The name “Sabina” is a curious thing. Literally meaning “woman from Sabine,” the historical reference might seem cool until you realize the most notable thing that the Sabine women ever did was be kidnapped and abused. In the culture where I grew up, it was an old woman’s name, a product of generations gone by that you were more likely to find in a nursing home than a playground. In the culture I find myself now, it is assumed to be a misspelling. Surely you meant Sabrina. Or Sabine. Or Salina. Anything but Sabina.
Looking at it objectively, there is no reason for me to be emotionally tied to the misspelt, last-generation abduction reference that is my name.
That doesn’t stop me.
This semester, more than ever before, I have been surrounded by the conversation of changing one’s name. Whether that is from guys who don’t like the name they were given at birth or girls preparing to change their last name in marriage, the question has continued to pop up: “Would you ever change your name?” “Would you do it for your husband?” “Would you do it for yourself?”
If I had a good reason for keeping my first name, that question might not bother me so much. If it fit who I was as a person, or if it represented a member of my family, or even if 60 percent of the people I met could get it right on the first try, I might feel more justified in my attachment to it. Yet I have no good reason. I have no defence for the word that I have been tied to since the day I was born. There is no reason for me to buck against the idea of changing my name.
Except, I guess, that it’s mine.
When all is said and done, the names we have carry very little importance in our lives or experiences. If my birth certificate read Emily or Chavaleh (another name my parents considered that would have made spelling mistakes even more complicated), I doubt almost anything in my life would be different. I would still have the same personality and love the same things. I would likely know the same people and have the same opportunities. All in all, I would be the same person with a different name.
Wouldn’t I?
Long before I ever began to enjoy the process of writing, I remember telling my friends how my future autobiography would be titled “Without the R.” It was not so much that the ‘r’ so often shoved in my name made it worse, or even that the people who put it there were wrong in assuming that it belonged. It was the mere fact that, through its presence, the ‘r’ somehow stripped the word of its meaning. Those three syllables no longer applied to me, and there was nothing I wanted more than to get them back.
Throughout human history, there have been countless discussions about the power of names. In my own area of creative writing, names are studied as a way of conveying meaning, and names in different cultures can often signify much about the person and who they are to the people around them. But even in the modern United States, where names often show no more than the aesthetic preferences of a person’s parents, names still mean something – not because the letters carry some hidden message, but because they signify a person. They represent the expanding unknowable mystery of the person they apply to. They give voice to all the complexities of an identity that could fill a thousand pages and still be unexplainable.
Names don’t matter because they give meaning to the people who carry them. They matter because they represent a being so filled with meaning that it spills over onto them. They are the nouns of souls.
Even when they don’t make any sense.
