MY NAME IS…

Gaël Samuel Kabatantshi.

A mouthful, ain’t it? But that’s my name.

Now that we’re introduced, I’ll tell you something about myself. 

Firstly, I’ll have you know that I try not to be a peddler of ‘pro-tips’ and how-to’s when it comes to living life. I find these trite and unhelpful. I live, then I report on my experiences, hoping you either find some solace in our commonality or some caution in my tale.

Secondly, I guess I should also admit that I am ashamed of my name. Or at least I was.

From an early age I was teased by children who, unfortunately, found in my name, the perfect moniker for ridicule.

Teba means to spoil in chiluba, or to be rotten. Chiluba is my mother tongue, the language of my mother’s ancestors; the Bantu people of the Congo.

So, in the Mu(teba) of my name, the witty and cruel among my peers found a common thing to unite them. Calling meFufu a teba. Which means fufu(a traditional African dish), that is spoiled.

If you’ve never had the misfortune of smelling spoiled fufu, count yourself very lucky. It is not an experience I would wish on the most aromatically adventurous soul. That was my childhood nickname. Fufu a teba.

I try to start most of my stories with personal anecdotes for two reasons:

One, it helps expel some demons. And two, it is my firm belief that establishing context is the most important part of telling a story.

So now that I’ve have done both, let’s get into why I, as a native born African, now dashed American, grew to hate my name.

And why I now love it. And, in true, genuine American fashion, hate yours instead.

PART 1: KIDS FUCKING SUCK

It starts, as it almost always does, with childhood trauma.

And since I’ve already bared my soul about mine, I feel I don’t need to get into the nitty gritty details of where the shame from my name comes from.

It got no better when I landed, “fresh off the boat” as they say, on American soil for the first time.

Never mind that nothing could dampen the excitement of seeing my mother again, who had made the trip two years prior, or the sheer novelty of going from third world to first world at such a young and impressionable age.

No, never mind all of that. What I had just done- what my parents had just done, was take us from the familiar to the wholly unfamiliar. A entirely different set of rules and expectations awaited us now. And we had no clue, so trial by error it had to be.

As you’d expect, things got spicy when I started public school here in America. I was a skinny African kid who knew no English, had a funny name, an accent, and none of the cultural, idiomatic, and colloquial knowledge of the average American twelve year old.

I was, in a word, royally and socially fucked. The jokes would practically write themselves.

Amidst the new and the unfamiliar, there remained one thing I was altogether still too familiar with… My treatment at the hands of other children, especially young boys, who are, at that age, easily tempted by the darker sides of basic human need.

The need to impress. The need for attention and validation. And something I started to feel all too keenly; the need to belong.

By now, I know what some of you must be thinking- So what? I was bullied as a child, big fucking whoop.

But it was a big fucking whoop. Because looking back, some of the worst aspects of my personality- I now realize after much reflection, were born as a sort of defense mechanism I would use to shield myself from ridicule.

Pathological untruths. Near instinctive avoidance. Poor conflict resolution techniques.

All of these because I was afraid of what some American snot-nosed little fucks had to say about my name, my appearance, and my culture.

Pitiful.

But now I am a man full grown. Introspective and able to articulate said introspections.

And if I learned anything from those early years… It’s that kids, no matter where in the world, fucking suck.

PART 2: ENTER GAY-LE

But I’m an adult now.

And so, I feel(hopefully rightly), that I can be candid.

Americans- most of you couldn’t pronounce your way out of a paper bag if your lives depended on it, specifically when it comes to foreign names.

And the rest of the world both hates and loves you for it. It makes you easy to identify, phonetically speaking. And brace for, culturally speaking.

But, and this is a black-woman-in-the-rap-game sized but, it is a living hell for anyone who must live here with a “non-American” name.

We are forever doomed to read and hear, in your lack of effort and/or general ineptitude with languages that are not your own- our names, butchered beyond belief, misspelled to such unrecognizable levels(yes, Starbucks employees, I’m fucking looking at you), as to be reading and hearing another language altogether. And that is because it is.

