Rebecca Tamás on Accurate Naming

For Granta, UK-based poet Rebecca Tamás writes about the power of naming: "My name, my name spelled correctly, is the link to the other half of myself," writes Tamás. "It is the link to my family in Budapest: my siblings, dad and nephew." More:

...My grandmother who, having spent time in prison for being a communist in fascist Romania (thus escaping the Holocaust), was so scared of rats that, not only was the word ‘rat’ banned from the household, but ‘George Orwell’ and ‘1984’ too. My name is the link to my Jewishness, such that it is; the link to boiling Hungarian summers; eating lángos in the waterpark in my bright green swimsuit; Eszterházy cake in the cool, golden billowing of Café Gerbeaud. It is the link to watching my dad leave the stage after giving a speech at a socialist gathering, only to see another man spit on his coat. It is the link to hearing my mum trying to learn from Hungarian tapes, repeating the word for ‘watermelon’ over and over in our lino-floored kitchen.

On the morning after the EU referendum, in Edinburgh, a taxi driver told me he voted to leave. Even though he could tell that I’d been crying, he explained that he voted leave ‘because of the Eastern Europeans coming here to take money off the government.’ When, feeling completely fake in my English-accented armour, I told him that I’m half Hungarian, he lapsed into silence.

At my new university job, I saw that the accent did not feature on the class timetable. This was where my students would first see my name and learn that we would be working together. I got in touch with the relevant authorities and found that ‘special characters’ could not be included in the timetable system...

Read on at Granta.