A name, just sound and smoke that damp celestial ardor?

Or: why names are important

“Feeling is everything, name is but sound and smoke that damp celestial ardor.” So says Faust in Goethe's Faust. But is it really so, is our name really nothing but sound and smoke that damp celestial ardor? If so, why is it that the first thing they take away from you in a prison, in a concentration camp, in a detention centre like Guantanamo, is your name, and turn you into a number? In this way, they take away your personality, your humanity. For me it is obvious: our name is much more than sound and smoke, the name represents our individuality, it makes us human.

When, a little over a year ago, I started to connect with more of my inner community selves, one of the first things I did was to give them all names: my inner girl became Zora, taking her name from Zora the redhead (a German TV series in my teens), my little one was named Alex, my (then) inner teenage boy started to be called Rigby, and more... And, with their own names they started to develop their own personalities, each one of them. Their names are much more than sound and smoke...

And my name? I have a name - perhaps more correctly: I had - that was given to me by my parents. This name - now my deadname - for me represents their expectation of who I should have been. But, this is not me, and never has been. Beyond the fact that this name is not me, this name for me is also very much linked to all the abuse and mistreatment I suffered in my childhood at the hands of my father (sexual abuse) and my mother (a range of psychological abuse to intrusions into my intimate space sometimes bordering on the sexual).

When, ten years ago now, I started to identify as a non-binary person, I initially did nothing with my name, and, somewhat later, I started experimenting with small adjustments to my deadname to de-masculinise it. But, a few weeks ago I started to feel that this is not enough. With all the adjustments this name never ended up convincing me, it remained an alien name that didn't represent me. It simply remained the non-existent person my parents would have liked to have.

Then, I realised that I needed a name of my own. I didn't have to think much. I decided on Alana. My queer adult self was already called Alana. According to the website elsignificadodelnombre.com (in Spanish), Alana is of Scottish Gaelic origin, and is a name that can be masculine or feminine - ideal for a non-binary person like me.

At first, I felt weird hearing my name as Alana. But this lasted only a few days. Soon I began to feel a liberation, a release from the chain that still connected me to the person my parents imagined me to be. Alana. That's me.

Ezra Furman sings in their song Book of Our Names:

I want there to be a book of our names
None of them missing, none quite the same
None of us ashes, all of us flames
And I want us to read it aloud

[...]

And the names will bе the real ones that are ours
Not the ones given us by the enemy powers
But the ones that we know in our bones and our bowels
And they'll be said out loud and repeated

Alana, my name, and not the name given to me by the enemy powers - my parents.

Now I am also exploring changing my surname, as the surname also - and perhaps at the formal level of descendancy even more - links me to "my" family, to this family that never felt mine, that always seemed like a cage to me. So, I carry the surname of my father, of my abuser. I have never felt comfortable with this surname. But only now, facing all my childhood traumas, and especially the abuse, this name causes me a lot of discomfort. How can I continue to carry the name of my abuser? How can I thus point out to the whole world that I am a descendant of this fucking family? Yet another cage. I feel the need to disassociate myself from that family, both my father and my mother.

Luckily, in my daily life, far away from a formal world, my surname is not very present. So I can forget that I carry the surname of my abuser. Even in my health centre my doctor calls me by my first name (which I have not yet changed to Alana with the Andalusian Health Service). But, this does not mean that I want to continue living with this surname. After having given myself my own name, I also want to give myself my own surname, which does not link me to my abusers (both my father and my mother), but to my community: Alana Queer.