
Illustration by Sheed Sorple Cecil / THE REPUBLIC.
the ministry of arts / books dept.
What Is in a Yorùbá Name?

Illustration by Sheed Sorple Cecil / THE REPUBLIC.
the ministry of arts / books dept.
What Is in a Yorùbá Name?
When, at the close of the sixteenth century, William Shakespeare asked—rather philosophically, if also derisively—in the voice of one of the eponymous characters in the tragic play, Romeo and Juliet, ‘What’s in a name?’, (perhaps unfortunately) the English playwright did not have a Yorùbá critic to respond. What a monumental discourse that question could have sparked! This is because, for the Yorùbá people, that which we call a rose by any other name might not smell as sweet—it might give off an entirely different note. To the Yorùbá, everything is in a name. A name is given to determine a person’s identity—cultural, communal, familial, religious and so on. It is also given to determine their fate, character, attitude and outlook. A name holds an important place in Yorùbá culture as it is both spiritual and transcendental. Because of this spiritual reverence for names and naming, neither is ever accidental nor instinctual. Rather, a name is considered, taking into account the circumstance of birth and the parents’ conscious expectations for what they hope their child will grow up to be. It is this circumferential intricacy and nodal significance of names and naming in Yorùbá culture that British-Nigerian poet Theresa Lola seeks to express, execute and trace in her second full-length collection of poems, aptly titled Ceremony for the Nameless.
AT THE CEREMONY
It is only fitting that Lola opens the book with a poem called ‘Chorus at the Ceremony’. What is clever about this title, its position in the book, and its content is that it directly references what precedes it, rather than its own content. The real opening of the book is a recreation of the most important moment in any Yorùbá naming ceremony: the moment when the officiant announces the child’s names, as decided by the parents and other family members. With each name called out, the community in attendance ‘chorus’ approvingly, one name after the other:
Name 1
All repeat Name 1
Name 2
All repeat Name 2
Name 3
All repeat Name 3
Name 4
All repeat Name 4
Name 5
All repeat Name 5
Surname
All repeat Surname
The ‘chorus’ is suggestive of the communal nature of a naming ceremony, where the family of the newborn and the neighbours gather not only to give names to the child but also to sign a social contract: the collective responsibility of nurturing the child into a responsible member of the society. ‘Family is a circus of fanciful contentions,’ Lola writes in the second stanza of the poem, insinuating the imaginative facility that the family members tap into to give the child deserving, enviable and weighty names. Yet, a name is never just a name—at least not for the simplistic purpose of mere identification. Names are essentially prayers bestowed upon a child as eternal companions and guides in their journey through life. More importantly, they are constant reminders of the child’s origins and aspirations. Beyond these sophisticated understandings of naming, names are also bags of expectations—perhaps the only lead snag against the silver lining of that ‘fanciful’ tradition. This aspect of the tradition is addressed in another poem called ‘Ceremony’, which opens with the specific roles people play during a Yorùbá naming ceremony. These roles, much like the names given to the child, have underlying inferences:
Wise women and men arrive bearing gifts.
Honey, salt, palm oil, alligator pepper:
each adds its flavour to your appointed name.
They profess they will eat from it someday
and boast that the future was worth hoping for.
Each gift is offered with love and a sense of responsibility, which doubles as a way of praying for the child. The sounds of the names of these gifts in Yorùbá are themselves onomatopoeic threshold to prayers. However, each gift is also given with a note of selfishness, even with a tinge of entitlement, as the community develops a continued interest in the child’s life:
It takes a village to raise a child,
and now you are a teenager. Every street you turn
there is a villager bearing eyes and proverbs.
They remind you of the alligator pepper
which has brown seeds vast as the stars.
Hence, every change in the child’s life is followed closely by communal expectations first copyrighted at the naming ceremony. These expectations often lead to frustrations unless the child dares to cast off the heavy baggage of tradition and fashion their own self-definition. Unless, as Lola admonishes,
You begin again. New recipes, old prophecies.
You were welcomed into the world with a ceremony,
and have spent your life seeking the return of an audience.
