The Power of Name

SZIFRA BIRKE: My sister breaks out in hysterical laughter and says, "Oh, my God, Sue, they named you Szifra."

SOFIA COLOMBO-ABDULLAH: What I didn't expect was the kid next to me looking me straight in the eyes, and then saying, "Are you a terrorist?

Your name sounds like a terrorist name."

U-MELENI MHLABA-ADEBO: So, my father said, in his native tongue, he's Ndebele, "What are we waiting for?

U-Meleni."

And thus, I have my given name.

♪ ♪ BIRKE: My parents were originally from Poland.

They came to the U.S. after the Holocaust, they were both Holocaust survivors whose entire families-- all but three cousins on each side-- everyone else was killed, was exterminated during the Holocaust.

And they really did not talk very personally about their families.

Do you regret not being able to ask more questions?

I could have actually asked the questions had I realized that I could've asked the questions.

- Mmm.

- But by the time I realized it, my dad had died, and so I did ask my mom more questions.

But I think it's a bit of a mission for me to encourage children-- grown children-- of refugees to dare to ask, and even ask, like, lightweight things.

Because we're taught to stay away from anything historic, and then we don't have all this information, and our parents actually are ready to talk.

- Mmm.

- But we don't know that.

♪ I'm 16 years old.

I'm at City Hall with my younger sister, Ros, and I'm there for my birth certificate so that I can get my driver's permit.

And I am psyched.

I'm pretty excited about the idea of driving.

So I tell the woman behind the counter, "Susan Birke, B-I-R-K-E." And before I can even tell her my birthdate, she says, "Oh, honey, I know your family, and that's not your name."

And I think, "I'm 16.

"I've lived with this for a long time, I think I know it's my name."

She said, "It has a Z in it."

And I think, "Oh, well, maybe they spelled Susan with a Z, "because my parents are Holocaust survivors, "English was their fourth language, and they spelled, may we say creatively."

So she hands me back a piece of paper, a little white piece of paper, and she's right, it has a Z on it.

It says, "S-Z-I-F-R-A R. Birke, B-I-R-K-E." We are the only B-I-R-K-Es in Lowell, and it's June 28, 1950, this must be me.

But this is a me I have never seen before.

Walking back to my parents' clothing store, my sister and I are, like, "Sifra," "Zifra," "Sy-fra," "Zy-fra."

Unintelligible.

Until my sister breaks out in hysterical laughter and says, "Oh, my God, Sue, they named you Szifra."

I'm 16.

I'm a cheerleader.

I just want to be normal.

I just want to be Susan Birke.

It wasn't a great name, no frills, no fuss, but it worked just fine.

Now I find out that I am going to be Szifra?

Szifra is my Hebrew name.

When you're a Jew, you get a Hebrew name.

You don't do anything with your Hebrew name, you just have it.

We get back to my parents' store.

I show them this piece of paper.

I am melting down near tears.

They ignore me.

They start this volley back and forth-- or as my dad would say, "Forth and back."

(imitating parents' accent): "So, Stella, voos is this R?

I thought we named her Szifra Leah."

"Yeah, I thought we did, too."

(laughter) "I think I figured it out.

I think we named her Rukhl."

(laughter) Rukhl-- what does that sound like?

Vomit, right?

(guttural): Rukhl.

25 minutes ago, I'm Susan Birke.

No middle initial, no nothing, I'm just Susan Birke.

Now, 25 minutes later, I am 16 years old, in Lowell, Massachusetts, and I'm Szifra Rukhl Birke.

(laughter) That night, I'm like, "So where did the Susan come from, then, all these years?"

(imitating parents' accent): "Well, a customer.

"We was calling you Szifra, "a customer told us it's not a good name in America.

"We say, 'What should we call her?'

"They tell us, 'A good American name is Susan.'

"So we called you Susan.

(laughter) I guess we forgot."

(laughter) Between that moment and going to B.U.

to college, I am back and forth-- or forth and back-- about, do I go with Szifra?

Do I go with Susan?

Do I go... what do I do here?

And I decide to take the plunge and go to B.U.

as Szifra.

I tell people my name is Szifra when they ask, and they call me Szifra, 'cause I just told them that was my name.

On the home front, my eight-year-old brother is deciding to be a big ally and he tells people, my friends when they call, "We don't have a Sue or Susan who lives in our home, but we do have a Szifra, if you would like to speak with her."

(laughter) I'm 30, living in Indiana, couple of sons, people ask me about my name, I tell them the truth, Szifra was an Egyptian nursemaid.

I tell them the half-truth, she was an Egyptian nursemaid, but I don't tell them the Jewish part of the story.

I'm 50 years old with my mom, sitting at her table, and my very stoic mom is staring at me very intently with tears in her eyes.

