An exercise I have invented and used many times on my courses is to spend the first session thinking about names. Our own names – and how we feel about them. The task is simple. First write down some thoughts on your name. I introduce this by saying, for example ,
“My name ‘Tonya’, is spelt with a ‘y’, not an ‘i’ and an ‘o’, not and ‘a’. It makes a difference to me if you spell it wrongly. It is not my name. Even though my father spelt it with an ‘i’ on my birth certificate. Apparently, my mum and dad were reading Dr Zhivago when they met. I am named after the Geraldine Chapman character in the film. This means that my husband is going to run off with Julie Christie but I prefer my name to Lara.”
Then I’ll add something about my surname ‘Blowers’ – and how it has been the source of many a humiliating nickname for my siblings and I, and how I am grateful now to be living in Italy where instead it is a rather interesting name, quite exotic-sounding, instead of plain rude and smirk-inducing.
Then people will tell us what they want to about their own names.
This covers two or three bases.
First, the rather awkward getting-to-know-you round the circle kind of hesitant who am I? business that none of us enjoys very much – and in any case, very soon after we have all forgotten everything that was said and who said it.
Second, it really does help you remember people’s names because such memorable information is attached to them.
Third, it encourages people to talk about themselves in a deep, contextual way, without having to say in the more stilted way, ‘I’m from Chad, I speak French, I have two daughters’. Instead, this enables you to say “My name —- means ‘born after twins’ but I wasn’t born after twins – my grandmother was, and when I was born, they said I was like my grandmother. And in my village, my tribe, we speak a language that is only in my tribe – there are 152 languages in my country. Each village has its own language.” or else to say “—-” is the name I tell people I’m called here. “——” is my real name in Russian – but it is completely different and in a different script. So I don’t mind if people say it wrongly because it has nothing to do with my name. I like it. I get a good idea of the person I am talking to, depending on the questions people have about my name.”
After some discussion, we will then go into a free write. (I will be putting up another post shortly describing what free writing is, but essentially it’s writing with no holes barred – letting go. Writing what comes into your head without worrying about grammar, spelling, punctuation, content. It’s turning off all the voices in your head – your mother’s, boyfriend’s, your own, that tell you ‘you can’t say that!’ Importantly, it’s a timed exercise. We start at 5 minutes – which can feel like a surprisingly long time when you’re not allowed to pause for thought.) The free write needs a starting point, a theme, an anchor phrase. For today, the phrase is …”His name was…” Off we go, five minutes starting from now..
What gets written might be terrible, boring, dull, rubbish (cross out as you see fit) but the exercise lubricates your writing hand, frees your mind of junk, actually gives you the pleasure of realising you can write, because you have just written! and gets you in a very good place to knuckle down to some more (real?) writing. Sometimes (surprisingly often actually) it can throw up some real gems (a riff on Woolf’s wonderful phrase “diamonds in the dust heap”). In our evening session, one student found that the very first line and the last line she wrote made the beginning of a short story. If you’re reading this Katrina, let us know how you got on…
Sometimes, I add to the melange of thoughtfulness by reading out some relevant passages from novels, or poems, or autobiographies, or from blogs, adverts, whatever comes to mind when I’m preparing my class. This week I found these wonderful passages:
From Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street
‘My Name’
In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A Muddy colour. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, sounds like sobbing.
It was my great-grandfather’s name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse – which is supposed to be bad luck if you’re born female – but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like their women strong.
My great-grandmother. I would’ve liked to have known her, a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That’s the way he did it.
And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.
At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tim and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister’s name – Magdalena – which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza.
I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.
