By any other name would smell as sweet."
-- Shakespeare
Meditation: by Joy Harjo, a citizen of the Muscogee (or Creek) Nation, an excerpt from her poem “Remember”
Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is…
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too...
Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.
Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.
Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember that language comes from this.
Remember the dance that language is, that life is.
Remember.
Reading: by Hendrik Hertzberg from “Senses of Entitlement” (The New Yorker, April 8, 2013)
Names make news, an old newsroom motto has it. But names also make opinions. What something gets called can have more spin on it than a Mariano Rivera cutter, whether the person doing the calling intends it that way or not. Sometimes the difference between positive and negative is a matter of taste, literally or figuratively… Sometimes the difference is a product of circumstances, as when yesterday’s beachfront property becomes today’s flood zone. Sometimes it gets all judgmental. After a couple of Martinis one may regard oneself as pleasantly pixillated, but one’s spouse may consider one drunk as a skunk.
In politics, the naming is almost always with malice (or niceness) aforethought. Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, the Occupied Territories, Occupied Palestine: all denote the same geographical reality, but on a sliding (or ascending, take your pick) moral scale. Call it what you will—enhanced interrogation or torture, collateral damage or civilian deaths, pro-life or anti-reproductive rights, global warming or climate change, homosexual marriage or marriage equality, assault rifles or “semi-automatic small-calibre sporting rifles with plastic accessories”—it’s all the same, and… it’s all, to some degree, propaganda.
Reading: by author and activist Eve Ensler from a piece entitled “The Power and Mystery of Naming Things,” which was read on the radio program “This I Believe”
I believe in the power and mystery of naming things. Language has the capacity to transform our cells, rearrange our learned patterns of behavior, and redirect our thinking. I believe in naming what’s right in front of us because that is often what is most invisible…
I believe one person’s declaration sparks another and then another. Helen Caldicott naming the consequences of an escalating nuclear arms race gave rise to an antinuclear movement. The brave soldier who came forward and named the abuses at Abu Ghraib Prison was responsible for a sweeping investigation.
Naming things, breaking through taboos and denial is the dangerous, terrifying and crucial work. This has to happen in spite of political climates or coercions, in spite of careers being won or lost, in spite of the fear of being criticized, outcast, or disliked. I believe freedom begins with naming things. Humanity is preserved by it.
Reading: by Patricia Fargnoli a poem entitled “Naming My Daughter”
In the Uruba tribe of Africa, children are named not only at birth but throughout their lives by their characteristics and the events that befall them.
The one who took hold in the cold night
The one who kicked loudly
The one who slid down quickly in the ice storm
She who came while the doctor was eating dessert
New one held up by heels in the glare
The river between two brothers
Second pot on the stove
Princess of a hundred dolls
Hair like water falling beneath moonlight
Strides into the day
She who runs away with motorcycle club president
Daughter kicked with a boot
Daughter blizzard in the sky
Daughter night-pocket
She who sells sports club memberships
One who loves over and over
She who wants child but lost one.
She who wants marriage but has none
She who never gives up
Diana (Goddess of the Chase)
Doris (for the carrot-top grandmother
she never knew)
Fargnoli (for the father
who drank and left and died)
Peter Pan, Iron Pumper
Tumbleweed who goes months without calling
Daughter who is a pillar of light
Daughter mirror, Daughter stands alone
Daughter boomerang who always comes back
Daughter who flies forward into the day
where I will be nameless.
What’s In a Name?
A Sermon Delivered on April 14, 2013
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
My name is “Axel.” Not the most common American name. It is more common in Germany, which is where I was born. It happens with some regularity that I am addressed as “Alex.” And this serves as a gentle reminder that, somehow, I don’t quite fit this culture’s commonly accepted categories.
When I was in elementary school, in Pearl River, NY, my name was an easy target for playground bullies. My not-so-friendly friends would circle around and taunt me with a sing-song chant: “Axel forgot his wheels, Axel forgot his wheels,” until I fled, frustrated and hurt.
My parents chose my name when they were a young couple with dreams of living in this country. They thought it worked well in both English and German.
My middle name, is even more unusual. The “H” you see on our church letterhead, between “Axel” and “Gehrmann” stands for “Hilger.” My parents picked the name to remember my father’s older sister, Hildegard, who died a few years before I was born. She was only 38 years old.
