How I got my "name"

Hello everyone.  I am Ryan Kennedy.  And growing up that meant something to me.  We carry our name around like an appendage, allowing it to grow with us and to some small degree shape who we are.  Our relationship with the names people call us, our calling names you could say, grows and changes with the cultures around us.  Don’t believe me?  Just look around you.  Do you live somewhere where your get to call your boss Steve? Or is it always Mr/Ms. Jackson?  Have you ever had a professor that insisted that you call them “Dr. someoneso” vs. “Mr/Mrs. Someoneso”?  They did get their PhD after all, and how you address them should reflect this accomplishment.  Your insistence on what your calling name is seems to be an insistence on who you are.  Your individuality.  So when living in a culture devoid of individuals, does it make sense, or seem right to demand to be an individual?  Great question, Ryan.  Thanks Ryan. Well this isn’t the kind of question that has an answer, but I will share my take on this problem and would invite you, my dedicated readers to contribute to the conversation either in the comments section or you can reach me via e-mail because my experience is just one of many and these are the kinds of questions that really need to be shared amongst multiple perspectives.  So more on this in the bonus section at the end.

Growing up as a white, straight, American, male I was afforded the privilege of dictating who I was.  Culturally I was permitted to base my identity off of my accomplishments, my jobs, my academic achievements, and ultimately my choices.  If somebody did make assumptions about who I was they were typically positive and affirming and gave me the space to develop into the person that I felt that I wanted to become rather than spending my time trying to fit myself into a mold that society had created for me or felt the pressure of societies expectation of who I should be weighing down on me.  Now I have mentioned in previous posts about how even for someone like me the groups and cultures around me exert enormous influence over who I become, but even so I was left an enormous license in deciding who I wanted to be.  Living in Burkina challenged that space.  Challenged my identity.  But in a strange and unprecedented way.

In the states names are very important.  You meet someone, you shake their hand, they ask you your name, you tell them and ask them their name, and then if you’re anything like me you some how never manage to focus hard enough to actually hear their name because you’re too busy thinking of other things like breathing and saxophones and literally anything your brain can think of besides that person’s name.  At which point you are forced to embarrassedly ask that person what there name is while assuring them that you are going to forget it again.  And all of this because names are important.  We identify with our name, we are proud of our name, we like people calling us by our name, and we note with pride the moments when our superiors upgrade us from “you” or “weatherby” to our actual name.  It’s a sign of respect and refusing to call somebody by their name is refusing to acknowledge that person as an individual.  So I guess it would surprise you all to hear that for a good portion of my service I had no name.

In Burkina a person’s name serves a different role than it does in most social circles in America.  It is used to identify somebody as part of a group rather than as an individual because no individual is more important then the group that they belong to.  The title of that group allows you to know something about who this person is, what they do, and decide if they should be allowed within your group or if you are not ready to trust them.  While in Burkina many volunteers are confronted with what I would call the “Nassara problem”, that is the general population simply calls all of us a single word.  In my region it was Nassara.  In the western region it was Tubaboo.  When I was in Togo and Benin it was Yovo.  And no matter where you go it is never your actual name.  It is an informative statement of who you are made by others.  There is rarely a moment during the introductions when you will be asked for your given or personal name, you are simply given this new name.  Often times I will hear people translate this name as “white”, which is often the case, but not always true.  In fact I know many nonwhite volunteers who still receive this name.  I find a more accurate translation to be “stranger”.  Which makes a lot of sense coming from an interdependent culture that’s primary objective is to protect the in-group, protect the village.  Being called “stranger” immediately identifies you as an outsider and it allows people to treat you accordingly.  As I mentioned in a previous post not every call of “nassara” is the same, but this is where it was important to practice listening so that you could actually hear what you were being called.  Some “Nasara”s meant, “Go away”.  Some meant, “entertain me”, some meant “who are you”, and some meant “this is what you are”.

Now every volunteer has a different interaction with the Nassara problem and every volunteer comes up with their own method of handling this problem.  Because it can be hard.  Moving around the country with chants of your whiteness following you around.  Maybe starting a meeting where you present yourself by your name and the response you get is “ok, Nassara”.  I think that to some people this refusal to be acknowledged as an individual is hard and scary.  For most of us, or at least those of us who have been benefactors of white privilege we have never lived in a culture that dictated who we were.  That gave us a role that we were obligated to fill. 

