My name is not Andrew Jackson. I was not the 7th president of the United States. My likeness does not appear on the twenty-dollar bill. However, in my quest to gain acceptance, I instituted my own “Removal Policy.” In the process, I carved out my personal Trail of Tears.
Predictably, I walked it alone ...
*
In the summer of 1963, my parents discovered I was very near-sighted, nearly blind actually. The moment the kindly lady put the first pair of glasses on my face at a tiny optician’s shop in Port Said was nothing short of a miracle. Thanks to two pieces of glass, ensconced in a thick ugly plastic frame, the world was changed. The fuzzy outline of objects was magically replaced with sharp, clearly-defined edges. Awe-struck by this new world, and equally grateful for it, I fell in love with my glasses. They became my best friends and my most prized possession. My new spectacles made me see the world clearly. At the same time, they sadly opened my eyes to some of the most disturbing facts of life.
The innocence of children is one of the biggest lies of human history. Children are capable of acts of extreme meanness and cruelty; all for the sake of a laugh or just to establish a pecking order. I still remember all too vividly the pain and humiliation of returning to my school at the beginning of the second grade. At that time, political correctness had not yet come into existence. The idea of hypocritical sensitivity to, and respect for difference was alien to the world’s mindset.
I was the only kid with glasses in the entire school. The thick lenses amplified the size of my eyes, giving me a fiendish look. For some reason, the kids found that hilarious. They never failed to make me painfully aware of it. But that was not the worst of it. The name “Four Eyes” though hurtful, was the least of my concerns. Once it was discovered how important that apparatus was to me, that I was willing to guard it with my life, it became their favorite sport to snatch it off my face and hide it in a place that was impossible for my myopic eyes to locate. They found some perverse joy (that I could never understand) in hearing my screams, my desperate pleading and the flood of profanities that spewed forth from my mouth when all else failed.
They had a lot of fun.
I didn’t.
It would seem that the letter K suffers from a severe identity crisis. I think it is bipolar with a touch of split personality disorder. Put it at the beginning of word, like know, knife, knave, kneel and it ceases to exist and disappears without a trace. However, if it appears in the middle of a word, it becomes one of the strongest sounds. It cannot be ignored or overlooked. Once there, it demands to be pronounced, loud and clear. Very quickly after starting my new life in New York, my family name gave me a knuckle sandwich that knocked me out that brought me to my knees.
In Arabic, my family name فخر means pride. Of the seven deadly sins, theologians and philosophers reserve a special place for pride. According to the sages, lust, envy, anger, greed, gluttony and sloth are all bad, but pride is the deadliest of all, the root of all evil, and the beginning of sin.
When it comes to emotions, Arabic is a very precise language. It is doubtful that any other language could match its level of differentiation between the slightest shades of emotional expression. There are at least 17 Arabic words that cover the whole spectrum of the feelings of pride; from their most sinful and venal to their most noble and sublime. The pride embodied by my family name is not one that conveys a sense of hubris, haughtiness, conceit, boastfulness or vanity. Rather, it connotes the legitimate pride one takes in a great heritage, in a good lineage, in a job well done, in courage and altruism and in the necessary humility that must accompany them. The traditional Arabic epic poems always opened with a few lines on love, loss and longing. Those were immediately followed by some lines of “Pride” in which the poet extolled the virtues of his clan, their generosity of spirit, their helpfulness to strangers stranded in the vast emptiness of the desert, their sacrifice and their willingness to share their scant, life-giving water with the thirsty and their valiant fight against any form of injustice. That is the essence of pride and the true meaning of my family name in Arabic.
Unfortunately, that elegant (and proud) name was transcribed with a K right in the middle of it. To make things even more complicated for the weak and inflexible Anglo-Saxon tongues, our family name is made up of three consonants with just a tiny imperceptible short vowel between the first and second letters. Thus, my beautiful family name became a heavy burden that weighed my New Yorker self down. I tried to make light of it, to turn it into a funny conversation opener. The greeting on my answering machine went: “Hi. You have reached the guy who is impossible to find and whose name is impossible to pronounce.” But I could not hide from myself the fact that I was ashamed of my name. Whenever I introduced myself, I would mumble or whisper something that remotely resembled the name I used to say proudly in any Arabic-speaking environment. Whenever I gathered enough courage to say it like it is, it lent itself to rather embarrassing mispronunciations. Instead of being Mr. Pride, I found myself called alternately as Mr. Fakir (pauper in Arabic), Mr. Fahaar (thankfully meaningless in any language I know), but most often I was called Mr. Fucker. That was really sad.
At a party, somebody made a bad taste, drunken joke about my name. Annoyed and hurt, I left in a huff. Seething with anger and deeply hurt, I had no idea what to do, but something, anything, had to be done to end this problem once and for all. I was 24 years old. Understandably, the thought of starting a family had not even crossed my mind. But I had decided beyond a shadow of doubt that I was here to stay, and that New York will forever be my hometown. Suddenly, memories of my traumatic experience as “Four Eyes” came back to me full force and I found myself thinking of my potential family and the outlandish name I was going to bequeath my children. The thought of my yet-to-be born children being constantly taunted at school for having such an off-color family name tormented me. My friends had started what I came to call my “Removal Policy” almost as soon as I arrived in New York. For some reason, my first name, Hossam, (meaning Sword in Arabic) proved difficult for them to pronounce. They shortened it to the lazy and meaningless Sam. At least one of them loved to call me “Yosemite Sam.” He thought it was funny. I didn’t. But my official removal policy was born that night. The hateful letter K will be dropped from my name and with it, all the shame and embarrassment will be forever gone.
As it turned out, that simple solution was not all that simple. To make it official, I had to deal with the Egyptian bureaucracy. Over the millennia, that unwieldy, cumbersome and profoundly paranoid monster has developed erecting barriers and placing obstacles into a fine, though sinister, art. When navigating the dark labyrinth of Egypt’s bureaucracy, you are guilty until proven innocent. Nothing is what it seems. Any request must have an ulterior motive. Contrary to the most rudimentary tenet of Logic 101, that you can’t prove a negative, this is precisely what you have to do in those dusty, dimly-lit offices. Dropping one lousy letter from the transliteration of my family name in a foreign language became a deliberate attempt to “alter my identity.” I had to prove I was not a fugitive running away from the Interpol. I had to prove that no court anywhere in the world had passed a sentence against me. Every step of the way, something was missing, a paper here, a document there, an official stamp God knows where. Luckily, there is one effective antidote to the venom of Egyptian bureaucracy: Zucchini.
For some obscure reason, connections, nepotism, cronyism and favoritism are known collectively in Egyptian slang as zucchini. Thanks to my father’s position as a high-ranking officer in the military, and the connections I developed through my work at the UN, I had a plentiful supply of that most useful vegetable. I honestly tried to make that pitiful change without seeking the help of this or that family friend and failed miserably. All it took was a couple phone calls and all suspicions evaporated, all obstacles magically disappeared. The letter K was dropped in my new passport.
My family name officially became FAHR, pronounced FAR. It was apt. For I was far, very far indeed. I lived in two places at the same time. And I was very far from both of them. When in New York, I was exactly 5020 miles far from Cairo. When in Cairo, I was 5020 miles far from New York.
This is how I, حسام فخر، Hossam Fakhr, Sword Pride, became (Yosemite?) Sam Far. The first time I introduced myself with that name, my eyes grew misty, a lump lodged itself in my throat, and my heart was filled with heavy sadness. I had taken the first solitary step along my personal trail of tears.
So, what really is in a name?
A hell of a lot, it would seem.
