Personal Portfolio Feature: ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch your name?’

“What’s your name?” is probably one of life’s most asked questions. And yet, we rarely unpack the stories contained in these clusters of letters.

Image Credit: Alex Moiseev on Unsplash

“Our names: they’re so mundane, we barely notice them. We walk around with them all day, every day. They are an invisible layer of our being that surrounds us, like a lexical second skin.”

These are the opening words to writer Sheela Banerjee’s newly released book, ‘What’s In A Name?’, a little over 300 pages of exquisite storytelling and in-depth research into the hidden stories we can uncover through our names. “Once prised open, our names reveal a multitude of stories, reveal feelings, states of consciousness and lost histories that embody who we really are and where we come from,” the introduction reads.

Image Credit: @sheelabanerjeewords on Instagram

I picked a signed copy up at a recent Q&A event, where I had the joy of chatting to Sheela* and finding out more about this etymological investigation into “Friendship, Identity and History in Modern Multicultural Britain.” Readers are transported across centuries and continents as the author uncovers the complex history behind her own name, and those of her closest friends.

This got me thinking about my own name, Cerys, a traditional Welsh name, meaning “love”, derived from the Welsh verb “caru” (to love). Despite frequent mispronunciations, including “Kharis”, “Seris”, ‘Ser-ees’ and ‘Krays’, I love my name and feel comfortable wearing it every day. Perhaps, the only exception to this is hearing it butchered when a Starbucks barista calls me out for my drink.

Inspired by Sheela’s qualitative research, I decided to try my hand at digging into the untapped histories sitting in my closest friends’ names. Sheela’s book is a personal journey about deep friendships, and in this style, I purposely went out to speak to those closest to me, to find the stories that, like Sheela writes, are “right under our noses.”

Leah Buffalino

Summer of 2022. I first met Leah in Kolkata, India, where we both volunteered at Mother Teresa’s care homes and orphanages. Coincidentally, Mother Teresa’s Kolkata homes is also where Leah’s Sicilian mother and Italian- American father met as volunteers about 30 years ago.

Leah explains the meaning of her Hebrew first name: “Weary or weak, because Leah in the Bible had weak eyes.” Thankfully, this is balanced by her surname Buffalino, which means in Italian, “to laugh a lot, like a really hearty laugh.”

Leah was born in Kentucky, USA. She recalls the origin of middle names in the states. “In Ellis Island, when everybody was immigrating, they could pick new names. But there were so many names that were similar and so they were like ‘you can’t all be John Smith, so you have to pick a middle name’. So that’s where it came from, like John Thomas Smith, that’s how the middle name came about in the US.”

Her father’s grandparents emigrated from Italy about 90 years ago, settling in New York. I ask her if she is aware of any links between her family and the infamous Italian American Mafia godfather Russell Bufalino, head of the Bufalino crime family. She laughs, “I think it’s with one f, and my last name is two f’s. My family is relying on the fact that we have two f’s in our name, so we’re not technically linked to any mafia group. But I mean, there’s no doubt that my family was, I mean, they’re from New York City…”

Ari Song (송아리)

Arirang is a famous Korean folk tune. It reminds Ari Song (송아리) of mythical forests, of the steam that rises from mountain ponds, and of course, of her first name.

But there’s a bit more to these two syllables. At birth, my friend was named Yewon Song (송예원). She explains to me that commonly, Korean newborns will be named with three syllables (two Korean letters for the first name and one for the last), in special “naming studios” which use traditional astrology to compile a list of “good” names for a child, according to their specific time and date of birth.

In her book, Sheela Banerjee describes the sensation of not liking your name as like wearing an ill-fitting coat. Ari agrees. “It was three years ago now and I was thinking that I should change my name. I woke up and I thought ‘I am not Yewon’, and my whole life I didn’t feel like Yewon. And when people called me, it was awkward.”

Luckily, it is “quite common” for one to change their name in Korea. Ari explains this change perhaps doesn’t carry the same weight as in the West. In fact, growing up in Seoul, some of her classmates would have their names changed, often by their parents, if they believed their child’s name had altered their fortune. Ari says, “when I was 10, 11, there were so many people changing their names, and they said stuff like ‘oh, my grandma said something (bad) happened last year because of my name, so we’re changing my name.” Names in Korean tradition are so tightly associated with fate and fortune that naming one’s child, or re-naming oneself, as Ari did, is no simple feat though. With her parents’ approval, she was given a list to choose from, from a local naming studio, again based on her time and date of birth. The name Ari stood out to her on one of these lists. Unlike Yewon, Ari is a purely Korean name, and not derived from medieval Chinese.

The name Song, inherited from her father, is not an allusion to any folk tune, but has deeply geographical and historical roots.

It can be traced back to the Song Dynasty, an era of imperial China lasting from 960 to 1279 AD. Ari explains it is unclear whether the linguistic influence dripped into the Korean peninsula from Northern China and the name was just borrowed from medieval Chinese by Koreans, who did not have a written alphabet until 1443, or whether her family are indeed descended from this imperial lineage.

Suzanne Tuhasha Karandagoda Mudalige

I met Suzanne, or Suzie, at my university’s Christian Union. The Christian faith is fundamental to her, and her family’s naming choices.

The name Suzanne has Biblical roots, derived from the Hebrew “shoshan” meaning “lily” or “lily of the valley”. My friend explains, “they (my parents) wanted me to have a Christian name, and Suzanne is supposed to be a friend of Jesus in the Bible.”

Faith plays a big part in her father’s name too. On his birth certificate, Suzanne’s Sri Lankan Sinhalese father is Haresh, derived from Hare Krishna. It was given to him by his grandmother, who was interested in Hinduism and influenced by the popularity of Bollywood films exported from India at the time. Suzanne’s father however goes by Patrick- he feels no connection to Hindu mythology, and feels this name, Patrick, which was given to him as a second name by his Christian mother, more fully expresses who he is and what he believes.

Tuhasha, Suzanne’s second name, is a contraption of her parents’ names, Haresh and ‘Tutu’, her mother Indunica’s pet name. She explains she loves how unique it is.

The surname Karandagoda, from her father, is a typical Sinhalese name, indicating her family’s traditional caste and geographical origin, namely, the coastal region of Galle. Mudalige, also indicating a traditionally ‘pure’ Sinhalese bloodline, translates to “house of money.”

But Suzanne’s story isn’t quite that simple. Her surnames are very traditionally Sinhalese. She laughs, “if you were only to read my name as a Sri Lankan person, you would never have guessed that I’ve got Tamil (heritage), right?” Indeed, names can also conceal, as much as they reveal. Her mother, Indunica Philips, is mostly Tamil, Sri Lanka’s northern ethnic minority. Her parents’ union as Tamil and Sinhalese Sri Lankans is all the more significant considering the country’s recent civil war between the Tamil and Sinhalese warring factions. In this sense, my friend’s name also tells a story of reconciliation, of love crossing bitter ethnic divides.

Names, and our relationships to them, are complicated. Interviewing my closest friends has allowed me to just scratch the surface into how much a few letters can reveal. Mafias, imperial dynasties and civil wars. There’s clearly a lot more to our names.

What is your name? How do you feel about it? I encourage you to mull it over today, it may be carrying much more history than you realise. I’ll leave you with some food for thought from Sheela: “The words we use, through their histories and associations, shape our realities, they give meaning to our experience of the world. And a name-something so intimate to us, so connected to us- is one of the most powerful expressions of this process.”

*I have a scheduled meeting to formally interview author Sheela Banerjee on her book and research methods. Unfortunately, this falls after the submission date of this assignment, however I will add the interview to the online version of this article when it is complete.