So I guess there are multiple ways to respond to being called Nassara, or “le blanc”, or really any other term that dictates your identity.  The path that I ended up following was to accept it.  Because, as I said, the bizarre nature of this labeling.  In fact the labeling that comes from being a Nassara isn’t inherently negative.  In fact some of it is positive.  Being a Nassara can sometimes open the individual to realms of unearned privilege due to the fact that the culture values whiteness.  Oftentimes this privilege makes us feel uncomfortable or guilty.  But the response to this feeling shouldn’t be to demand the culture to allow you to feel comfortable.  In a way, I think that it is important to feel uncomfortable about this treatment.  Accept the reality of it and try to learn from it. I saw it as an acknowledgement of my place in Burkina.  I was not here to be an individual. I had not earned that right and I don’t think that I should use the privilege that comes with my whiteness to insist that I be acknowledged as an individual.  Some volunteers sit their friends down and explain, “do not call me Nassara, in my culture that is an offensive thing to do, my name is ______ and you should call me ______”, which is a perfectly reasonable request.  If you were amongst Americans.  But you aren’t and sometimes you have to bend to the reality of your situation.  Imagine it from their perspective.  You see a white guy and you call them, “hey, white guy!” just like you would expect to be called “hey black guy!”.  But then the white guy comes over and sits you down and tells you that that was a rude thing to do, and that you should call him Greg.  And well, he is a white guy, so you want to do what he says, so you say, “ok, Greg”.  But on the inside you’re really thinking “but why? You are a white guy?  I must not understand”.  And so now if you’re Greg, I would be curious as to whether or not that was the impression you wanted to make?  I would argue that you haven’t fixed anything; you haven’t explained some aspect of your culture to a friend or colleague in the hope that they might learn something new.  You demanded that they treat you as if this was your home, but the problem is.  It’s not.

Another response is for volunteers to ask to be given their “village name”.  And I would imagine this comes from a place of wanting to find a replacement for “Nassara” and so you tell you friends in village, “don’t call me, ‘Nassara’ call me something local’”, and normally your friends will be delighted to do this.  And so you get a name in the local language and it is easy for your friends to remember because it means something to them and you now have an identifier that you become attached to.  I guess the interesting conundrum here is that essentially you have arrived and you are called “Nassara” or “stranger” and the response comes across as “no, I am not a stranger.  I am here and I am one of you and I will have my name”. 

I felt that it did me more good to have that constant reminder that I was not one of them.  I was not a villager from Kogho.  And no matter how hard I tried, how much I integrated, how much I denied the trappings of a western life to completely immerse myself within the conditions of this life I could never truly be one of them.  My reality wouldn’t permit it.  If something went wrong for me the Peace Corps had me medically covered.  If the rains were bad, I received a monthly stipend regardless of the rain so I would still eat.  Hell I’m hoping most of you, my dedicated and detail oriented readers, noted that during my summer in the fields I left in the middle to go on a vacation to Togo and Benin.  It still allows you to live in your village and integrate, but it changes the way that you address life having that background sense of security.  Living in Burkina is hard.  There is no questioning that.  But as volunteers we all knew that any suffering that we endured was a temporary condition and that eventually it would end, or if you needed you could take a break.  You could learn to adapt and accept, you could find ways to avoid it, or you could just white knuckle your way through a service in the desert.  But it will end.  For your friends in village that isn’t the case.  They aren’t holding on to any idea that this suffering is temporary.  This is their reality and you just have to deal with it.  As a volunteer or hell even as an American when we encounter a difficult situation we can or are encouraged to just leave that situation.  You don’t like your town?  Move to a better town.  You don’t like your name?  Change your name.  You don’t like your school? Transfer to a better school.  The way you adapt and develop your problem solving ability is very different from somebody who understands that these unpleasant conditions are permanent.  You don’t like your village?  Make your village better.  You don’t like your name?  That’s not up to you.  You don’t like your school?  Work harder to like your school. 

