Changing Names Changing Lives

Naming a child is very important. The name will be like a statement of what the parent hopes for the child. My parents named me Nabil, which means Nobel. They are still praying I will live up to my name. Nabil is an Arabic name, but my last name does not seem to be a typical Arabic name. It does not start with the traditional “AL” and it looks more like an Italian name than Arabic. It would be easy to pass as a European, French or Italian or even English. However, as the famous sailor once said, “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam.” I am proud to be an Arab. Some people may find that strange considering the public opinion in America, but I know my heritage and the contributions of the Arab people to the world and I would not have been born anything else if given the chance. 

      The character created by Bharati Mukherjee in Jasmine, was not as lucky as me. She was not proud of her heritage and she was wanted to be someone else – anyone else. She had several names, and each had a meaning described in the book. Having checked with the name meanings, however, Jyoti does mean Light, and Jasmine means flower (and also gift from God), but Jane does not mean “a fighter and adapter” and Mukherjee writes on page 40. Jane means gracious and merciful, characteristics that Mukherjee does not give to Jyoti, Jasmine, Jazzy, Jase or Jane. 

      Jasmine was trying to find out who she wanted to be. She knew who she did not want to be – the daughter of a poor family with too many girls. She had no choices in India because all the dowry money would be gone by the time she was ready to be married, so her only hope was to be sold into slavery – a marriage to an old man who needed a mother for his orphaned children and housekeeper. However, when she arrived in America she became a surrogate mother to Taylor’s child. Then she became the caregiver of Bud and mother of Du, and orphan from Vietnam. Finally, she ran away again with Taylor and his daughter. Even as she was running away from Bud and going with Taylor to a new life with the only man she loved since her husband was blown apart in the bombing, she says, “Time will tell if I am a tornado, rubble-maker, arising from nowhere and disappearing into a cloud” (Mukherjee 241). 

      It is fairly common for someone to say they are trying to find out who they are. they are looking for themselves, but I think that we can not find out who we are, but we can decide who we want to be and work toward becoming that. We can start with our name, to find out what our parents were thinking about when they gave us our name. I can think of many names worse than Jyoti (Light) or Jasmine (Flower) or Jane (Gracious and merciful) or Nabil (Nobel) to use as a starting point for inventing the person you want to be.