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ARTWORK: Karolina Kocimska
Renaming children with their own dialectics, using our practices, was a process of re-humanisation that built back the cultural infrastructures lost to colonial violence. Culture alone was not the only revolutionary force. In the face of colonisation, the existence of these nations was not just proved by culture, but by people’s resistance against occupation. So naming their children, speaking the names of their fathers, put colonialism to shame by exhibiting cultural treasures right under the nose of the empire.
becomes Evans, Goldsmith becomes Smith or Gold, and Avakian becomes King.” This is an intrinsic part of the immigrant experience. Changing our names, and shortening them, is a part of survival. Changing the very thing that uniquely defines you, to live a life that is convenient for the white man. For me, it feels like a tax that we cannot escape. Thank you for letting us be here, we will keep our heads down. I will smile every time you call me a name that is not mine, as you diminish the forces of history that secured my very being today.
Ratnayake Mudiyanselage Ranasinghe was my grandfather’s name. He chose to give his given name as a surname to his children. Ranasinghe, meaning an unfaced warrior in the face of battle. I don’t know much about the man he was, but I know he lived up to the name he gave me. A staunch anti-colonialist and active member of resistance politics, he devoted his life to unionism and public healthcare. 518 years of colonisation in Sri Lanka, and his name survived his ancestors and it survived him.
It is a tax for existence in a country that was never intended to be yours. A way to show that you know how to keep your distance and stay in your place. The price paid is not just that of the plane ticket, our very being here is at the expense of our eternal ties to our cultures. So, it is no surprise when Baldwin says “at the midnight hour, the lost identity aches.”
But it won’t survive his descendants. Because in a new country, we were made to feel that his name was a burden. Blank stares during roll call. Long glares, and the pre-emptive “Oh I’m going to get this wrong,” made us feel like an inconvenience. So, on a Wednesday evening in a Perth government bureau, it cost us $50 to change our name. Only now do I realise it cost me much more. Because of course the way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost forever. James Baldwin explained this phenomenon best: “They come through Ellis Island, where Giorgio becomes Joe, Pappavasiliu becomes Palmer, Evangelos
As a child of diaspora and an immigrant, it is easy to let the domineering culture convince you the most important contract is between yourself and your loyalty to this country. That you must renew this allegiance every day. I no longer believe this. The most important bond is between yourself and your community. But I don’t know how any relationship with that community can be formed if it refuses to speak your name as you, your parents and your language intend it. Immigrants and people of colour in this country, live lives that are “up-rooted, re-rooted and rootless.” Our names remain portals to motherlands that some of us never got to know. So, the onus is on all of us, because each time we speak a name correctly, we make more of an effort, we deal a blow to the imperial flags that still fly in the collective unconscious.