It falls in line reasonably well with a lot of the hashtags attached to different posts from the instagram account @barbiesavior (lord the internets are amazing) such as #gonativeorgohome or something along about being one of the average, getting the true local experience.  Its this thinking that I really think people like the creators of this account are trying to go after.  Not necessarily to attack, but to encourage conversation and awareness.  Because at the end of the day neither this post nor, I would imagine, the posts by others talking about this topic.  Are intended to be an attack.  I don’t want my message to be, “don’t go out there and serve” or “don’t travel” or “don’t try to help”.  More “be aware of what it is you are doing, what you are not doing, and accept the differences”

Your interaction with the world around you is different depending on the cultural cycles that you occupy and while living in your village you will always occupy a different cultural cycle.  But that’s ok.  We aren’t there to be an African.  Or to be a Burkinabe.  To earn some sort of “I’m now an African” badge and come back to America and start talking about how much more meaningful life is because you’re African.  No, we’re there to be different.  And to share that difference, to understand why they are different.  And if they are going to remind me of my difference every time they call me, that’s ok.  Because I am different, so let’s talk about that.

Now I did eventually get given a village name.  Which is good, I guess, otherwise the title of this blog post would have been really confusing.  But it was because my village decided too, and it wasn’t really a replacement of Nassara.  Just an adjustment.  I was given the name Ouedraogo Rayende after I had lived in village for about a year and it was really just a different label to describe me.  To explain what I was.  My name is Ryan Kennedy they told me.  Kennedy is the royal family in America and Ouedraogo is the royal family in Burkina.  So we will call you Ouedraogo.  And you live alone. You have no wife and you have no kids (weirdo) so we will call you Rayendé, which means “a man alone”.  And it’s funny.  Most of my friends in village just shorten Rayendé to Rayen.  Which sounds oddly like Ryan.  So at the end of the day I was called by my given name.  But I think that the way that I got there made all of the difference.

So what is the take away from all of this?  Besides the fact that my village thinks the Kennedys are the American royal family (which in and of itself excludes me from being a #truenative , but is still kind of funny).  I guess the best that I can offer is that the world is really made up of a lot of different groups.  Some groups composed of individuals.  Some composed of people who see themselves as one.  Some groups with privilege. Some without.  Some groups well publicized.  Some never heard of.  And while living in Kogho it impressed upon me that there are just some groups that you don’t get to belong to.  You can insist that you belong, or you can force your way into a different group.  You can do everything just like the members of another group, but at the end of the day, you are different, separate, Nassara. But I think there is something connective about recognizing our differentness while at the same time trying to take the time to learn and listen to these other groups.  So yes, after two years in Burkina I never became a true native.  But that wasn’t why I was there.  And yes during my two years I had the opportunity to do some pretty cool work, but I didn’t really solve any problems.  I was given a unique opportunity to go out and share something with this little village and they were able to share something in return.  And allowing my village to remind me every day that that was all that I did and that I was simply a small part of a larger whole leaves a bigger impact than convincing myself that I was there to be one of them and to solve their problems.

But what am I doing, I just spent all of this time talking about how these kinds of things are meant to be conversations rather than a one sided lecture.  And as I have mentioned, my experience is very limited to..well my experience.  A white, American, male serving in the Peace Corps in Kogho, Burkina Faso.  So I would like to invite you, my dedicated readers, to participate in this conversation.  Maybe I missed something, maybe I wildly oversimplified an extremely not simple problem, or maybe I am way less smart than I like to sometimes think that I am and you would simply like to inform me that I am wrong.  Feel free to use the comments section as a forum or even email me your responses at rkennedy12345@gmail.com.  I will respond, and if you want to compose a response highlighting how wrong that I am I will even post those later, either anonymously or with your name attached so that others can enjoy our attempts at defining the indefinable.  Well here’s to hoping this idea actually works.  Cheers, and until next week.

Fun picture.  This was taken during my ride home from my neighboring town about 10km away.  It was always a nice relaxing ride once I got over the fear of becoming lost in the bush.  But also a good add on to this conversation.  I could ride this route 100 times with a bushel of hay on my head and I would still never know what it was like to be the guy in this picture.  Only he knows, so why not spend the time to ask him?