We were kids who wore talking shoes and too small clothes, spending paper dollars from the feds on hot pickles and penny candy at the corner liquor store. Kwintessa and LaCreshia, Tameka, Shaunta, Tanisha, and Miesha were the names my friends were given. The boys who chased us were Lamont and Tyrone, Demetrius and Malik, DaQuan, Jamal and Javion. It was the nineties. And a post-industrial, Black, Midwestern town was home. Here, everything about what we called ourselves and each other felt right. Our names we carried with pride, correcting pronunciation when warranted, enunciating each consonant and vowel, elevating our voices and spelling our names out loud when the listener didn’t return the right phonetic sounds associated with our identity. Whatever was happening in the tainted, misshapen world we inhabited, our names, what we called ourselves and each other, became an embodiment of safety, an extension of whatever we believed was sacred. 

                But when money was enough, Daddy and Momma moved us to the suburbs. The same ones where the white folks who flew from our town went when we Black folks bought houses beside theirs. In our subdivision, we became the “Good Coloreds” of our cul-de-sac. I learned quickly the shame of names that contrasted the Sarahs and Emilys, Kates, and Connors, who automatically shortened my name to “Zee.”  Or the Dustins and the Lukes, Tims, and Taylors who opted for the whole first syllable, the Buddhist term they thought was fun to coopt in the same ways they had Namaste. When they didn’t shorten my name, an “a” was added to extend it. 

                It’s zuh-neek-KWA, right?

                They’d ask, almost certain. I would recoil and correct them, a half-chuckle from us both by the end of the exchange. My name had lost its shine. It felt ghetto when it fell out of their mouths and I felt ghetto in receipt of it. Shedding half of my name became essential to feeling whole. 

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                 Somali poet, Warsan Shire, has famously written,

                                                              “Give your daughters difficult names.

                           Give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue.

                                                  My name makes you want to tell me the truth.

                    My name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right.”

                This quote was all over the internet the day after a reporter on the red carpet for the movie premiere of Annie resorted to calling the lead actress the name of the character she played in the film. The actress, not even a teen then, told the blonde woman with the microphone, “My name is not Annie. It’s Quvenzhane.” 

               This was 2013, and I was a grown ass woman still shortening my name upon introductions, offering “Zee” instead of “Zenique,” extinguishing for them the fullness that they’d have to hold on their tongues. A fullness that Shire insisted upon. 

               Later that year, while in Lagos to participate in the Farafina writing workshop, I observed the honor with which Damilola and Okechukwu, Timendu, Kelechi and Arinze, Chidinma and Uchenna touted the entirety of their names, refusing alternatives and uttering each syllable as easily as they exhaled their breath. Eghosa, the program director, after greeting us all and reveling in the rare occurrence it was for African Diasporic writers to create together, extended his hand to me. “And here, we have Zenique, our African-American. Welcome home.” 

                Tears welled up in my eyes.

                That same summer, after two weeks in Nigeria, I went to East Africa to visit my host family and the friends I fell in love with when I studied abroad there years before. I heard their names anew when I arrived after my time on the west side of the continent. The Christian names they preferred were as simple as the ones from the suburbs of my childhood: Margaret and Alice, Ben, Mark and Alex. I sometimes asked about the opposite of these colonial markers. Those names have since escaped me.

                Days before I left the country, while on a drive with my dear friend, her belly, pregnant and heavy, brushing up against the steering wheel, she told me the name she planned for her unborn child. It was a Luganda name. Its meaning, “Praise.” 

                “Oh?” I asked earnestly, “No Christian name?” 

                “No, Zenique,” she began while using one hand to make gestures as she spoke. The other hand keeping the steering wheel steady. She always called me by my full name. 

                “My husband and I have decided to give our children only African names. Why should we take on the names of white people? Would they take on ours?”    

                A few days later, I flew back to the U.S. I no longer wanted to be known as Zee.

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                In the Midwest, in a summer that was after Michael Brown and before Breonna Taylor, I met a woman named Shaniqua. We were DEI facilitators spending a week together on a college campus with a camp for teens and their teachers. Shaniqua didn’t code switch in front of the white folks we worked with and she didn’t pretend her name was anything but what it was. She reminded me of the freedom I felt with friends from back in the day and, while at the camp, she and I hung out often. Two dark skin sistas, our hair out in coils and kinky styles, our boisterous banter, our raucous cackles. In a space where we were teaching racial equity and justice, we didn’t hold back. We were wholly ourselves. 

