Call Me By Her Name
[Content Warning]
This weekend I was sitting on the cold concrete steps outside of a house party, watching as people filtered in. I had a cigarette in one hand and I absent-mindedly inhaled, breathing in tar and the crisp October air of Halloween night.
I was having a relatively quiet conversation with the two people working the door when a large group of underclassmen arrived all at once, and after I said hello to one girl I knew, a blonde girl I didn’t know approached me with sudden drunken excitement. “Hey!” She exclaimed as I stared back, bemused. “It’s so great to finally meet you! Are you friends with M___?”
I nodded; we were friends, if a friend was someone I’d partied with over fall break and had had hungover brunch with on a few occasions.
She smiled again and asked for a drag of my cig. As I passed it to her, she said. “Yeah I see pictures of you all over his Instagram, you’re so cool.”
I blinked, suddenly confused; there isn’t a single picture of us together. And I once again thought of how we weren’t really all that close, even though we got along well. Then I realized what had happened. M___’s best friend was a A___, who had graduated last year; she was the one who he posted pictures of frequently. Ironically enough, she was also currently at the center of a racial profiling controversy, in which, despite having ample evidence to the contrary, the college claimed that she was at a protest against a white supremacist brought to campus last semester. The public safety officer who claimed to have identified her was someone who’d seen her face semi-regularly for almost four years (he was also the same officer who later racially profiled a Latina faculty member trying to get into her office).
“Oh that’s not me actually, you’re thinking of A____.” I tried to correct her, but she either didn’t understand or didn’t care to. In the end she wandered inside and I ashed my cigarette, watching the embers flicker out of existence in the cool air.
The day before, we had talked about names in my class. Two blue jays flew between leafless trees, and I watched them through the glass as we discussed our experiences and our family names.
In many South and Central American countries, the naming convention uses a given name, a second given name, and two last names from both the mother and the father, as opposed to the convention in the US, which uses one given name, one “middle” name, and privileges the father’s last name over the mother’s.
As my classmates shared stories of how parts of their family names were erased when they came to the US because of racism, xenophobia, and patriarchy, I came to my own quiet realization. Their names, and by extension an important aspect of their cultural and ethnic backgrounds, were at varying stages of being erased; mine, in contrast, was long gone. Elizabeth Ashley Dunn. What does that say about my culture, about my history? I lose myself in my thoughts, and the blue jays flying outside of the window remind me of an early childhood summer spent at my grandparent’s house.
My grandma and I would scatter bird feed on the back patio, and then we would go inside and watch from behind the sliding glass doors as birds came to peck it up. I remember blue jays, sparrows, robins, cardinals-and other birds I have no names for-landing at varying intervals for a few quick morsels; when I went back to Atlanta, I’d throw crumbs to the pigeons on the street and think of her.
Elisabeth, my grandmother, the woman I was named after, grew up in small town in southern Germany. My granddad, who was enlisted in the army at the time, was stationed there, where they met and eventually married.
I remember her taking me to the sitting room and giving me a piece of home baked pound cake. As we sat together, the sound of her oxygen machine laboring in the background, she showed me pictures of white people I could barely reconcile with my own brownness. Pictures of them cradling me; of them posing with me in a frilly dress; of them holding both my hands as I toddled out of a pool. There were family photos as well, of people who’d died before I was even born.
There was one man in particular that she pointed out, frozen in black and white with his eyes shadowed under a military cap. She identified him as her own father. She reached out and held my hands, turning them over in hers, and then told me that he and I had the same hands; large and long fingered. At the time I took this comparison and held it close, marveling at the fact that I could share something with someone so distant from me. It was also one of the rare moments in which her love was tender, without the layer of brusqueness that usually colored it.
She told me stories of how her father was a soldier, but that before he could fight in the war he was captured by the Russians and became a POW for the entirity of it, and that he stayed alive by charming those who held him prisoner. It took me until highschool to realize that the war she referenced was WW2, and I’ve picked up on enough of the omittances about him to seriously question exactly what kind of soldier he was.
