The Names They Gave Me

A few days ago I came across an article by Arab-American writer, Tasbeeh Herwees called The Names They Gave Me. I found it particularly interesting since it was related to the Language and Identity part of our course. Further, it was something that I was very familiar with and I found the article to be very well written.

In her article, the author talks about how she grew up in the United States with an Arabic name. Her mother felt very strongly about her keeping her real name instead of adopting an American nickname. This is followed by many awkward encounters with teachers who are incapable of pronouncing her Arabic name, leading her to feel as though she was a burden. She compares this to a tribe who did not have a name for the color blue, leading her to the conclusion that "It does not exist because it has no name". This story is one that is probably shared by most children with names that are native to their home country living in the United States.

However, I realized that this is a story that is not only related to children growing up in western countries. Since third grade, I have attended international schools here in the U.A.E, and I have noticed that this is also a common theme for us. Children coming from countries all around their names quickly accustom themselves to a twisted form of their names. Even as an Arab living in Arab country, I have realized that Arab names are rarely pronounced in the correct way at school. After a few years, we begin to introduce ourselves in the same way our western teachers and friends said our names. To me, that seems like a destruction of our identity. And in a way, that sounds hypocritical to me, because we do have the power to correct those who mispronounce our names. However it was exhausting to correct them time and time again, to watch them struggle with the letters and sounds. In order for us to embrace our differences and collectively strengthen our languages, we should make the effort to pronounce names correctly. Herwees describes the time her math teacher works to correctly pronounce her name as a moment which made her feel as though her "name was a crown". And that should be the case with all names, in order to strengthen them as individuals and keep their identity. 

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Summer Blog Post

A few days ago I returned from my trip to Italy with my family, we went to a city that I had wanted to visit for a long time, Milan. In the few days building up to my trip, I spent my time frantically planning and researching. I wanted to fit as many things into our trip as possible, a typical habit of mine. But for some reason, I forgot a major detail: language. I am fluent in English and Arabic, and I can speak a little bit of French; but I knew nothing of Italian. I remembered this while I was at the airport, with a few minutes to board and barely had time to try and look up a few common phrases which I could use. Italian was not a language I was familiar with at all, and when I arrived at Milan Malpensa, I knew two words, "grazie" and "ciao". 

The city was beautiful, it really was. On the first day we visited the nearby Lake Como, which was a beautiful lake surrounded by several small towns. Communication in those towns proved impossible very quickly, they were very small towns with not many residents and English was not commonly spoken. Still, since it was a tourist area, I didn't understand the full extent of this language barrier until I got to Milan. Although it was the financial capital of Italy, many people in the city did not speak English, especially in the smaller stores. However, we did get by, and we were able to have full meals in restaurants who had no English speakers. 

This brought my attention to two things. The first was our ability to communicate, two groups speaking completely different languages were able to somehow understand each other. And in a world where "broken English" is deemed unprofessional or unacademic, that seemed like an amazing thing. That leads me to the second thing, that despite that they were not able to speak English, they were all working and doing perfectly fine. Speaking English wasn't a requirement for them, and not having this ability certainly didn't make them any less successful. This meant that anyone who wanted to work or live in Italy, would have to learn Italian. And this creates a sense of identity for the country which I believe is a huge advantage for them. It allows them to hold on to their culture, history and traditions, which strengthens them as a nation. Furthermore, it encourages more people to learn their language in order to benefit from what Italy has to offer, and this makes the language stronger and more popular. I felt this within my first few minutes in the airport, where most signs had large Italian labels followed by smaller, less obvious English translations. I quickly learned that "uscita" was exit, and although that wasn't very helpful in my upcoming interactions with natives that didn't speak English, it just showed how important the Italian language was for its people. 

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