My mother doesn't have tears in her eyes very often.

I ask, "Like, so, is everything okay?"

(imitating accent): "Yeah, Szif, everything's okay."

"It doesn't look like everything's okay."

(imitating Polish accent): "Well, I'm just thinking, looking at you, you look just like my mother."

Well, I don't know if that's, like, a good thing or a bad thing.

Because my mother's mother, Szifra, and her father, and her brothers, and her sister, and the rest of the family were exterminated in the Holocaust, like my dad's family.

So I decide to ask her, "Is this hard?"

And she says, (imitating accent): "Well, yeah, it's hard, "but it's a good hard.

"Because I loved my mother.

"I loved her so much.

(voice breaking): "And when I look at you, I see my mother.

"And I get to see her close and be close to her.

I'm so glad we named you Szifra."

"And I'm so glad you named me Szifra, too."

It's been 51 years since that moment when I would have done anything to be the cheerleader Susan Birke.

Today, when people ask me about my name-- which you can imagine happens regularly, S-Z-I-F-R-A, Szifra-- I tell them the whole story.

I tell them that Szifra was one of the two very brave Egyptian nursemaids who refused to obey the pharaoh's orders to kill the Jewish boys-- the Jewish boy infants.

That Szifra was my grandmother's name, and she was killed in the Holocaust.

I tell them all sorts of things about my name, including the Jewish part of the story.

I was too nervous at 30 to tell the Jewish part of the story, and to talk about my name.

Today, I couldn't be more proud, more honored, to be able (voice breaking): to share my name, and to share this story for all the Szifras, and all the Rukhls, and all of the Leyzers, and Khayims, and all of the people who couldn't tell their own story because they didn't survive to tell it.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ COLOMBO-ABDULLAH: My name is Sofía Colombo-Abdullah.

I'm a junior at Boston University, I'm studying political science.

From Fairfax, Virginia, but I'm originally from Atlanta, Georgia.

So, can you tell me about how you got interested in storytelling or just stories in general?

I've always loved stories ever since I was a kid.

I've been an avid reader my entire life.

Actually, when I was in fifth grade, actually, there was a reading contest at my school for who could read the most books.

And I have to say, I came in second, and I have never been more mad in my entire life.

But I just really like stories.

They're something that have always just, like, appealed to me, just because it's just there's, like, a whole other world just in some, like, a few pages.

So, I think that's really cool.

So, what are you hoping that the audience takes away from your story tonight?

I think a lot of us, like, even me, we judge people, like, right off the bat, just, like, before you even met them, based on, like, how they dress or based on how they look or act or whatever.

I think like that's what I want to take away for myself as well.

Not just like the people who will be listening and watching-- give people a chance.

- Mm-hmm.

- And don't assume someone thinks a certain way or believes certain things just because of how they look or just what their names are.

So, I think that's important.

♪ The first time I was asked if I was a terrorist was when I was nine years old.

I had just moved to northern Virginia from Atlanta, Georgia.

The school I enrolled in had quite a different environment compared to the one I had just come from.

In Virginia, I was surrounded by mostly only white kids.

In Atlanta, my classroom was filled with children of color.

My first class of fifth grade was language arts in Mrs. Hines's class.

To begin the year, Mrs. Hines started off with the roll call.

My last name begins with a C, so I'm near the beginning of the attendance list.

She gets through the As and the Bs, and then we're here, "Sofía Colombo-Abdullah."

Her pronunciation is miles off, but that's expected.

What I didn't expect was the kid next to me, a blond-haired boy with blue eyes, taking a long lean towards me, looking me straight in the eyes, and then saying, "Are you a terrorist?

Your name sounds like a terrorist name."

I was nine, I had no idea what terrorist even meant.

I hadn't grown up in northern Virginia, which, with its proximity to D.C., was still reeling from the effects and the persistent presence of the 9/11 attacks.

And it had just never come up.

I was too young for my parents to ever discuss it with me.

But, from his question, I knew that it wasn't good, that I wasn't seen as good.

For years, I hated my name.

It grated on me a lot.

In its entirety, it is a whopping 26 letters long.

It's othering, very othering.

People react very strangely to it.

And it wasn't just my last name that made me feel that way.

My first name is Sofía, and it has just enough foreignness to draw a little attention to it with its spelling.

Eventually, though, I did get some confidence.

The internet told me that Sofia was Greek for wisdom.

Greek like Athena, the goddess of wisdom.

Urban Dictionary told me that Sofia was a name that was "vivacious and full of life."

(laughter) Well, the-the meaning that I really delighted in was the one that my mother told me.

She told me that she named me for a queen-- the queen of Spain, to be exact.

Me, queenly-- how many other people could say that?

