memory and aspiration of her people with her.
Our Colorful Names
I, for one, revel in the innovative and even flippant ways we name our children. Give me a “Lesha” or “Malika” over a Sarah or Lauren any day of the week, and twice on Black Jesus Sunday! And the name, Kiana? Please. Kianas can’t be put in a box. For one, the name can be spelled in infinitely different ways: the (arguably) standard Kiana, Keyonah (with that silent yet powerful “h”), Keeona, Kieona and, let’s not forget the undefeated heavyweight champion, Qiuana! Come through!
Encouragingly, various examples of naming self-determination and reclamation are coming to the forefront. I was inspired and tickled by the Black mama who named her son De’Coldest, imbuing within him the expectation and confidence to ascend to unimaginable heights. I felt energized and proud when the talented British actor Thandiwe Newton, demanded that respect and a “w” be put on her name to reconnect to its Zulu origins. Football players Odafe Oweh and Bobby Okereke tackled ignorance and affirmed cultural pride by invoking their cultural name and requiring correct pronunciation, respectively.
Historic Cultural Naming
Black folks’ naming conventions have always been multifaceted. The African cultures from which we descend have and continue to use names to preserve historic events, links to loved ones who have passed on, mark conditions surrounding birth, or highlight and cultivate specific attributes within the named. In his brilliant and provocative 2008 book Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, Michael Eric Dyson deep dives into our history of naming, pre-, during and post-enslavement, highlighting the wells of meaning, cultural continuity and resistance. During enslavement, our ancestors continued to utilize African names when out of earshot of enslavers, despite enslavers’ assigning them names connected to animals or figures that suggested stupidity and servitude.
Post-enslavement, our African ancestors affirmed their newfound liberation with “resistive nomenclature,” adopting surnames like “Freeman, Newman and Liberty.” They also borrowed from the “flair and creativity” of African cultural naming by naming children “Hershey Bar, Listerine and Creamola.”
In 1930, Rockingham county of North Carolina was known for “highly fantastical names” like, “Agenora, Audrivalus, Earvila, Eldeese … Margorilla, Roanza and Venton Orlaydo.” Overall, Dyson illustrates that newly freed Africans “fought back with a homespun ingenuity that pitted our imaginations against the ghastly terrors of chattel slavery. And we took back our dignity, or at least our self-determination, one syllable at a time.”
Sadly, consistent with the U.S.’s infamous brand, systemic racism and implicit bias vilifies our exercise of freedom to define ourselves for ourselves through naming. Discrimination is rampant. Studies have shown that mortgage lenders and HR managers alike reject Black candidates with cultural or inventive names, even when their credentials match or exceed applicants with traditional white-sounding names. Unfortunately, many African-Americans also have internalized the notion that names that cannot be easily pronounced or written with minimal letters on a resume or masthead are somehow “ghetto” or “low class.” The critically acclaimed show Black-ish delved into these complexities and the impulse to choose a “conventional” name when Dre desired to name his son Devante to honor his heritage and evoke the love held for his Compton brothers who shared the moniker. That episode got me! We all have love for the Devontes (Devantes or DeVeonte, my childhood friend) in our lives.
It’s a New Day
Kizzmekia and Ketanji offer a resounding “No more!” to the white supremacy and internalized racism that would have us relinquish our God-given right to perform the basic act of naming ourselves. Along with myriad other mental shackles, we must throw off respectability and give our babies difficult names.
Dr. Kizzmekia and Judge Ketanji embody our ancestors’ visions for self-determination and freedom. Because of them, and the fearlessness and prescience of the people who named them, my daughter will be inspired to proudly carry her name. And she will know that the domains of scientific innovation, public health intervention, law, authority and justice are her birthright, not despite of but because of her meaningful name. And she can walk into that destiny with her culturally-rooted name, resplendently “difficult,” daring and divine.
