What’s in a Name?

When Shakespeare’s Juliet Capulet (in Romeo and Juliet) famously asked, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” she was not suggesting that names don’t matter, rather she was making a desperate, romantic plea to ignore the political realities of Verona. To Juliet, a name was a mere external label, completely detached from the core essence or intrinsic character of the person bearing it. But history, sociology, and politics tell a vastly different story.

One person who understood this very well on St. Martin is my good friend, Joseph Lake Jr. I recall that he received quite some backlash for giving his children African names. That was almost five decades ago. Mandela was still on Robben Island - considered a “terrorist” - and apartheid was still very much alive and well. Everything African was viewed in derogatory terms. And to have the testicular fortitude to give all your children African names at the time was to expose yourself to ridicule and be seen as a pariah. How times have changed!

It goes without saying that a name is very seldom just a random collection of syllables. It is a vessel of identity, a cultural map, a social marker, and a site of intense political struggle. From the moment we are given one, our names begin acting as our primary interface with the world, our calling card, so to speak — shaping how we are perceived, how we perceive ourselves, and how we navigate the structures of power around us.

Anchoring Identity

Culturally, a name is a bridge between the past and the present. In many indigenous and traditional societies, naming is not a passive choice but a profound ritual. It can denote the circumstances of a child’s birth, the aspirations of the parents, or a direct line of ancestral inheritance.

There is an African proverb that says:

"A name is a blueprint of a person’s destiny."  For instance, in the Yoruba culture of West Africa, names like Babatunde (“father has returned”) or Yetunde (“mother has returned”) do more than identify an individual; they express a deep cosmological belief in the continuity of life and ancestral reincarnation.

Similarly, when people migrate, or are torn from their homeland, their names become portable anchors of their heritage. On the other hand, the deliberate stripping away of names has historically been used as a primary weapon of cultural erasure.

During the evil period of Trans-Atlantic Chattel Slavery, enslaved Africans were systematically stripped of their birth names and given the surnames of their enslavers. This was a calculated move to sever their connection to their homelands, histories, and humanity. It was done deliberately because to control a person's name is to control their narrative and their identity.

We see this in that passage in Alex Haley’s classic, Roots, where Kunta Kinte is being violently renamed Toby. The enslavers/colonizers knew that naming is an exercise of power, a declaration of ownership. You name a dog because it belongs to you; it is your property. You name it so that it answers in obedience whenever you call it.

For the African, however, naming is perhaps the most important ritual following the birth of a child. It is usually a community affair in which the newborn is formally welcomed into the fold. The elders give the baby names that express the specific hopes and aspirations for the child's moral character, wealth, health and destiny.

Bias and Belonging

In the social sphere, names function as a form of shorthand coding. Long before someone meets us, our names whisper details about our gender, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic background. Because human beings are riddled with implicit biases, these linguistic shortcuts can have measurable, real-world consequences.

For example, sociologists and economists have repeatedly demonstrated the phenomenon of "name discrimination." In a landmark field experiment by economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, resumes with white-sounding names (like Emily or Greg) received 50% more callbacks for interviews than identical resumes with Black-sounding names (like Lakisha or Jamal).

It was Dale Carnegie who once said, "Names are the sweetest, most important sound in any language."

While Carnegie meant this as a tip for interpersonal warmth, the darker flip side is that an unfamiliar or "foreign-sounding" name can evoke systemic coldness.

In multicultural Western societies, many immigrants and minorities face the exhausting dilemma of the "resume whitewash"—altering or shortening their names to sound more anglicized (e.g., changing Mohammad to Mo or Xian to Sean) simply to get a foot through the door.

In fact, the current President of the US deliberately uses the full name of former President Obama - Barack Hussein Obama - as a dog whistle, to appeal to the Islamophobic sentiments of his MAGA base.

Moreover, naming conventions reveal deep-seated social hierarchies regarding gender. The tradition of a woman taking her husband’s surname upon marriage dates back to English common law and the concept of coverture, where a woman’s legal rights were subsumed by those of her husband. While modern couples increasingly opt for hyphenation, keeping birth names, or creating entirely new blended surnames, the standard expectation remains a powerful social script.

The Political Battlefield

Politically, names are instruments of state legibility and control. Historically, surnames were largely popularized by states for the purpose of taxation, conscription, and census-tracking. The introduction of fixed surnames allowed centralized governments to transform messy, localized communities into an organized, trackable citizenry.

Because naming is tied so closely to sovereignty and power, it frequently becomes a battleground for political resistance and engineering.

One of the basic principles of Postcolonial Theory states that "to name is to exercise power, to bring into existence, to define reality." To understand this concept better, let’s consider the politics of toponymy—the naming of places.

When a colonial power invades a territory, one of its first acts is often to rename the landscape, superimposing its own language over the indigenous geography. The reclaiming of original names is, therefore, a vital step in post-colonial healing and national sovereignty. We see this in the shift from Bombay to Mumbai, Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, etc.

On an individual level, political regimes have frequently used naming laws to enforce assimilation. In the 1980s, the Bulgarian government forced its ethnic Turkish minority to adopt Slavic names as part of a brutal campaign of forced national alignment. In recent decades, countries like Iceland and France have maintained strict state registries of approved names to protect national linguistic traditions, effectively policing how citizens can identify their children.

Until recently, parents in the French-controlled northern half of our island could not give their children African names.

On the flip side, changing one's name can be a radical act of political consciousness and even self-determination. During the Civil Rights movement in the United States, figures like Mohammed Ali and Malcolm X rejected what they viewed as "slave names" to reclaim their identity. Malcolm X famously explained that the "X" symbolized the true African family name that he could never know.

St. Martin’s foremost poet and publisher, Lasana Sekou shed his European names for African ones, because he sees naming in itself as a revolutionary, and liberating act. In his pan-Caribbean poem, “We Continue”, Sekou celebrates the region's heroes and shared cultural identity. He calls out the names of Caribbean historical figures and heroes in the poem, the way a griot chants the names of the ancestors, emphasizing regional solidarity, anti-colonial liberation, and the endurance of Caribbean people.

Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott has also written extensively about names. His poem "Names" (Sea Grapes, 1976) is a profound exploration of postcolonial identity, language, and the historical erasure of the Caribbean people. It ties directly back to his concept of the "New Adam"—someone who must rebuild a world and a language from scratch after his history has been stripped away.

The poem opens with the sea as a blank slate, a kind of tabula rasa upon which the Caribbean man must exercise his “Adamic nature”.

He writes: “My race began as the sea began, / with no nouns, and with no horizon."

Walcott rejects the colonial precept of domination by nomination and instead advocates that in their innocence and purity, the “new Adams” should name their own reality.

It is morning yet on creation day.

If we agree that the colonized mind is made in the image and likeness of its colonizer, it becomes an essential part of the decolonization process to rename our spaces, our institutions and reclaim our landscape and mindscape in word and in deed.

Conclusion

To conclude, Shakespeare’s Juliet was wrong. A rose by any other name might smell just as sweet to a biologist, but in the human theater, names carry immense architectural weight and meaning. They are the invisible clothing we wear every day, woven from the threads of our ancestors' journeys, our society’s biases, and our governments' laws.

To respect a person’s name — to pronounce it correctly, to validate its origin, and to recognize its significance—is an act of basic human dignity and even human rights. To choose a name, to reclaim a name, or to fight for the right to bear one is an act of profound self-realization. Far from being arbitrary labels, our names are the mirrors that reflect exactly who we are, where we come from, and who we hope to become.

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