Your name is your identity

Dear followers,

            Firstly, I would like to apologize for my absence to all my regular readers and followers, I have been incredibly inactive. Our son was born on March 11 and I needed some time to find a good routine that would work for myself and my family. But our son is doing so well. We truly have been blessed with a healthy, strong and loveable son.

            About 9 months ago, we were told that we were going to have a son, I had not looked into boys names. The only thing I was sure about was that it had to be a Kurdish name.

            I’m a firm believer in the phrase ‘your name is your identity’. As a parent you are given the right to name your child and in some cases this child will face many difficulties when growing up. Your child can be discriminated or refused because of his or her name. My grandfather was such a patriotic man that he named my mother Kurdistan. Not knowing, back then, how many challenging she would face because of her name.

She always loved to study mathematics but because of her name she didn’t get accepted. She either had to walk away or change her name. Now, I remember, back when I was at university, I met a girl who had a very funny Kurdish name. Translated to English it means ‘don’t cry my love’. Maybe she cried a lot when she was born? But would you, as a parent, like to burden a child with a name like that for the rest of her life? I do have to say that my son will find some difficulties in the name we have given him. Maybe I have a bit of my grandfather in me when it comes to patriotism.

            I know that my son will be going back and forth between Kurdistan and Europe and therefore I didn’t want a name that would be difficult to pronounce. We named our child Aryan and I know that some people will relate that name to the concept in the Nazi ideology of the Nordic race – According to them; the Aryan race was a master race. But it just happens to be our race as well. His name originates from the Sanskrit word Arya which means Noble. And looking further into history of the Kurdish language, Aryan truly identifies his identity.

I found his name when I was going through my grandfather’s/mother’s book. My grandfather started to collect and write down all the Kurdish names he had heard of and published that book in the 50’s. This book has been republished a couple of times by my mother and now I wanted to add the names that were still missing. I have been writing down all the names and the new names I knew of during my pregnancy.

I also wanted to know how many people here in Kurdistan give their child a Kurdish name and so I spent my morning counting all the Kurdish names that were given to children registered in Hawler in January 2014. If you’re curious about the number or if you’re curious to know if there is an increase or not, you’ll have to keep an eye on my blogs. It will come up soon.

           About two months ago I was walking around in Europe and I met Dilxwaz, I didn’t know she was Kurdish until she introduced herself; a very pleasant surprise. Identity groups, belonging, language and names; without them, Kurds would have ‘disappeared’ already.