Later Halloween night I was sitting on the front porch, joking around and enjoying myself. Lately I’d been working on being more me; on no longer trying to fold myself into shapes that would please other people, and allowing my personality to unfold in whatever way I pleased. And it felt liberating to do that, to be authentically me for the first time in what felt like years. Until of course, I was reminded that some of the people I was trying to get to know didn’t even know who I was.
A boy I knew through a mutual friend came outside. I’d seen him earlier that day in the radio station, pointed at him and dramatically said his name: N___! He’d laughed and said mine back to me.
So when he sat across from me and called me by A___’s name, I thought he was joking. I laughed, “Oh yeah, I am A____!” That was the slogan a group of student activists had created to bring attention to racial profiling; we’d also hung posters around the college with pictures of different Black women and femmes with the same caption to point out the fact that none of us are the same people.
All of that context seemed to be lost on him though. Instead of joking along with me he nodded. “Yeah, you’re A___ right?”
“No I’m Liz! Are you serious?”
He backtracked, then apologized. And I accepted it without too much of an issue. Because I generally forgive if the apology is sincere. Because who ever knew property to hold a grudge against it’s owner? That is the historical relationship, of course. Some of my friends great grandparents may have enslaved mine. And some of mine may have particpated in the genocide against theirs.
The next day I stared at long fingered hands covered in red, and the small but numerous rivulets of it dripping down their legs; they take off one of their houseshoes so it doesn’t stain. The room smells like iron. They’ve been sawing at their arm with a dull paring knife for two hours, after an impulsive decision to remove their birth control implant. It’s bleeding more than expected. Oh, I know their name is Elizabeth. But I couldn’t feel the connection between the name and the face, between the blood and the self. Part of it was symptomatic of the breakdown I was experiencing. The technical term is dissociation; there are some great memes about it on twitter.
Part of it though, came from working so hard to build a sense of self in a world that is constantly deconstructing me, and having that thrown back in my face. Systemic dehumanization reinforces the trauma related depersonalization I already experience, and vice versa; mental illness and oppression are an ouroboros devouring it’s own tail. And having doubt cast on an already unstable sense of identity, twice in one night, and innumerable times over a single semester, makes it even harder for me to reconcile Elizabeth with myself. Am I Liz? Am I crazy? Am I A___? Am I human?
A friend comes over later and helps me cut the rest of it out, and clean the blood soaking into the fake hardwood floor.
One of my aunts is very interested in tracing the lineage of our family-you know, ancestry.com and all that shit. I was never really interested in that project, thinking that she’d probably be unable to go back farther than two or three generations. So I was surprised when she told our family a couple of years ago that she’d been able to trace us all the way back to North Carolina.
Specifically, to the Dunn plantation.
My last name comes from the people who owned my ancestors, in an excrutiatingly literal sense. My aunt recovered a story of a slave having a child by their master, and that person becoming the originator of our particular branch of the Dunn line. I wonder if that distant relative, who was enslaved, ever experienced a moment of humanity? I imagine what their life could have been like, and think of the famous scene in Roots, when Kunta Kinte is tortured until he screams out that his name is Toby. I wonder what it means that no one would have to torture me to wring a white woman’s name from my lips.
I wonder, too, about the one who held the whip, who viewed other people as property and forcefully inserted themselves into my family tree. Did that distant relative, who considered themselves master, ever experience a moment of humanity? What do I do with the blood of that distant master, or the blood of that dubious soldier? And when I looked in the mirror on Sunday and found blood dripping from my knife, which of me was it that hurt myself? And which of me is it that is healing?
All this in a name. History, blue jays, genocide, contradictions, unexpected love-even humor. I find it amusing to make puns out of my name (a few of the hits include Elizabiddy, Neoliberaliz, and Elesbian). I love that my aunt and cousins call me lizzy-poo when they draw me close and hug me until I feel at home. I also take joy in being different than A___, or K___, or T___, different than any other Black women-or anyone else-I know. Different by virtue of being a human being with my own particular experiences. I carry all of this with me, with pride and shame and highly individualized complexity.
And still, they call me by her name.
