Change of Name

one.

I was teaching seventh-grade Humanities in New York City when the first plane hit. 

Mike, the Vice Principal, quietly entered my classroom through a door propped open by an industrial-sized can of corn. Teams of students were preparing to deliver role-based arguments in opposition to, and support of, the Salem Witch Trials. I was standing at the whiteboard reviewing the day’s agenda.

There wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy about Mike’s entrance. I was used to classroom visitors. Administrators were always on the move: active and engaged in students’ learning. Our school was located less than three miles from the World Trade Center, part of a local district that encompassed lower Manhattan.

An Army veteran with a Spanish surname, Mike had hired me the year before. Soon after I joined the staff, he invited me to grab coffee. We were in sight of the Dunkin Donuts on 23rd Street when Mike abruptly stopped talking and flew into an intersection, swiped a man off his feet, and deposited him on the opposite curb before a barreling taxi could run him down. From that point on, I called him Superman. 

Mike nodded in my direction and sat at my desk. I kept addressing the students, then watched Mike doodle in the notebook he always carried while I answered their questions. Once I released students to work, he rose and beckoned me towards the door, away from the clamor.

“What’s up?” I said. 

The hum of students followed us into the bright hallway.

“A plane crashed into the World Trade Center,” Mike said. 

I imagined a single prop, like the one my American grandfather flew, getting stuck in the steel girders. The plane’s tail, a hammerhead shark, mooning the city.

“It’s probably just a training exercise gone wrong,” he said.

“That’s scary.”

The mention of a training exercise made me think of a jet, a war plane piercing the mirrored windows of a skyscraper. A silver rain pelting the pedestrians below.

What does that have to do with us, though?” I said.

“The district is asking that we keep students in their classrooms. It’s a tentative shelter-in-place.” 

I nodded. I didn’t ask any more questions aloud. 

Why would teachers be notified of a plane crash several miles away?

“Don’t tell the kids,” he said.

The muscles on either side of his jaw contorted: two little fists curling in on themselves.

“I gotta go. There are a few folks I still need to check in with,” he said.

“Okay.”

I used my foot to push the industrial-sized can of corn off to the side. The warmth of the classroom hit my face and the door clicked shut behind me.

* * *

“It happened again,” Mike said. This time he addressed the class.

“Hey scholars! 1-2-3 eyes on me,” I said. 

“3-1-2 eyes on you,” came back in a chorus.

Most students were—like me—the children of immigrants. Their faces, names and identities reflected New York City: Dominican, Croatian, Honduran, Bhutanese, Nigerian, Mexican, to name a few.

“Mr. Soguero has something he needs to share with you-all.”

Watching the students train their eyes on Mike, I took a deep breath.

“There’s been an attack,” Mike said. “Two planes just hit the World Trade Center.” 

Chairs screeched against the floor, tables wiggled, hands shot into the air.

“What do you mean, attack?”

“Was there an explosion?” 

“Did people die?”

Mike listened, his arms akimbo, his button-down shirt slowly beginning to untuck itself.

“We’re closing school and contacting your parents. Subway lines are shut down, so we’ll work with your families to get you home. In the meantime, you are to stay in this classroom,” Mike said.

“Yeah, no school!”

“Do we still get a snack break at 10am?”

“Are you saying that we can’t even use the bathroom?”

Amidst the commentary, a blond Puerto Rican student, her hair pulled into a tight bun, shouted in Mike’s direction.

“It’s the Muslims!”

Mike recoiled.

“Stop,” I said. The room went quiet.

“Bruni, that’s so beyond messed up,” Mike said. “I would take you to the office right now if we weren’t on lockdown. When I call your mom, you best be sure I’ll tell her what you just said.”

“I don’t care,” Bruni said.

“Remember Oklahoma City,” I said.  

“Huh?” said Bruni.  

“What I’m saying is: we don’t know who did this. My dad was raised Muslim. Do you think my family did this?” I said.

Bruni rolled her eyes. 

I took another deep breath and glanced out the window. Such a bright, beautiful day in Manhattan. I started negotiating with the sky. Please please please please please please please please please don’t let it be.

Into that brief moment of silence, I realized we’d been talking over the long wail of sirens for several minutes. They didn’t stop for the rest of the day. 

two.