The name “Gehrmann” has been passed down the generations, from father to father. It goes back to the ancient Germanic word “gehr,” which means “spear” or “javelin.” Some ancient ancestor of mine was a spear-carrier.
I didn’t have a say in the name I was given. But it does say something about who I am, and who I have become.
* * *
Names have power – both the names we are given and the names we give. The names we give to the people around us, the names we give to the issues that affect us, have power.
In politics, names are a kind of propaganda, Hendrik Hertzberg writes. The words we use to shape public policy, and frame our agendas are powerful. They say something about who we are and what we want.
When I preach sermons about torture, reproductive rights, or global warming, I try to offer a balanced, non-partisan perspective. But, of course, even the most basic words I use to address the issues say something about my political bias, and my agenda.
Last week our church hosted a local rally for immigration reform. Those involved in the effort support the rights of “undocumented immigrants.” Those who oppose them tend to do so because they are distrustful of “illegal aliens.” It makes a difference how we name the people stuck in the network of our Homeland Security system. “Alien” is a name that serves to distance and dehumanize real people.
It’s a distinction I am vividly aware of, because I am German. I am here legally as a “resident alien,” which sounds like a creature from outer space. At some point this year I may become an “American citizen” – which sounds very different, sounds like a person. I wonder how that new name will affect who I am.
* * *
The historian Loren Graham writes,
“A common concept in history is that knowing the name of something or someone gives one power over that thing or person. This concept occurs in many… cultures—in ancient and primitive tribes, as well as in Islamic, Jewish, Egyptian, Vedic, Hindu, and Christian traditions. The …persistence and historical continuity of the linking of naming and power are unmistakable…”
He says,
“In Genesis we hear in the first verses that "God said 'Let there be Light' and there was light." Think about that statement logically. God named the thing before he created it; the naming seems a necessary first step toward creation. Then, according to Genesis, God gave Man the right to name all the animals and, at the same time, the right of dominion over them.” (from “The Power of Names: Religion and Mathematics”)
* * *
The power of names, and the power of naming, has particular meaning for American Indians.
Alan Ray is the president of Elmhurst College, in Elmhurst, IL. He is also a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He writes,
“The people who lived on this continent before and since Europeans came had names for themselves. Often they called themselves “principal people” …or “first people” in their languages...
Those who became colonizers of these first peoples gave them different names. Thinking he had found a route to India, Columbus famously called them “Indians.” He distinguished some groups from others… according to whether they were fierce or friendly to his crew. The power to name is the power to assign qualities to things and to people, so in the British and later the American imagination, Indians were either fearsome savages or gentle folks abiding in an Eden-like state of Nature. Neither status is fully human.” (from “Getting to Know You: Native Americans and the Power of Naming,” delivered for Native American Awareness Week at Elmhurst College, 2009)
Alan Ray has experienced firsthand how the stereotypes with which we portray Indians serve to demean and diminish real people. Here in town, one example of destructive stereotyping is found in the form of Chief Illiniwek – the former “symbol” or “mascot” of the university’s athletic department. At half-time shows not long ago, a student dressed up in authentic Indian garb performed a rousing dance, firing up the fans, portraying a caricature of an Indian. Supporters of this tradition said the performance was meant to honor Indians. But real Indians experienced it as just the opposite.
The American Indian Studies Program at the U of I has opposed the Chief for years. Real Indians say the Chief masquerade demeans them and exacerbates a “climate of intolerance, abuse, and hostility.” (from a statement by the American Indian Studies Program, by Robert Warrior, Director, Sept. 30, 2009)
Today, a new generation of students is pushing to have the retired Chief reinstated. Sadly, it seems the university and our community are failing to educate them on the history of this issue.
Alan Ray says,
“Indians are here, we’re real, we do not all look the same or think the same, we have very different tribal histories and very different relationships with the United States and individual states—some groups “recognized,” some not, with very different levels of tribal cultural knowledge, skills and tastes. Paradoxically, Indian people are real but there are no “real Indians,” no icon of “Indianness,”… The one thing every Indian in America has in common is a shared history of cultural oppression—genocide—that started more than 500 years ago. It is not a pretty history but it is one everyone who lives on this continent should know.”
