Names and identity: Nomenclature as tool of slavery and invasion

Days before the insurrection at the US Capitol building in Washington DC, and with far less media coverage, Congress dealt the final blow to then president Donald Trump’s veto of the defence Bill. For the past 60 years, this Bill has passed with bipartisan support, but first the House of Representatives and then the Senate rejected his efforts.

One of the stated reasons for Trump’s refusal to sign was his opposition to the renaming of military bases named after Confederate generals, such as Fort Hood and Fort Bragg. Trump declared that these bases were “Hallowed Grounds” and part of a “great American Heritage” and he opposed any attempt “to wash away history and to dishonour . . . our founding principles”. David Petraeus, a retired US army general, pointed to the irony that these bases were “named for those took up arms against the United States and for the right to enslave others”.

So much is attached to names. So much history, so much partisan allegiance.

Place names are often contested in countries that have been colonised, where names in the colonisers’ language replace those with meanings attached to native landscape, culture, mythology and identity. In Australia, it is less than 30 years since Uluru, the original indigenous name, was reinstated as the designation for Ayers Rock – a title imposed in the 19th century to honour the chief secretary of South Australia, Sir Henry Ayers.

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Anglicisation of place names

This pattern of overwriting original place names as part of mapping a colonised country – the subject of Brian Friel’s play Translations – served as the final step in the anglicisation of place names in Ireland in the first half of the 19th century. The process, begun with the Elizabethan conquest, was much contested during the Gaelic revival.

Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League, called for de-anglicisation of place names in the late 1800s. The contentious names of Kingstown, King’s County and Queen’s County reverted to Dún Laoghaire, Offaly and Laois years before they were officially sanctioned by the new Irish State in the 1920s. De-anglicising place names, however, is not always without controversy – it is just 15 years since the Dingle/An Daingean/Daingean Uí Chúis debacle.

Similarly, people’s names are concerned with both identity and identification. They come trailing their ancestral lineage, their historical allegiances, a cultural identity, an ethnic badge; they may bear a power seal, or a brand of oppression, sometimes a religious imprimatur, a socioeconomic or class membership card.

Our personal identity is inextricably linked with our name, whether or not we perceive it as a good fit. Babies as young as five months preferentially orient their gaze to the sound of their name, indicating a direct self-relevance to this significant social cue.

But names have meaning not only for our own identity but also for how others regard us. Make no mistake, names matter. They matter when a child with an unusual name starts school.

Misspellings and mispronunciations of names are often a source of significant and under-reported stress for children from minority groups. Often they are asked if they have a shorter name, or they may even be told that they will be called some approximation of it. And the pattern may repeat year on year. Where names are plucked from a roll sheet, second- or third-level students with an unusual or difficult name are less likely to be called upon in class to discuss a point or contribute an answer.

Cultural bias

The bias continues when these children move on and begin to look for employment. Multiple studies have demonstrated the importance of names when applying for jobs. Applicants with names unfamiliar to the recruiting employers have a significantly lower rate of calls to interview. A 2009 study in Ireland for the Equality Commission found that job applicants with identifiably non-Irish names were less than half as likely to be called for interview as those with typically Irish names. The discrimination was consistent across the three minorities tested (African, Asian and German).

Furthermore, experiments have shown that people impute a lower socioeconomic grouping and a lower educational attainment to those with certain names: for example, Amber as opposed to Alexandra, Dwayne as opposed to David. Religious affiliations or stereotyped national or ethnic characteristics are regularly assumed, based on name, representing an innate tendency to flock together birds of the same feather.

It all becomes more extreme and divisive in countries with a history of colonisation, oppression or power imbalances. Names can determine or predict where you might live, which schools you will attend, which job interviews you may be called for and who you will marry.

In her novel Milkman, Anna Burns explores the importance of names as social, political and religious markers. By excluding them, she draws attention to their power. Within the unnamed narrator’s unnamed community is a list of names forbidden “for the reason they were too much of the country ‘over the water’”. These banned names were “infused with the energy, the power of history, the age-old conflict, enjoinments and resisted impositions laid down long ago in this country by that country”.

Within Ireland there has always been a push-and-pull factor in the use of personal names and indeed surnames – these have been subject to change for economic as well as political reasons. Think how often the prefixes of Mc/Mac and O have been dropped and subsequently restored in the last two centuries.

Ireland is said to have one of the oldest systems of patrilineal hereditary surnames in the world. Such heritable surnames act as cultural markers of common ancestry. But what of those who have no such markers; those who have been removed from their homelands and deprived of access to their cultural background as well as their family line?

Obliteration of history

The practice of slavery saw the obliteration of the identity of millions of Africans who were forcibly shipped across the Atlantic and sold off in the colonies of the Americas and the West Indies. The loss of their names began as early as the original records at the point of departure when African names, never before written down, were recorded in ledgers, misheard, misspelled.

From there, among myriad cruelties, indignities and traumas, enslaved people heard their true names mispronounced, altered or replaced with names chosen by their captors. With each succeeding generation of enslavement, the names had less connection with a homeland, a culture or even just a family group.

Those who still recalled their original birth name were forced to respond to a foreign name imposed by a foreign captor, often with their captor’s surname automatically recorded as their own. Not recorded were the names used by enslaved people among themselves, which may have given insight into family names or even naming practices, and thus some hint of ethnic or cultural origins.

It was not uncommon for an enslaved worker’s name to be changed several times on a whim; a nursemaid known ever after by the childish approximation that her young charge called her; an enslaved servant being given the same name as the last servant because it was easier for the family. Small wonder then that it is so difficult for African-Americans to track their ancestry.

Even after emancipation, the problems persisted. At that point, many of the newly liberated chose their own surnames. Oral testimony recorded from those once enslaved shows how they decided on which official names to choose. The phrase “the name I wore before” crops up in these accounts, suggesting that for the survivors of slavery these imposed names were akin to a piece of clothing and as apt to be removed, changed or finally divested.

Socially demeaning

Those who escaped enslavement were subject to a series of epithets attached to their names that underscored their position in society. One example of this can be found in the names applied to Tony Small, the man who saved the life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald in the American Revolution and subsequently became his manservant.

In the Fitzgerald family correspondence, he is first referred to as “my black” before becoming Poor Tony, and after some years Faithful Tony, then Tony. By the late 1790s he is Mr Small. In his final and most significant act, his will is registered under Mr Anthony Small, demonstrating, perhaps, his authority over his own identity.

For all that, there is little way of knowing Tony Small’s origins. The same is true for generations of African-Americans (and all those descendants of enslaved people in other countries) who have no access to their past, to their family lineage and their cultural heritage.

Names matter. They say a lot about us. So too does the refusal of a president to countenance removing the names of Confederate military commanders from military forts, the same Confederates who sought to perpetuate the enslavement of 3.5 million African-Americans.

Words to Shape My Name by Laura McKenna is published by New Island