How i got my name Poem by Charl-Pierre Naudé

(or, A Concise History of Colonisation)


Giving a name to something
is to breath life into it.
Of all the ways animals procreate,
protect and survive communally,
a single member giving a name
to another is the thing
that changes the species forever.

Giving names
is the origin of humanity.
The beginning of Creation.
Why Darwin is wrong.
And the reason why his cat left.

The granting of names is also the reason
why God created Heaven and Earth within seven days.
Seven names in one family are more than enough.

Giving a name to another is an act of Love.
(A ruthless act of subjugation
too, which we'll leave unprobed for now.)

My parents gave me a name
about which I have divided feelings.
My name sports a hyphen,
seeming no less divided about itself.

But one must treat one's name with utmost care -
because it doesn't belong to you.
It is a way in which other people express their love.

The name I have is a stem-with-leaves
plucked from the Huguenot diaspora bush
but the roots stayed behind, and the corolla too.

I was a few months old already,
the sickly captain of a waterlogged paper boat,
my feet struggling in their socks like red romans in a scoop,
when pa realised that my name
had been misspelt in the national register.
There are differing accounts as to why those erstwhile refugees
from France forfeited their language so readily:
they were actually a Germanic tribe shod and bow-tied against their will
in a handyman language of the Devil toady to the Pope.
Or else, they were so anxious to learn the birdy language of heaven
that casting off earthly mumbo-jumbo was only a pleasure.
Scarcely had the road's flurry of dust angels
laid down in their rest again when the old foot-sloggers
forgot how to spell their own names.
The new vineyard cannot be trusted.
Neither its goblet of Holy Communion.

But alas, my dad was an erudite man.
He would rectify the problem for ever.
The settlers of Africa always get things wrong.
But it is never too late too set the record straight.
So he got into his Willy's Jeep to brave the hundred
or so kilometres to the main town of remote East Griqualand
where he was a doctor, through driving snow and rain
- where people paid him with chickens and eggs -
and got lost in the creeping mist, his limbs disappearing piece
by piece as the Jeep laboured through sludge, on a mythical journey.
The windscreen would clear under the wipers and the buried scape
would blink, and instantly disappear again under flung snow.
It was a question of correctness, of knowing thyself:
his son's name must have the original spelling.
A wagon had crushed half of it, another part was just gone.
That wasn't good enough. It was time for the record.
No half-baked name for his boy. Time for memory.
For love. My father was a very sweet man.

But the attempt failed.
Again the name miscarriaged;
more South African now, pidginised even more.
Further away from its roots, more in the future.
More itself than anyone could imagine.
The ‘es' of the French Charles, as in Charles Baudelaire
(I'll fancy myself )
no, more precisely Charles Pierre Baudelaire,
was as gone as ever, and never retrieved.
My name remained Charl.
Simply syncopated.
Maybe the lizard had got a fright, and lost its tail,
which then was bottled by a sangoma.
And the hyphen of all those boring Jean-Pierres,
a splinter-insert for joining a vowel
to its follow-up consonant, ended in my name.
It must have been an earthquake that shook up
the splinters and the spaghetti alphabets
everywhere at that moment exactly, when my dad
stuck his hand in the name jar.

Yip, that is what happened.
That same earth tremor also jumbled
some other very important names and events.
Look what it did to Genghis Garibaldi,
the man after whom Guy Fawkes is named.
Or poor Henry VIII, beheaded six times
by his awful wife because it didn't work
the first time, neither the second, and so forth.
And the Indian emperor who built
that beautiful mausoleum, the Vatican, for his dead wife -
one can always trust the genitals to float
a breathtaking construction on holy water.
And don't forget the First Lateran Council,
one of the most sombre fashion parades of evening gowns ever
and entirely negligible due to that self-denial
inherent to such business,
whereafter a lot of unhappy souls
discovered they had female bodies.
I got off lightly.

My name is spelt wrong
but in the right way.
You only have to compare it
to other versions, to see this is true.
Its origin lies
not in the past but in the future,
in a dictionary still drifting in space,
its thesaurus hovering right next to it,
according to astronomers.
A John and a Jack;
two brother galaxies,
two drag queens:
a girl dressed in the same design
but for a different season.

The future:
roots spreading in the air;
my name is a tree that dived into the earth.

And I sport my hyphen
like a plaster on my nose.
I walk into the kitchen again.
I am a little boy.
To where mom stands.
To where she still stands, in my memory.
She rubs on the plaster to secure it.
This is our secret.
We pretend together.
I loved it then, why wouldn't
I love it now?

We smile at each other,
my mom and I.
In a while, just now,
my dad will be back.
I can't wait.
He'll crouch next to me,
pout his lips intently
and carefully examine the strip on my nose.
Then he will ask me what is wrong.