You are slowly realising you have to concern yourself
less with expectations. Care first about the taste
of your name in your own mouth.
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THE NAME AND THE CULTURE COMPLEX
With a prehensile feel for her cultural roots—an understanding that Lola admits to have attained through rigorous research—she navigates the dismissive propensities of this age and the many unfortunate corollaries of cultural clashes. In the poem, ‘My Name is My Home’, Lola attends, with striking precision and proportionate sentiment, to the drastic effects of mispronouncing a Yorùbá name. Through the crisp metaphor of a well-furnished house, Lola affirms the significance of her name. She represents the mispronunciation of her name (Olúfúnmilọ́lá, meaning, ‘God has given me wealth’), not only as a violation of her property but also as a preamble to its total destruction. This, as a Yorùbá person would understand—and as Lola herself communicates—is not a hyperbolic claim:
Every time someone mispronounces my name
they break its windows, dirty the floors,
replace things, take things.
In a secondary school in Bromley my Yoruba name
pronounced Foon-mi is bent into Fun-mi,
and so are the house rules.
They enter my name with a litter of confetti.
In a different school a girl calls me Fanny, claims it sounds similar.
In Yorùbá, as in many other languages, tone is as essential to meaning as movement is to dance. This is especially true for Yorùbá, where the mispronunciation of a single letter in a word can change its meaning from something positive to its complete opposite. And since Yorùbá names are essentially prayers, any form of mispronunciation is not only strictly frowned upon but considered utterly intolerable. Throughout the poem, ‘My Name is My Home’, each mispronunciation causes a slight crumble in the structure of the metaphorical house, while every correction surrealistically rebuilds it:
In another school
I remove the ‘n’ in the spelling of my name, mistake
what is subtle for what is silent.
Go by Fumi instead of Funmi.
Then I remember what the letter n means to my skin folk,
the weapon-shaped word it carries
so I grab the n back, and feel
the roof inside my name reposition itself.
The speaker’s newly acquired understanding of the semantic intricacy of her name then pushes her initial reserved mien toward a militant vigilance:
Every time someone mispronounces my name
they disrupt its foundations.
Replace things. Break things.
Now, I’m left with no choice but to build spiked gates,
position armed guards. I must shield my name.
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However, it is rather disappointing that Lola’s rigorous research into the language of her birth could not save her from making the same mistake herself—not a mistake of mispronunciation, but a shortcoming at textual technicality. In Yorùbá, diacritics are just as essential for precise meaning-making as they serve as sentries against homographic confusion. Unfortunately, Lola botches this important functional aspect of the language, to diminishing effect, in poems like ‘Grandma Says She’s Dying’. Here, she leaves the word ‘orúkọ’ (name) naked in the affirmative saying: ‘Àmín ni oruko Jésù’. In the poem, ‘To My Previous Self’, the inconsistency in the diacritics of the Yorùbá proverb on self-improvement renders the saying not just confusing but entirely meaningless: ‘A-jí-má-boójú: ti nfi ojú àná woran.’ Similarly, in ‘Umbrella’, the epigraph features a Yorùbá proverb on friendship, but the diacritical inconsistencies distort it so severely that I could not recall the correct rendering of that original proverb: ‘Rere ojú; ojú ni afeni, sùtì lehìn.’ With these distortions, which upon investigation are partly traced to Oyekan Owomoyela’s book, Yoruba Proverbs, Lola lends the same destructive hands to that well-furnished building of the language, which undermines the structural integrity of the language she seeks to defend in the poem, ‘My Name is My Home’. Hence, she paradoxically weakens the argument for preserving her own name.
In ‘Greeting the Elders’, Lola nonetheless performs an art of brilliant rendition of an operatic aspect of this intricate culture of naming, particularly in relation to the Yorùbá understanding of respect. At the same time, she uses the poem to articulate the tension between her complex, traditional culture and her acquired European one. In ‘Greeting the Elders’, Lola narrates her terrible mistake of greeting an older family acquaintance by her first name alone—omitting the respectful ‘title’ traditionally affixed to it. For any Yorùbá person who has experienced this kind of farcical awkwardness, Liz’s reaction and Lola’s dialogue tag in the following line are nothing short of impeccable: ‘Who are you calling Liz? / She sparks.’ Meanwhile, Lola’s ‘body is still inside an office, / participating in a festival of handshakes / and first names.’