                One night that week, we sat on a curb away from the campus buildings to sneak a few puffs from a pack of Newports. 

                “Shaniqua, I love how you show up in this space, Girl. You’re just so…so real.” I told her this as I released a cloud of smoke into the air. We both squinted as the billow dissipated in our faces. 

                “I mean, Zenique, I’m too old to be trying to be anything else! I’m a Black girl from the South. That’s it!” She leaned back onto her haunches, unfolded her legs out in front of her and stretched them farther into the street. Night fell on her face and illuminated her brown skin and big hair, the contrast of the half-cigarette hanging from her lips help my attention. What I’d considered when I met her was the same thing that awed me this night. “Shaniqua” didn’t make her shrink, didn’t make her overpronounce words and reach for an extra lilt in her language. She didn’t mind the movements of her body, or tuck in her belly and pull down her spine, make smaller movements with her limbs, all of this in an effort to fit in.  Assimilation and acceptance, I realized, asks that we bury ourselves by day only to unearth again by evening.  

                By the end of the week, when the teens lined up to hug us goodbye, some would slip up and interchange our names or merge them together: Shaniqua would become Zenique or Shanique and I would become Shaniqua or Zeniqua. 

                “Oh, that’s fine!” we both exclaimed to the red-faced teens who just learned about microaggressions. After they all left, we threw our arms around the other’s neck and playfully switched out one name for the other. 

                “Heyyyy, Zenique, Girl!” I boomed.

                “Hey, Shaniqua!” She teased as we crashed into each other, doubled over in laughter. 

                “Girl, I just love you!”

                “I love you, too.” 

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                Another time, while facilitating a caucus workshop for Black and Brown folks engaging in racial justice work, after our introductions where we shared names that were both common and ethnically intricate, I asked the group to share, in Column 1, their biggest pet peeves about folks from their own racial group and, in Column 2, the reasons why that action or behavior distressed them. A participant, reading from the two columns on their sheet of paper, shared those ghetto names as the thing that annoyed them and because it’s unprofessional and silly as the reason why. 

                The room was quiet. Eyes averted and some folks reached for the fidgets that were strewn among the tables. Others held their breath. I saw them counting inside their clenched cheeks.  Together, we took a beat.

                “This is good, this is good…” I began, “BECAUSE this workshop is all about us figuring out together how racism has influenced the ways we engage with one another. Here is where we come to terms with how racism has made us hate ourselves.” I touched the shoulder of the person who had just shared so they didn’t think I was picking on them. 

                “Think for a moment about how you learned Black names were ghetto.” I implored. 

                My first-grade teacher with an upturned lip asked what kinda name is that. My class laughed at my name. Coach and my teammates opted for my last name, said my first was too hard, too complicated, too ghetto. Co-workers gave me a nickname. A white woman smirked and said interesting when I introduced myself. My name has been reduced to an initial or acronym. An employer asked if I had a nickname I would like to be called by, the name you got is too hard, too complicated, too ghetto, he said.  

                 “Now, let’s take a minute and reframe this for ourselves. Let’s get into some emergent strategies and revisioning like Auntie Adrienne Maree Brown has taught us.”

                I then asked the group to reflect on the “Blackest” names they have ever encountered and challenged them to find the beauty in it. Afterwards, I asked them to silently extend into the universe an apology and an applause for that person and for their parents who named them. Finally, we closed with these affirmations and revisionist prompts: 

• • • Black names aren’t ghetto, they’re magic.
    • Yes…even the Shananaes, Shaniquas, Daquans and Tyrones.
    • Our ancestors were stripped of their language. Elaborate names are the way back to our mother tongue. To our heritage.
    • As such, these names should be borne with pride.
    • Let us give to the world our whole names and let them hold its shape in their mouths.
    • African-Americans don’t need new names.

                After the workshop, the participants thanked me. Some shook my hand. One participant, who waited for the rest of the class to pass, stopped in front of me and hugged my neck, but didn’t linger after the embrace. But I didn’t need them too. I believed that whatever power had been taken from the name they carried, could now be restored. Just like magic. ╪.