What's in a Name?

When we became pregnant, we spent hours discussing names for our child. I wanted to pick something that would be easily pronounceable in both English and Polish. I liked old-fashioned family names, and nature names. We agreed on “Forest Bogdan” for a name if it was a boy, and “Maria Rose” if it was a girl. Both names were easily pronounceable and readable in both languages. 

Exhausted after giving birth, and simply grateful that we had a healthy baby boy, I made no protest when Michal asked if we could put the name Bogdan first. It was Michal’s father’s name. I knew how much it meant to him. 

And so Bogdan Forest Kawka was named. The name itself is ancient slavic, from the words “God” (Bog) and “Given”(dan). My American mother was delighted with her first grandchild. What are the nicknames for Bogdan? She asked.  Bodzio is the common Polish diminutive form, and I spelled it for her phonetically “Bojo”. And so we called our son Bojo. He was a good baby!

Then around age 1 ½, I grew tired of introducing my baby as Bojo and getting the weird looks and inevitable “Sorry, what?” from people. No one got it right on the first or second try. My aunt expressed her concern that other kids would call him Bozo when he started school. 

Then there was the well-meaning church lady who was delighted to have a young family in the congregation. She asked if she could write a little feature about us in the upcoming church newsletter. I gave her our names and told her about what brought us to Klamath Falls. When the article came out, my sons’ name was Boger.

I started introducing my son as Forest with consistency. Even going so far as to correct my friends in public that we were now calling him Forest, not Bojo. People picked up on it. The librarians at storytime called him Forest. The old ladies at church called him Forest. They complimented the name! They remembered it! They pronounced it correctly on the first try! 

Eventually Michal realized what I was doing. He was offended. “You can’t just change his name without asking me,” he asserted. When Michal took our son out in public, he introduced him as Bogdan. Our friends were getting confused. 

When our son started preschool, the teacher, who was a personal friend of mine, laminated his name card “Forest”. On the second day of school, Michal went to talk to the teacher and asked her to change it to Bogdan. 

Now that our son was going to learn how to write his name, we had agreed it would be Bogdan. I still cringed when I introduced my son and people never got it right on the first try or on the second try. “Bowen?” “Odin?” Yet, in my gut I knew I was being cowardly and that Michal was right to insist that we call him by his name and just explain to people that it is Polish.

Like most tired moms in Klamath Falls, I enjoyed taking my active preschooler to Jump-n-jax, the indoor bounce house which some people said was full of germs but I didn’t care. They had couches and magazines, to read while my son ran around and jumped like crazy. 

And that was where, in a 2017 issue of Glamor, I stumbled on an article about the actress Uzo Aduba explaining her own unusual name. Here it is:

In Igbo, Uzoamaka—pronounce it “oh-zah-mahk-kah”—means “the road is good.” In a speech she gave at Glamour’s ‘The Girl Project’ Rally in 2017, she remembered once wanting to change that name to better fit in with her white American classmates. “I came home from school one day, and my mom was cooking in the kitchen,” she said, “I said to her ‘Mommy, can you call me Zoe?’ She stopped and gave that mother look that only mothers know and have, and said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because no one can say Uzoamaka.’ She looked at me and she said, ‘If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.’”

Aduba never wanted to change her name again.

And that’s when it clicked. (I mean, go figure that I had to learn to claim my name from a black woman. Damn.)

In my life of white privilege, I could deny my own and my son’s difference. I could deny his heritage, by changing his name to fit in with the “Jordans” and the “Katies”. In seeking to conform to the perceived power structure, I was participating in white supremacy. I was glad, as I came into the shameful realization of what I had been trying to do, that I had a partner in Michal who was strong in his identity as a proud immigrant. Through insisting that we call our son Bogdan, his given name, the meaning of which I love, I was forced to confront my own fears of being ‘different’. 

If you read my blog, leave me a comment! I like to know who is reading this. Also, it lets me know that I’m not just screaming into the void.