Sandra Cisneros, The House On Mango Street (1984) New York: Random House, 1991, pp. 10-11
From Janet Frame’s autobiography ‘To The Is-Land’
There were the ancestors, then, given as mythical possessions – your great-grandmother, your great-grandfather, did this, was this, lived and died there and there – and the living parents, accumulating memories we had not shared. Then on 15 December 1920, a daughter, Myrtle was born, and on 20 April 1922, a son, Robert, or Bruddie; in 1923 another son, stillborn, unnamed, was buried; and on 28 August 1924, I was born, named Janet Paterson Frame, with ready-made parents and a sister and a brother who had already begun their store of experience, inaccessible to me except through their language and the record, always slightly different, of our mother and father, and as each member of the family was born, each, in a sense, with memories on loan, began to supply the individual furnishings of each Was-Land, each Is-Land, and the hopes and dreams of the Future.
[...]
I was delivered by Dr Emily Seideberg McKinnon at St Helens Hospital, Dunedin, where I was known as ‘the baby who was always hungry.’ I had a twin, which did not develop beyond a few weeks. Twins were hereditary in Mother’s family, and she would often quote the poem written by (I think) her grandmother, whose two sets of twins died in infancy: ‘Four little locks of gold.’ Mother’s memory of my birth alwys had two repeated references – her boast that I was delivered by the first woman medical graduate in New Zealand and her pride in the abundance of milk that enabled her to feed myself and other babies.
‘My milk was drawn off,’ she’d say, making a liberal giving motion toward and away from her ‘titties,’ in one of her many gestures that we, the ancestors ever alert beside us, assigned to the ‘French’ side of the family. With similar drama mother spoke of Dr Emily Seideberg McKinnon, which must have impressed me even during my first few days of being, for her lifelong repetition of names important to her – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Pember Reeves (The Passing of the Forest), Michael Joseph Savage – never failed to awaken a sense of magic.
Janet Frame, To The Is-Land (1982). London: HarperCollins, 1993, pp. 13-14
From Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
[N.B. the inscription at the beginning of the novel reads:
The fathers may soar
And the children may know their names ]
Macon Dead never knew how it came about – how his only son acquired the nickname that stuck in spite of his own refusal to use it or acknowledge it. It was a matter that concerned him a good deal, for the giving of names in his family was always surrounded by what he believed to be monumental foolishness. No one mentioned to him the incident out of which the nickname grew because he was a difficult man to approach – a hard man, with a manner so cool it dscouraged casual or spontanous conversation. Only Freddie the janitor took liberties with Macon Dead, liberties he purchased with the services he rendered, and Freddie was the last person on earth to tell him. So Macon Dead neither heard of nor visualized Ruth’s sudden terror, her awkward jump from the rocking chair, the boy’s fall broken by the tiny footstool, or Freddie’s amused, admiring summation of the situation.
Without knowing any of the details, however, he guessed, with the accuracy of a mind sharpened by hatred, that the name he heard schoolchildren call his son, the name he overheard the ragman use when he paid the boy three cents for a bundle of old clothes – he guessed that this name was not clean. Milkman. It certainly didn’t sound like the honest job of a dairyman, or bring to his mind cold bright cans standing on the back porch, glittering like captains on guard. It sounded dirty, intimate, and hot. He knew that wherever the name came from, it had something to do with his wife and was, like the emotion he always felt when thinking of her, coated with disgust.
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977) London: Pan Books, 1989, pp.15-16
Then I’ll set some optional homework.
Homework for this session was to:
a) write for (at least) 5 minutes everyday. Any time, any place, any topic (only not work-related). If you need a focus, write a diary entry everyday, or take a word or phrase from a newspaper and freewrite from that. You’ll think this is an easy task. But it’s not. You’ll be surprised how many of you don’t manage it. Every day. Clearly it’s not finding the time that’s the problem (it’s only 5 minutes).
and/or
b) use today’s session as the starting point for some writing. Write a piece about ‘My name’ or ‘His name was..’ – or anything you like that has come to you from this writing practice.
c) see if you can find/ remember passages from novels/poems/autobiographies/wherever, that focus on names. Bring this to the next session/ e-mail it to the group.
And that’s it. One session down.
Let’s see what happens next week…
