Naming &/or Claiming
When I google my surname in a fit of idle introspection I find it imprinted on a town in Haiti, a slave revolt in Louisiana, church registers in the Channel Islands, various papers in France and Canada, and a colonial governor’s family in Angola (which perhaps accounts for the Haiti connection). The indexing that the internets does is odd like that: a chain of random connections showing up the circularity of history as the-named, its shaping in and by violence, its traces of resistance and liberation, its surprising affects. A series of patented, popular links scream at me: FindYourPast.com and so on.
We don’t want to bear certain histories or historicities, we don’t want to make space for it in suspensions or sorries. But we will fight for our names (my good name, not in my name). Our misplaced names reflect the displacement of history onto us. It’s bigger than us, like our names. We wear it, we wear them.