I am dissonance in motion, garbled Farsi and freckles. Ajun, my Iranian grandmother, used to say I looked like her cousin from Shiraz. She, the cousin, was light skinned, like me. Both of us betrothed to hair that flamed like banked embers when the sun glanced off it. 

Ajun’s observations were kind. They were also an attempt to skirt around the obvious. The freckles gave me away. Not to mention Mom, all blue-eyed and American.

To top it all off, there was an ancient first name full of suspect vowels: M-E-R-O-E. If one were to ask for guidance, I might say, “Meroe rhymes with sparrow. It is light on the consonants, very little stress.”

Yet MAY-row, ME-row, MER-row and MER-row-E were the most common hack jobs. A flowing name reduced to sharp jerks, like a dog snapping a squeaky toy back and forth in an evolutionary attempt to break its neck.

It’s true that Baba’s full name—Fazlollah—was also vowel-heavy, and that he went by the first syllable to spare the tongues of Americans. Meroe didn’t adapt so easily to variation. There was an uncomfortable pause before it was said aloud.

Throughout my career as a K-12 student, that pause made my cheeks redden. The first day of school was the worst. Teachers started from the top of the roster, easily rolling off Adams, Aguilar and Akaboshi with practiced flair. My elementary and middle schools were heavy with Spanish and Japanese surnames. There would be at least one Brown, Badilla or Bai. That’s when I’d feel an electric hum coursing through my body. Right after the Collins or the Corona. Or, it might come after Diaz or Daichi. Often I said my name into the pause without prompting, my voice a cowbell. It prevented the painful stutter, the garbled tongue of the teacher. It deflected attention from my difference. It also, as I got older and transferred to a majority white high school, added to my sullen teenage credibility. Adults are stupid.

Sometimes the mispronunciation was so staggering that I didn’t recognize myself: it was Merlot in my 10^th-grade Geometry class and Bone Marrow (to snorts and sharp laughter) in 11^th-grade Biology. More recently, a sweet elderly neighbor called me Moron.

three.

Baba told me I was named after a princess.

Whether in its original or post-9/11 form, I can tell you that my first name is a multisensory site of racialized contention. It isn’t just the painful stutter that I have to watch out for. There has been a lifetime of dubious looks: when I stand and walk to a door held open by someone in scrubs for a doctor’s appointment, it’s there. I sense a bodily hesitation, like the door might close in my face. It happens when I press my papers to a bullet-proof glass window at passport check and wonder if the extra questions, the extra care with searching my body, is related to the name I carry. 

The dubious look is followed, sometimes, by a question. 

“Are you adopted?” is a popular one. 

“Are your parents hippies?” 

“Is that your yoga name?” was asked only once, but it’s so memorable. This question floated above the sustainable bamboo flooring at a trendy San Francisco studio, complete with a mural of Ganesh on the wall. 

The most common questions are “What kind of name is that?” and “Where are you from?” I normally answer the former with “Iranian,” because to go into the nuances of my name would be wasting time and energy. I answer the latter with, “My dad is from Iran.”

I don’t believe the questioners care about my origins. They just want some comfort in the face of dissonance: how could someone who looks like me end up with a name like that? The name itself causes alarm. The name + my face = too much to bear.

There are exceptions.

Sometimes, from folks of color, the questions are a way to suss out whether I am a culture vulture, a comrade, or a member of the family. The questions transform into an invitation. When I answer, there may be a softening around the eyes, an ease in the shoulders. Occasionally, I am gifted with the story of an Iranian friend or lover or spouse. 

four.

The name Meroe isn’t Farsi. It doesn’t hail from Iran. Baba, a self-styled internationalist who came of age during the postcolonial movements of the 50s and 60s, told me that Meroё (with the umlaut) was a famed Kushite city of trade and goldsmithing located on the middle Nile. Meroё was the heart of the ancient Kingdom of Kush, now contained within the national borders of Sudan. 

Baba saw my name as a talisman to bestow upon his firstborn. It wasn’t American. And that was glorious. It wasn’t Iranian, either. This was a second vote in my name’s favor. The liminal existence that Baba offered with Meroe was what he also wished for himself: to be part of the world—not of a single nation or country or faith.

However, Baba’s love affair with internationalism exposed a creative tension that didn’t always mesh with his immigrant’s desire to make it in Amrika. To succeed here—particularly as part of the generation to arrive before the 1979 Revolution—meant cultivating the friendship of white people, even prior to his relationship with Mom. I can imagine that having a white presenting American daughter with a Kushite first name and a very traditional Shi’a family name were, in part, his nod to the American dream and a big fuck you.

