FADED NAME
I saw a crow running about a stork
I marveled long and investigated their case
In order to that i might find a clue
as to what it was that they had in common ...
When amazed and bewildered, I approached them,
Then indeed I saw that both of them were lame.
Rumi, Mathnawi , MEVLANA
When you leave your homeland behind,they say, you have to renounce at least one part of you. If that was the case i know exactly what i have left behind: my name. Back in Turkey, I used to be Tuğba Yalçın.
Here in America, I had become an Tuba Yalcin.
My special letters were excluded for me to be better included. After all,Americans, just like everyone else, relished familiarity-in names they could pronounce, sounds they could resonate, even if they did not make much sense one way the other. Yet, few nations could perhaps be as self-assured as the Americans in reprocessing the names and surnames of foreigners. When a Turk, for instance,realizes she has just mispronounced the name of an American in Turkey, he will be embarrassed and
in all likelihood consider this her own mistake, or in any case, as something to do with herself. When an American realizes she has just mispronounced the name a Turk in the United States, however, in likelihood , it won`t be hers but rather the name itself that will be held responsible for that mistake.
As names adjust to a for country, something is always lost to be it a dot, a letter, or an accent. What happens to your name in other territory is similar to what happens to a voluminous pack of spinach when cooked- some new taste can be added to the main ingredient, but its size shrinks visibly. It is this cutback a foreigner learns first. The primary requirement of accommodation in a strange land is the estrangement of the hitherto most familiar: your name.
Playing around with pronunciation, curbing letters, modifying sounds, looking for the best substitute, and if you happen to have more than one name, altogether abandoning the one less presentable to native speakers...Foreigners are people with either one or more parts of their names in the dark.Likewise, in my case too, Tuğba had replaced my name the less arduous and more presentable Tuba or Tugba, depending on the speaker`s choice.
