antipopper

With the various young Sudanese, Somalian and Liberian people who come in to use the multimedia access centre I supervise, conversations like this are becoming more frequent:

Me: Hey, I’m Ben. What’s your name?

Dude: Daddy Boy.

Me: Hey, Daddy Boy. Have you got another name you use for like, more official stuff, so we can send mail to your house?

Daddy Boy: No.

Me: Cool. Anyway, if you want, just write down your name and contact details on this contact list…

Daddy Boy writes “D-A-D-D-Y-B-O-Y”…

Me: Thanks.

I guess there might be something profound to say here about cultures (and subcultures) of naming, but my first thought is that it’s fucking cool we’re going to be sending physical mail that’s officially addressed to people like “DMC” and “Daddy Boy”. Take that, officious database fields! This claiming of the vernacular name is like a weird reversal of the situation where migrants, especially children, are unofficially but forcibly renamed by white authority figures, like immigration officials or teachers who can’t be bothered learning how to pronounce their names… after which the new names actually end up sticking. A good proportion of my uncles- and aunts-in-law were named this way. “Nayif? I can’t fucking say that shit. You’re called ‘Nick’ now, all right?” (In contrast, heaps of my own blood relatives were born as subaltern subjects of the British Empire, and thus “luckily” already had English names.)

The irony is that the names that guys like Daddy Boy have claimed for themselves are possibly “easier” to pronounce by whitey teachers, but as “street” names, they’re probably being institutionally suppressed in favour of the relatively “unpronounceable” names their parents gave them…

[ tags: names, naming, race ]