Since Baba liked having it both ways, he was—unsurprisingly—ambivalent about American citizenship. His birthright was limitless in Iran: the vaulted gardens of Isfahan where he was born, the steel beasts of the Trans-Iranian Railway upon which his father managed hundreds of miles of tracks, the earthbound presence of Damavand where the family escaped thick Tehrani heat in the sweet mountain air. Why give that up?

Baba only became a citizen, he said, because he wanted a job with the city of Chicago, working with their employment program for at-risk youth. Yet, one of the first things Baba did after I was born was apply for my social security card. I was an infant with a social security card because Baba, whatever he might say about being a reluctant citizen himself, absolutely wanted to ensure that my birthright, the country’s reciprocal agreement with those born on its soil, was unimpeachable. 

I know this because the story is family lore. But I also know this because an accountant once asked me whether I was born in the U.S. It wasn’t a challenge; he was curious about a discrepancy in my paperwork and trying to solve a mystery contained in the numbers. He explained that my social security number—as I’m assuming is true of all social security numbers—was coded, each sequence a signal: maybe of region or era or status. Yet, mine was different from any American-born employee whose paperwork he had processed over the years. My social security number coded me as an immigrant of West Asian descent, despite the I-9 paperwork that proved otherwise.

five.

Once I enrolled in college, Meroe took on other meanings. I began receiving flyers for a local Irish Republican Army affiliate chapter in Santa Cruz, California. I’m not sure how they found me or my mailing address. It was the first time, but not the last, that an Irish imprimatur was attached to my name. Again, all the vowels. 

Also in Santa Cruz, I got a call from a newly hired African Studies professor. I had signed up for his 8 am class, but decided I didn’t want to pedal up the steep paths to campus that early in the morning. My name was on his drop list; he called and asked whether I would reconsider. I demurred, uncomfortable with his reaching across a boundary I was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to cross. But there was my name: the surname Old Testament, Aramaic-old. The Kushite first name, even more ancient.

How could he not try?

I imagine that new to a campus that many students of color gave the moniker “The Shady Forest” for all the microaggressions endured, he was anxious to surround himself with students who looked like him. I also knew, were he to see me in the flesh, that I would represent more disappointment. It was an unwanted part: this role of foiling folks who were introduced to me through the two-dimensional world of print or a screen, and whose faces dropped on seeing me in all of my three-dimensional glory.

six.

Late on the night of 9/11, I returned to my Washington Heights apartment. My lungs stung from all the cigarettes I had smoked. After we paired all of our students with family members, the seventh-grade teachers wound our way down silent streets to the closest gathering place we could think of. We sat on the grass in Union Square and waited, along with thousands of others, for the trains to start running again. The air already smelled of death. 

Schools were closed for the rest of the week and I spent my time biking around a deserted Manhattan, keenly aware of how quiet the sky had become. No planes, the empty horizon haunted by a thick gray plume that rose out of lower Manhattan.

In the weeks that followed, the air became even more acrid and hard to breathe. The EPA held press conferences, assuring us that the particle count was within acceptable limits. Nose bleeds began to alternate with viscous dayglo-green mucus and we were offered vouchers for free air purifiers. 

When we did return to school, we navigated occupied streets: National Guardsmen, armed with semi-automatic rifles, stood sentry on corners. When we did return to school, Park Avenue was a cemetery: missing-persons flyers waved like prayer flags from lampposts. When we did return to school, Bruni yelled “Terrorist!” at Afghan kebab vendors as we walked to and from the school’s garden plot. 

When we did return to school, I decided to change my name.

As a kid growing up in Southern California, I was a quiet observer of the large and raucous parties thrown by my extended Iranian family in palatial homes high in the hills. One of the matriarchs who presided over these affairs was a woman we called Mamajan. Mamajan had the nose of a king and a thin long body. She reminded me of a patient spider.

“Meroe. Meroe. Meroe.” Mamajan clucked, tucking a stray hair behind one of my ears.

“Mamajan?”

“Meroe is not your name!” 

She conferred with Ajun, who sat next to her, in Farsi. Ajun, Baba’s mother, was a wide pillow of warmth in contrast to the thin spidery Mamajan. 

“That is not a Persian name,” Mamajan said.

