Time and time again I have suffered the turmoil of hearing my name pronounced in a manner which renders it unrecognisable to me. I have a simple name, a name which I utter with the same pride which my mother flaunted the first time she called me by my name.
Tshepang / v. pl. setswana : trust
It is believed by some that a child becomes their name, thus a name is more than a mere label by which to be identified. The name which was bestowed upon me is an ode to the fundamental elements of my character – trust and hope. So naturally it follows, out of respect for myself and my name, that I reject any distorted or watered-down pronounciation of Tshepang.
Whenever I think of how foreign tongues abuse the sensibility of my name I am usually consumed by a seemingly interminable rage. I would like to think that this is owing to the fact that my name is mostly ill-pronounced by white people, and as much as I am sensitive to the white toungue’s inability to replicate the sounds of my mother tongue, my name is highly sensitive to the ignorance by which it is oftentimes abused. I am pointing this out because believe it or not, being black in this country means being faced by racist confrontations on a daily basis; the mistreatment of my name, oftentimes by ignorant non-black individuals, is yet another pill of racist micro-agressions which I must supposedly swallow.
On nother note, I was recently introduced to a black Jamila Woods who equates blackness with magic and reminds us of black female struggle heroes such as Rosa Parks. In one of her tunes, In my Name, she defiantly echoes my sentiment on the name issue:
I like to make you wash your mouth before you talk about me
keep my name out your mouth cause you can’t handle the flee
don’t cut your toungue on my syllables
bet you need a syllabus to teach you how my vowels sound
it’s a long “i” baby baby
but your tongue too lazy
needa fix your face and say your grace
before you pray to me
I guess I don’t have much else to say, Jamila pretty much sums it up. Shout out to a home girl.
melaninandcocoa 