names
...with The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, by James Hillman
My full name has always been foreign, as much to me as anyone else who knows me.
We just don’t use it.
My family and friends call me, “S’phume,” a meaningless shortening of my eleven-letter name. That’s if they don’t call me by my slew of nicknames given fondly by my grandparents and family friends.
When people who don’t speak isiZulu (my mother-tongue and the origin of my name) struggle to pronounce it, it’s unbearable. Not embarrassing or annoying or offensive…just unbearable.
I want them to stop stumbling. I feel like they also want to stop. I feel like they are inconvenienced but want so badly not to be.
High school.
I acquire a name. It sounds familiar enough to my full name though it really has nothing to do with it at all.
“Pumi.”
It is used fondly by my new English and Afrikaans-speaking friends who don’t even bother to try pronouncing or remembering my full name.
I’m not uncomfortable with it because truly, I’ve got bigger issues to be uncomfortable about than racial politics.
Racial what?
I’m not bothered by my new name, in fact I’m elated that my new school mates care enough to give me a name. I’m trying to fit in, pretending like I’ve always known everyone.
You see, I’ve landed in this school because I did exceptionally well in my junior school and while I should’ve gone to another high school, I’m here at this much better one. One of the best in the region. I’m friendless, and desperate to befriend my high-society school mates who have all known each other since they were in grade 1.
The stakes are high, I can’t afford squabbles over my long name. I want to get past this and all the other barriers: class, competence, experience and race.
I don’t gravitate to the isiZulu-speaking kids, my own people. All my friends are white, English and Afrikaans-speakers. Believe it or not, I’m trying to fit in and not stick out. But I’m always the only brown face in a veld of white faces.
My choice.
Disorienting.
Long story.
Inklings of my interest in language and racial discourse surface timidly, sometimes, when I wonder why my friends don’t spell “Pumi” with an “h” like “Phumi” as it is correctly written in isiZulu. I write my own language proficiently, like the native speaker that I am, yet I too, write my new name as “Pumi.”
It’s a new name, neither isiZulu nor English.
Like me, fitting in neither the isiZulu nor English camps.
It doesn’t feel like I’m split in two though. This linguistic, and cultural tug-of-war doesn’t feel like that at all. It just feels like existing in different forms or shapes.
“Pumi” is not “Siphumelele.”
They each feel right at the appropriate times, an appropriateness measured with a visceral plumb line. I don’t mind the moulding and shape-shifting that takes place as I traverse back and forth.
But culture says I should mind. And culture starts to shout at me in university.
In university, my white friends compliment me when I keep my hair in afro-form, without extension braids or wool.
My lecturers point me to artists that talk about identity, blackness and femaleness in their work.
They all talk about “being allowed to be ourselves” and not assimilate as black people in “white spaces.”
I haven’t been me?
No, it seems I haven’t. A scandal erupts about black girls being forced to braid their hair in order to look “neat” in a neighbouring high school and we are all enraged on their behalf.
They should be allowed to be free with their hair. To not comb it if they feel like it or do whatever they choose with it…the white girls have a choice, so why not them?
I haven’t had a choice?
I have been braiding my hair in box-braids and cornrows and other “natural” hairstyles when I want to feel pretty or consolidate my hair. For me, keeping an open afro is laborious because I have to wake up earlier in the mornings... but now I’m told I’ve been relinquishing my choices.
I should be keeping my hair untouched and unmediated. I should be free.
Don’t I want to be free?
Of course I want to be free.
But are these my terms?
Who cares, I’m being set free right now. So, let me be free already.
I remain on the fence about the hair thing. I dabble in braids, I dabble in afro. At some point I shave my head bald, to resounding acclamation!
Secretly in pain for my hair to grow back.
But I do follow through with the name thing.
By the second semester of my first year in university, I now comprehend it this way:
My childhood white friends are unconscious racists who didn’t bother to pronounce my name because we were all in a predominantly white space that didn’t bother about the nuances of blackness including pronouncing and remembering the longer African-language names. As a holder of one such name, I deserve better.
I deserve to be called by my full name, with the right tonal inflections. And I deserve better, non-racist friends.
I strive to make these two desires a reality, and I’m successful.
Not easily, though.
On average, I befriend only 10% of all the people I meet, white, black, speakers and non-speakers of African-languages. I come to equate being valued with being called by my full name.
Those who care about me are clearly the ones who call me “Siphumelele” and don’t forget it when they see me in a place out of context, say for example choir friends that remember my name outside of the choir room.
Those who don’t remember my name or insist on nicknames, African-language speakers mostly, who often revert to “S’phume” in supposed fondness, I conclude can’t be my friends. Fellow black brothers and sisters? Please.