Tilting her head towards Mamajan, Ajun nodded in agreement.

“Baele, baele, doroste,” Ajun said.

Mamajan turned back, beading her eyes at me. 

“You are pretty, like the moon! You are not Meroe,” she said. 

“I’m not Meroe?”

“You are Mahru! Moonface. That is a Persian name.”

“Okay? Should I tell Baba he made a mistake?”

“No no no no, child. You have two names now.”

Mamajan patted my cheek.

“Get me some tea.”

I navigated the hallways, adults spilling out of doorways, and made my way to the samovar in the living room. My chest, encased in the tight bodice of a scratchy dress, felt funny. Flippy floppy. Our name-negotiation signified a rejection, and an invitation to gather. I was the only kid at the party who didn’t have two Iranian parents.

For a multiracial Iranian like me, Mahru was a less ambiguous marker of identity than Meroe. Mamajan played with metaphor and alliteration in her naming: she conjured the full moon, emanating celestial light, and kept the M intact.

seven.

Mahru felt right. The fires at Ground Zero were extinguished on my birthday, 100 days after they began. In January 2002, fresh off our winter break, I corrected teaching colleagues who addressed me as Meroe. I told them the story of Mamajan and the Persian name. They quickly adapted.

In phone calls to Los Angeles, Baba chuckled that I was heeding Mamajan’s instructions, after all these years. Though he never stopped calling me Meroe, Baba could hold two truths at once. Mamajan’s christening felt like an affirmation.

In marked contrast, Mom had a compelling reason for accepting the name change without hesitation. She had weathered her own endless question: Did your parents want a boy? Mom wouldn’t change her masculine first name—Larrie—until after her parents (including my American grandfather, the pilot) died, years after I changed mine. 

It fell upon Stew, whom I called my second dad, to protest the name change. When I first told him about Mamajan and the Persian name, he snorted with derision. Even as his rejection stung, I understood that—to a red diaper baby who weathered COINTELPRO and tried to levitate the Pentagon in 1967, to a Chicago 7 unindicted co-conspirator who helped found the Youth International Party with Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin—my name change wasn’t a radical act. Stew found my plan feeble, a small meaningless gesture that did nothing to directly confront the harm that was being unleashed within our national borders and internationally in the name of the War on Terror.

eight.

Mahru didn’t provide the same kind of linguistic challenge that Meroe had. There were less awkward pauses. Though, the soft “h” in the middle was a little tricky for Americans. I coached them to leave it out altogether: Ma-RU. I liked the sound of that: round and percussive. Many of the overzealous attempted to make the “h” hard and guttural, like hawking a loogie. Some of the folks who might have asked me, “Is that your yoga name?” now pronounced Mahru, Ma-HA-ru, which made me laugh. 

While it is largely my first name that continues to flummox, I have been asked on several occasions, “Did you marry a Persian?” My last name, unmistakable. It’s a prayer, my last name: an entreaty to God or the divine. I remain vigilant, on the lookout for when a speaker might slip in a “Mrs.” which I hastily correct.

I recall only one story about my last name that truly made me wince. It began with an academic counselor at a middle school where I worked. Since adults in education often refer to each other by last name, since we’d had plenty of disagreements over my observations that she and a few of her colleagues targeted young men of color for excessive disciplinary action and, since I had started The Salam Club just a few weeks prior—a club founded post-Trump’s 2017 Muslim Ban, centered on Muslim and Muslim adjacent students—her decidedly Freudian slip was made even more memorable.                                                                             

She called me Ms. Iraqi.

nine.

As an adult, I purchased a slim museum exhibit catalog dedicated to the legendary gold of Meroë. The cover depicts an ornate medallion with the head of a water buffalo at its center, balanced upon an upside-down rainbow of flourishes. Seeing the catalog’s title gave me a quiet thrill. 

When I was a child, carousel displays of first-name keychains, necklace pendants and fridge magnets were ubiquitous. I was ever hopeful: always spinning, the wire squeaking, at gift shops and gas stations. Organized alphabetically, and blinking like an orrery as I spun them around and around, my name was never to be found. When I finally saw it spread across the front cover of the exhibit catalog, in a bold display font, I felt whole, like I was finally a part of the story.

In elementary school, when I complained that no one else had a name like mine, that teachers couldn’t pronounce it, Baba would suck his teeth and steel his eyes.