Lola is an interestingly straightforward poet. However, when she does plumb below the surface, she does so with the sly and surprising manner of a seasoned chess player: she compresses, impregnates, delegates and cathects words with as much meaning as their contexts. Consider the ending of ‘Greeting the Elders’, for instance, which follows Liz’s angry departure from the scene:
I stand in the meat aisle, guilt shivers through me.
Why does the red liquid that drips from meat
look so much like blood?
I must remember that it isn’t.
There’s a culture that travels through it.
For the body, it does some good.
The tension between Lola’s two cultures attains apotheosis in this ending. While Yorùbá culinary culture, as far as I know and the poem intimates, mandates washing blood from meat for hygienic reasons, her European culture avoids this practice to retain the slight nutritional benefit of the blood’s iron content. What is even more interesting—apart from the skilful movement from greeting to food—is that neither the poem’s beginning nor its middle prepares us for the sudden yet entrancing charm of this ending. Yet, even without it, the poem would remain a sincere representation of the Yorùbá obsession with honorific affixations to names. Its inclusion, however, not only drives the poem to perfection but also shows Lola’s unpronounced proprietary claim to both cultures. Despite her occasional lapses in linguistic technicality regarding Yorùbá orthography, this claim approaches near absolute.
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OUR APPELLATIONS
One might assume that a book with so parochial a preoccupation as names and naming would be limited or even repetitive. However, this is not the case. In addition to poems on friendship, nostalgia, the environment, celebrity parties, racism and the origins of Nigeria’s name and formation, the poems on names and naming serves as the book’s driving force. Among these is ‘My Names Converse’, one of the most imaginatively powerful and funniest poems in the collection. In this poem, Lola’s original name engages in a dialogue—part amusing, part apprehensive, and suggestive of sibling interactions—with her chosen appellation:
OLUFUNMILOLA: You don’t want to be seen in public with me anymore. I’m too much for you, aren’t I?
THERESA LOLA: I have taken the ‘lola’ from you as a souvenir, to remember the wealth of who you are. Even elevated it to a stand-alone word.
OLUFUNMILOLA: Spare me the boredom. You children of the diaspora, you like to dangle a portion of your heritage as bait.
THERESA LOLA: Don’t be so difficult.
OLUFUNMILOLA: Let’s hope you aren’t the one that gets eaten.
Ceremony for the Nameless also features an impressive sequence of poems titled ‘Our Appellations’, which covers the various types of names Yorùbá people give to their children. These range from names predetermined by the condition of birth (Orúkọ Àmútọ̀runwá and Orúkọ Àbíkú), nicknames (Orúkọ Ìnagijẹ), names given by family members (Orúkọ Àbísọ), and praise names (Orúkọ Oríkì). Lola handles each with taut clarity and grasping sensibility. Regarding Orúkọ Àbíkú, for instance, she writes about how Yorùbá people conscript names with the spiritual task of holding an errant child to life—a practice that serves as a nomenclatural equivalent of passive aggression. In this case, the passive aggression is pointedly, and somewhat amusingly, directed at death:
We called you Kusaanu [sic] (for death had mercy).
No one could hear your wails above theirs.
In your old age, when your lover asks
why you’re leaving suddenly,
you’ll tell them you are tired of staying
as a favour, not out of desire.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to identify any aspect of the Yorùbá naming tradition that Lola does not touch in this book. Thus, Ceremony for the Nameless could well serve as an essential introduction for outsiders seeking to understand this beautiful yet complicated tradition in all its complexity⎈
CEREMONY FOR THE NAMELESS
THERESA LOLA
80 PP. PENGUIN BOOKS, NOVEMBER 2024
UNITED KINGDOM
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