English.

And I acknowledge and admit to some generalizing, some languages are difficult, especially for non-native speakers.

Still, it is just one name, not an entire language. Would it kill really kill you to step out your comfort zone and learn how to pronounce a name properly?

My own name is pronounced Gah-el. Not Gay-le.

But after a while, even I got tired of it. Correcting the mispronunciation. And because of the sheer and overwhelming amount of people who could not(or would not) make the effort to learn the proper way to say my name, and my increasing need to belong- I became… Gayle.

If any of you struggle or have struggled with shame, you know it is a complex emotion. Twisted and warped in so many of life’s worst moments. A veritable breeding ground for insecurities, both real and imagined.

And I, and I’m sure many who share the early parts of my story, needed to belong here.

This was home now. So why did it feel so hostile? So oppressive.

Why did I feel so scrutinized, so weighed and found wanting, at all times?

I didn’t want to be different, I didn’t want to be the kid whose name gave everyone pause, and led to the oh-so dreadful questions.

Where is that from?

Where are you from?

I don’t know if you all realize this, but many Americans have a very particular way of asking this question.

Beneath it, there is almost always a sense of… presupposition, often inaccurately obtained from your media, which is steeped in soooo much bias and stereotypes. The questions were, to me, a judgment made and awaiting verbal validation from the judgee. That’s what I heard, every time someone would ask.

Where are you from? 

I didn’t want to say.

And suffer the judgements, the jokes, the sneering mimicry of my accent, the tongue clicking, all of which ironically enough, almost always came at the hands of young, black boys.

They were my chief tormentors.

Made likelier, I assume, because there are very few social consequences and/or cultural taboos in America surrounding the tensions between black Americans and black Africans.

Once we’re here, American society and to some degree, the world, either can’t tell us apart, or refuses to, and so ascribes no nuance to our squabbles.

Part 3: BEING BLACK AND BEING AFRICAN

But in our greatest tormentor, we often find a life-long friend. For they are the only ones truly willing to engage us on a, if not always equal, at least honest playing field.

I always knew the rules of the game.

You’re different from us, Gaël, they’d say. And so we’ll use that to make ourselves feel better about being different from them.

We all know about the proverbial them, don’t we?

In this, I found that most white Americans were often guarded with their genuine thoughts. Their true and honest feelings. This almost always reared its ugly head in varying degrees of condescension or gross amounts of sympathy.

Which by the way, to me, have always been one and the same.

The black kids weren’t like that. They were honest. In their jealousy. In their contempt. In their ridicule. In what, though I didn’t yet know it, were clunky and awkward attempts at friendship. At connection and understanding.

In black Americans, I found a community, scarred by centuries of what I had only experienced for a few years.

Here was when I learned that being black and being African were completely different things.

Being Black came with it, a lot of baggage, and a sort of playbook.

Be this way. Don’t be this way.

Being African isn’t quite like that in the States. You see we don’t really have such strict societal and national expectations on our behavior or about our place in the race hierarchy of the U.S.

Maybe because, in my observation, all black people tend to be lumped into a pile in the United States.

There came with that grouping, a sense of freedom that wrapped itself around my neck like a chain.

I could be, in the wider world, Black one second, American the next, and then African, on any given occasion. Sometimes, when I was feeling particularly exotic, a combination of all three!

This certainly threw my Black, American, and African brethren for a loop. 

They never knew how to treat me, and so came to misunderstand and mistreat me.

He’s far too “intellectual” to be capital B black, their confused looks would say, too close to midnight black to be American, their exclusion would say, and too African to really ever be either! Their oh so dreadful questions would say.

Make no mistake, though you may sense some bitter subtext in the sarcasm of my words, I delighted in this tremendously. Still do, if you couldn’t tell.

Nothing has proven to be more fruitful to the growth of my character and the coming into my own as a writer than my perpetual lack of belonging.