“Meroe is a beautiful name. Do you want a different name? Something simple: like Sandy?” 

Baba stared at me and I couldn’t say yes to that rigid mouth. My head shook back and forth. 

“No,” I said.

“Of course, the Americans don’t understand,” Baba said.

I choked down the words I wanted to say in response: Sandy was a great name. Especially when I considered the ease I would have in finding personalized shot glasses and coffee mugs and license plate holders. Not only that, Sandy had cultural cache. The character Sandy was a good-girl gone leather-sexy in Grease. She even had a song written about her. There was Sandy Duncan hawking Wheat Thins, Mom’s favorite snack, every night on television.

ten.

I did like my birth name. It made me special. I liked all the vowels, liked how they looked sitting next to my last name. So many es, all lined up. 

The problem was that Baba’s story about the origin of my name, like many tales that my family told, wasn’t quite right. His accounting was so consistent throughout my childhood and young adulthood, yet he was the only one who told it. I’d never heard anyone else talk about Meroe, the daughter of a Persian king. 

As an adult, I tried various search terms, scanned lesson plans posted online, and toggled through textbook scans from the 1920s, to find an entry that most closely matched Baba’s rendition. What I found went something like this: the Persian king Kambiz pushed his army into North Africa and distributed troops along the Nile around 525 BC. Kambiz was too busy with conquest to produce any heirs. Meroe was not his daughter; Meroё (with the umlaut) was his sister and advisor. He renamed Saba—a Biblical city associated with the family of Moses—in her name because she died there, far from home.

I was doubled in this moment of discovery. Ancient Persians were famously implicated in the project of empire. Baba had only been granted loans and a student visa to study in the U.S. because of American imperial designs on Iran. I had not considered my name to be an extension of, and possibly an act of resistance against, that project.

What had Baba intended, exactly, with this very intentional name choice? Was it some gesture towards multiracial solidarity? One that countered a persistent anti-Black ethos lying just below the surface of polite Persian conversation, what Iranians today often attempt to cover up with platitudes about Islamic equality?

Baba conjured the name Meroe as distinct from the body that grew inside of Mom. They agreed that this particular name was worthy of their baby girl. I suppose that my potential dreamy-form looked, in Baba’s imagination, more like his sister: beige and doe-eyed. Instead, he got freckles, hazel eyes rimmed in ancient gold. How ironic that, as I matured from infant to child, my form was visibly more Molly—phenotypically—than Meroe. 

I wanted to ask Baba: “Why an ancient African place name, minus the umlaut and associated with Persian conquest, for your Iranian American daughter?”

There are volumes of limpid Iranian names, and just as many aspirational American ones, names that so many Iranian families use as garlands, draping their American-born children in legibility. Why not those? Why a name that continues to place me outside the story of Amrika, no matter what the political conditions, in this very contested country of ours?

Was Baba attracted to my name’s association with trade and wealth? That seems unlikely. He was never a materialist, I reason, and didn’t fall for the pul-dar panic that many Iranian Americans get sucked into: grasping for a semblance of social stature through signifiers like a Benz or a fancy neighborhood.

Even as he confronts daily the haze of Alzheimer’s, Baba is not gone. I can still ask him questions, and sometimes he answers correctly. He refers to his best friend in the memory care facility, a white man, as farangi. The foreigner. His lips curl into a smirk when he says this and I throw my head back, slap my thigh, relieved that he is still so present and so funny. Still the self-styled internationalist who came of age during the postcolonial movements of the 50s and 60s. He talks on the phone with his brother in Farsi. Tsks about what’s happening in Falastin, stamps his feet at genocide, raises his cane in solidarity.

Yet, despite this rich lucidity, I am hesitant about asking him to recall the why of things. It strikes a tender part of him when I do. I watch his eyes reach into the far away and sometimes he doesn’t come back. I want Baba to come back, for as long as he can. So, instead, I imagine myself presenting him with the revised origin story of Meroe, born from the fruits of my research. I imagine him nodding as he listens, his mouth animated.

“That’s correct,” he says, once I’ve finished.

“But it’s a different story, Baba.” My hand grips his shoulder for emphasis.

“Different than what?” His eyes narrow.

“It’s not the one you told me!”

“So what?” He shrugs my hand off his shoulder. 

“Meroe,” he says. 

Then, he chuckles. His mouth is a gold mine.

“She’s still a princess.”

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