At Pizza Pizza, Starbucks, and the photo store down my street, my name is Sara. It’s not a lie. It’s my middle name. It’s easy to spell. It’s “normal.” As I approach 20, I find myself thinking more about what this word “normal” means. A few months ago, I read a three-year-old piece by Toronto writer Shailee Koranne, called, My Name Was Anglicized — But I’m Taking It Back. In this essay, Koranne highlights the microaggressive behaviours that resulted in a passive erasure of her identity. She told students in high school her name was “Shelley,” using Anglicization to achieve normalcy. Her “Shelley,” is not so different from my “Sara.”
I never truly appreciated how my parents always defended the pronunciation and spelling of my name if people got it wrong. My father told me that if my name was spelled or pronounced incorrectly, it wasn’t my name. What he implied was that messing up my name meant invalidating my identity. I am not me if you change my name, if you spell it Hadiya, or pronounce it Hidd-ee-yah, which sounds too much like “hideous,” or Had-die-yah, which many of my teachers have. An identity, for my parents, has always been a question of agency. If somebody threatens this agency, it is my duty to correct it. But how, then, did I come to this realization so late? Why, for years, did I let so many people spell and pronounce my name wrong? I tended to justify the same way I…