As the old truthful, but tired adage goes:

Too white for the blacks, and too black for the whites.

I came to know the feeling well.

Part 4: I HATE YOUR NAME

This whole tirade on my name… the shame it made me carry for so long…the sort of self-hatred fueled by the cultural, social, and racial ramifications of all those surface level interactions, is all to say- I love my name now.

Not because there’s anything inherently special about it, but because I now see it as both a legacy and a blank check.

The opportunity for remembrance, history and… the shaping of an authentic me.

I got to decide who Gayle was.

I get to decide who Gaël will be.

So, to all my third and second world peeps. All my sufferers of what I dub, “The Second Name”.

This name that this new society has given us, or that we have given ourselves, in lieu of our own.

This moniker we have stamped on our foreheads, just to belong. Just to make it easier for people-who frankly couldn't give a shit- to be able pronounce…

Hear me and hear me well when I say, with clear and resounding vehemence:

Fuck. That.

I once had a very shy Chinese girl in one of my college classes introduce herself to me as Star. She saw the look on my face and instantly knew to elaborate. 

“It’s actually Xīngxīng,” she explained. “ But it means star in english.”

And I remembered a part of me bristled so, at almost being denied the opportunity to call this girl by her given name. And a such a beautiful one at that. 

I remember thinking, “please, please don’t introduce yourself as ‘Star’. Be Xīngxīng.” Likewise, throughout my life I’ve found myself saying things like:

Your name’s not “Billy”. It’s Babak.

It’s Alejandro. Emphasis on the silent, but deadly J in the Jandro.

I found myself wishing that all my Preenas, my Abdullahs, Oles, Lakshays, Jēans(Masculine), and Xīngxīngs, wouldn’t give me a name I hated so.

I didn’t even care what their personal relationship with their name was…

That was their business. I just wanted to know it. 

Your name. 

Because I have a thing about calling people by their actual first name, you see- not their appropriated one.

Because a part of me feels that with each utterance, I can remind someone of who they are, where they come from. And all the fucked up, complicated shit that comes packaged in that.

No de aquí no de allá, am I right?

I know the struggles(and insecurities) that stem from a place making you feel like you don’t belong. Even when you do. 

It is something I have had to come to terms with. Because god knows, Americans have always had great difficulty coming to terms with pretty much anything that afflicts their history and culture, much less a homogenous naming structure and the meaning, or lack thereof, attributed to it. And how that affects those who do not fit that familiar mold.

And also because, I swear to christ, if I have to meet another Jake, or Hunter, or Bill, or fucking Jill, I’m going to fucking ki-

Ahem. That was an unfortunate digression. Where were we?

Ah yes- Myself.

Personally, it took me a while to understand why I let a country with such a vague and tenuous relationship with their own names, judge, decide, and ascribe a meaning to mine. As a child, a part of me wanted to adopt the when-in-Rome attitude and leave it at that, but I’ve always been one for the nuance in things.

And yeah, I know… Black names can be wild, but at least they’re creative.

My own name, is an acronym. My mother came up with it. It stands for Gloire à l’éternel. Or so translated, Glory be to the Eternal Christ.

Can you tell I grew up religious yet?

Is it profound? Not particularly, but the sentiment behind it certainly is. As my mother never misses a chance to tell me: I am the reason behind her staunch and unwavering belief in God. And I’d like to think that meaning is lost if you pronounce my name wrong. Because my mother doesn’t know any Gayles.

Each syllable sounds too different, so the mispronunciation strips from it the unique phonetic quality my mother intended in the deeper meaning. 

My name is as much the reciting of a song as it is a pairing of letters.

There can be a lot of meaning in a name. Or barely any at all.

So I’ll close with the famous words of one great Shawn Corey Carter.

Allow me to re-introduce myself, my name is Gaël Samuel Kabatantshi Muteba. 

Pronounced Gah-el. Not Gayle.

Emphasis on the often late in realization, but always revelatory palm to forehead, ah.

Cheers.