Refugees and names by Prerna Bakshi
When you’re a child of a refugee,
one of the first lessons you learn in school
is that your name – no longer
belongs to you.
That it will be hounded, shamed and replaced
with a brand new name, given
by members of the host country
with their rubber-stamp on it.
That it will be stripped of
all of its meaning, all of its history.
That it will be molded until
all the a’s turn into u’s;
until all the tones
become flat;
until the host country’s language
becomes the first and only language of the child.
His first day at school
in his new found host country,
my father gets scolded
by the Hindi teacher,
my grandparents get blamed
for not naming him correctly,
get mocked for not knowing
Hindi well enough.
No such thing as Taran,
the teacher remarked,
the correct word is Tarun – meaning young. Now repeat after me.
He was to remain Tarun, from this point on.
In Punjabi, my father’s native tongue,
Taran means savior, that’s what my grandparents thought he was,
when they made it to the other side of the border
alive, during the Partition.
My grandma was then
pregnant with my father.
My father survived
but his name didn’t.
one of the first lessons you learn in school
is that your name – no longer
belongs to you.
That it will be hounded, shamed and replaced
with a brand new name, given
by members of the host country
with their rubber-stamp on it.
That it will be stripped of
all of its meaning, all of its history.
That it will be molded until
all the a’s turn into u’s;
until all the tones
become flat;
until the host country’s language
becomes the first and only language of the child.
His first day at school
in his new found host country,
my father gets scolded
by the Hindi teacher,
my grandparents get blamed
for not naming him correctly,
get mocked for not knowing
Hindi well enough.
No such thing as Taran,
the teacher remarked,
the correct word is Tarun – meaning young. Now repeat after me.
He was to remain Tarun, from this point on.
In Punjabi, my father’s native tongue,
Taran means savior, that’s what my grandparents thought he was,
when they made it to the other side of the border
alive, during the Partition.
My grandma was then
pregnant with my father.
My father survived
but his name didn’t.
Prerna Bakshi is a writer, poet and activist. She is a Pushcart Prize Nominee and the author of the recently released book, Burnt Rotis, With Love, which was long-listed for the 2015 Erbacce-Press Poetry Award in the UK. More here- http://prernabakshi.strikingly.com/
Carlos Franco-Ruiz (°1987, Managua, Nicaragua). He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Miami in 2011. In 2013, he moved to Uruguay where he recently had a group exhibition "La Mirada del otro" at Museo De Las Migraciones. Currently lives and works in Sauce, Uruguay.