* * *
In a collection of poems entitled, “The Secret Powers of Naming,” Sara Littlecrow-Russell includes one poignant poem entitled, “Russian Roulette, Indian Style.” This is how it goes:
Russian Roulette
Indian style,
Is the spinning cylinder
Of a 500-year-old gun
With 5 out of 6 chambers loaded.
Each bullet
Has a different name –
Alcohol
Disease
Poverty
Violence
Assimilation
Survival is finding the name
Of the empty chamber.
Sara Littlecrow-Russell describes her book as a “journey of naming.” She says, “It is a methodical walk around the chambers of a revolver loaded with five colonial bullets. The bullets are alcohol, disease, poverty, violence, and assimilation. This book is named these things, because the sacred act of naming brings power over them. The sixth, empty chamber of the gun is named “survival.” In English, survival is a noun. It is static. It can be owned. Bought. Sold. Traded. In my Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibway, “survival” is a verb. An act of motion. A choice of direction. It cannot be owned, it must be lived.”
Joy Harjo writes, “To give a name, to be named, sets up a relationship, a connection, makes a community of sense that will stand no matter the tests of the unreasonable.”
* * *
Back in the 1970s the American poet Adrienne Rich taught English at City College in Manhattan. She worked with an ethnically and economically diverse student population, which did not have easy access to higher education. It was an eye-opening experience for her, and it deepened her appreciation for the power of language.
As she saw it, most schools, whether public or parochial, rewarded “conformity, passivity, and correct answers” and penalized “the troublesome question “as trouble-making,” the lively, independent, active child as “disruptive,” curiosity as misbehavior.”
Reflecting on the lives of the students she met, she writes:
“My daily life as a teacher confronts me with young men and women who have had language and literature used against them, to keep them in their place, to mystify, to bully, to make them feel powerless. Courses in great books or speed-reading are not an answer when it is the meaning of literature itself that is in question…
What has held me, and what I think holds many who teach basic writing, are the hidden veins of possibility running through students who don’t know (and strongly doubt) that this is what they were born for, but who may find it out to their own amazement, students who, grim with self-depreciation and prophesies of their own failure or tight with a fear they cannot express, can be lured to sticking it out to some moment of breakthrough, when they discover that they have ideas that are valuable, even original, and can express those ideas on paper…” (from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, p. 63, 67)
Adrienne Rich firmly believes that language is power. She says, “To be released into language [is] not simply learning the jargon of an elite, fitting unexceptionably into the status quo, but learning that language can be used as a means of changing reality.”
* * *
There is power and mystery in naming things. “Language has the capacity to transform our cells, rearrange our learned patterns of behavior, and redirect our thinking.” Naming what is right in front of us is sometimes the most difficult, because that is often what is most invisible.
* * *
Each of us has names. We have been given names. But our naming doesn’t occur just once in a lifetime. Naming is more than an act carried out long ago by our elders and ancestors, an act in which we had little say.
Yes, we are shaped by our history. Yes, we are shaped by our traditions. But we need not be confined by them. The past has brought us to the place we stand today. The future is in our hands. We are free, and freedom begins with naming. Naming is a first step toward creation.
We each use names and give names every day, as we interact with one another and with the world around us. Naming is a sacred act that conveys profound power.
We all know what it feels like to have language used against us. Haven’t we all had moments in our lives, when we were called names designed to bully us, to make us feel powerless, to keep us in our place? Haven’t we all had moments when we were made to feel alien and excluded? It isn’t a pleasant experience.
In some ways this kind of naming continues, and in some ways we perpetuate it, in the names we use to speak of others.
Even though this is a very common experience, putting it into words isn’t easy. Naming what is right in front of us is sometimes the most difficult, because that is often what is most invisible. Naming the invisible can be terrifying, and yet it is crucial that we do so.
May the names we choose make perfectly clear
That none of us are aliens.
May the names we use make perfectly clear,
That we are all sons and daughters of the same earth, brother and sisters.
And may the life we live give shape to new names,
So that each of us may some day be called
The One Who Dared to Love.
Amen.
Nice sermon Axel!
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