In my triune circle of friends, I am politically correct and I am lauded.
Then I read Chapter 8: Disguise, of The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996 by James Hillman.
And he takes me back to “Pumi” whom I have successfully erased at this point, standing in full “Siphumelele,” secretly buckling under the weight of this fullness.
Hillman, in The Soul’s Code, is talking about the intentionality of Life, and how what we came “here” to do influences the subtle and enormous twists and turns that our lives take.
In said Chapter 8, Hillman delves into what he proposes to be the “separateness” of the human being, and the thing that they are here to do, especially if that thing involves unparalleled talent or revolutionary creativity. Calling the animating force of this brilliance one’s “daimon” or “genius,” he says it can often be found disguised or hiding behind a name or nickname.
Kids have nicknames. So do ball players, jazz musicians, mobsters, and gang members. Is nicknaming a subtle recognition of the doppelgänger, a mode of remembering that it is Fats who sits at the keyboard and Dizzy who blows the horn, not Mr. Waller and Mr. Gillespie, who tie their shoes and eat their breakfasts (Hillman 1996)?
I’m reminded of how a similar understanding pervades our conception of an “alter ego” in popular culture. Think Beyoncè and “Sasha Fierce.” A wide and subtle lesson on the inhibition of a mere human, by an extraordinary force.
The nickname contains some inner truth that may stick through life and be perceived before the genius shows in larger style (Hillman 1996).
In my own isiZulu culture, I find a similar understating of this need to seperate the person you are when you’re “on” as we now say, from the person you are when you’re “not on,” not striving to put your best foot forward. Growing up, most people had the name they were called by at home, and then another name referred to as their “school name.”
In earlier generations, the school name would often be an English, Christian name but by my generation, the school name would also be an isiZulu name just as the name used by family and friends. There was still this felt necessity for a separation between what you are called when you’re doing what you do best, out of your “normal,” and what you are called when you are just being, amongst those who are intimately familiar with you.
Could “Siphumelele” and “Pumi” be “on” and “off,” respectively, for me? School name and home name?
This feels like a good size.
In one, inconsequential, though retrospectively significant squabble with two of my white friends in high school…I remember being mad at them for not knowing that my “real” name was “Siphumelele” and not “Pumi.”
I didn’t say this part out loud but I was also sad that, if my name was on some list, say people who made it into the school play or some other achievement, my friends wouldn’t know that “Siphumelele” was actually me, “Pumi.”
I wanted them to know the name of my genius so they would be able to recognise it in action. And in turn, recognise “Pumi.”
But, mistakenly, I was trying to conflate “Siphumelele” with “Pumi:” the perhaps greater part of me that wanted nothing of normality…with the part of me that was ordinary and perfectly content in normalcy.
[Hillman’s] feeling interpretation likes to understand the nickname as a way of bringing the star down to human dimension, so that we can relate and not be overawed by genius (Hillman 1996).
Further asserting the “two-ness” (I shy away from the word ‘duality’) of our being; how we have the version of us that does amazing things and the version of us that just is, and is common around friends and family, Hillman says,
The other side is that you can’t be both mortal and an immortal star. You need two names because they reflect the two persons, an inherent duplicity operating between the acorn and its bearer (Hillman 1996).
What if we were containers?
Carrying the thing that people admire in us instead of being it.
If we’re just carrying the thing, but are not actually it: if the thing contained and the container are separate…not only are we free from shame or embarrassment if we don’t reach certain prescribed goals, we’re also free from the pride and contempt that might arise from thinking we’re better than others when we do succeed at great things.
Does this sound like another tune of the “detachment” song?
Maybe it is.
Right now for me though, it sounds like freedom.
Because to be honest, I’m tired of getting offended on cue. I’m tired of being annoyed with people who can’t pronounce my full name or having to turn up my nose at nicknames that come from warm and inviting smiles.
I’m tired of escalating small exchanges to uphold the invisible chalice of political correctness.
It has caused me suffering, and I’m not interested in pain with no meaning. That, after all, is suffering.
When someone calls me “Pumi,” it doesn’t diminish “Siphumelele.” When I respond to the former, I’m not disavowing the latter.
I am both.
And all the space in-between.
I like this space, I like the breathing room.
So, what are your names friend? Where do they come up, what do they mean…see all the versions of you.
You are not fragmented, just varied.
It’s all you.
Yours,
Siphumelele (I am very “on” right now if you were wondering)
P.S.
I am also “Phumi” or “Pumi” or “S’phume” in different occasions.