(laughter) And for the first time, I really took pride in being Sofía.

When I was 16, I took a trip with my father.

We were on our way to Atlanta to go visit my grandmother.

We were in the Ronald Reagan National Airport in downtown D.C. We get to airport security, and the line is a breeze.

Dad and I have TSA PreCheck, so no shoes off and all of that.

PreCheck makes you feel kind of human compared to the regular line's stripping down process.

And we get through TSA, and it's also really helpful just because Dad and I have that questionable last name, and we look pretty ambiguous.

My dad is a black man with a sort of bronze skin tone, and I'm more like café con crema, my mother is Italian-Argentinian.

And we have a Muslim last name, but neither of us dresses in traditional Muslim wear.

We make it through TSA, and we head to our gate to wait.

We sit for about 20 minutes in those rigid, leathery, uncomfortable chairs before boarding begins.

There's a million kinds of people in the airport and a million kinds of chaos.

We wait, and then the boarding process begins.

But Dad and I are also the type to wait out the line, 'cause everybody's just trying to jostle each other and go nowhere fast-- it's like you can't speed up an airport line.

But we wait, and the line diminishes, and we go and hop in the line.

And the flight attendant conducting the boarding process is a short white lady with her hair cut in, like, a bob.

We reach her, and my dad pulls out his phone.

He has his ticket on his Apple Wallet, 'cause he thinks he's very tech savvy, so he scans it.

And as he's scanning the ticket, the flight attendant asks him a question.

"Are you sure you're on this flight?"

My dad, who has just scanned his ticket, says "Yes" with confusion.

"Is there a problem?"

The flight attendant asks him another question.

"Are you sure you're cleared to be on this flight, Mr.

Abdullah?"

My dad just says "Yes" calmly.

I'm internally boiling.

The question that she is asking is the same question that is hinted at towards thousands of Muslim people.

It's the same question that construes this prejudiced view that so many people have towards Muslim and Muslim-presenting people.

It's the "Are you a terrorist?"

question.

I will never forget what she said and how she said it.

It was just like that boy when I was nine.

But all I do is I scan my ticket, and I hold my tongue.

But I glare at her.

My dad is just the type to... he doesn't make a big deal out of things that he doesn't consider worth his time, and he's dealt with a whole lot worse in his life.

So, we continue on, and we board the flight.

But that was my name, that was my father, and this is who we are.

There shouldn't be anything wrong with that.

The flight is bumpy.

We sit across from the aisle from each other, and we continue through it in silence.

I knew my dad wasn't going to say anything, so he didn't-- nothing.

But the entire time, I'm just wondering to myself, "Why does a name matter so much?

It's just a name."

After we land in Atlanta, we head to the sky train to go through the terminals, and we get off at our designated stop.

And we head towards the escalators, and my dad turns to me as we get on the escalators.

And he doesn't express the frustration that I was most definitely feeling at that moment in time.

He says to me that there's no shame in a name because a name is who you are, and there is never any shame in that.

My name is Sofía Yasmeen Colombo-Abdullah.

It's Sofía con un A, with an A, there's an accent over the I, but I go by Sofie, because people never say it right.

Sofía means wisdom, Yasmeen means courage.

Colombo means dove, a name given to Italian orphans.

And Abdullah, Abdullah simply means "servant of Allah," which is Arabic for God.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ OKOKON: U-Meleni, it's great to meet you.

Can you tell me just a little bit about yourself?

MHLABA-ADEBO: So, I'm a poet, I am also an educator, I'm a marathoner, I'm a mom.

Was it difficult for you shifting gears from poetry to storytelling?

So, shifting gears from poetry to storytelling was very interesting for me, because I live, primarily, in the poetry world, like, everything-- when I move around the world, I just see poems all over the place.

So I really had to stretch as a writer to really fill in the gaps and in the spaces that I didn't have to do as a poet.

So I was trying to figure out, how do I do that in a story format?

How do I weave the story with the beautiful imagery, but with the specific details that people are listening for.

♪ MHLABA-ADEBO: My mother has a green thumb.

Perhaps it's because she grew up on a farm in Chipinge, in Zimbabwe.

Or perhaps she just has this gift of giving life to everything that she touches.

When we go on long drives in Murambi, in Zimbabwe, always in the back of her car is a little shovel and a small box.

And anytime we drive and she sees a small plant or a flower, she will stop the car and go out like a ballerina, and with the gentle, surgeon's precision, lift that beautiful plant or flower and take it back home.

She tasked me with watering the flowers.

Not too much water, not too little, but always with love.

She tells me that plants have feelings, and flowers, too.

And I can tell from the sprawling paradise of her home that they love her right back.

They are the lucky ones.

I, too, am lucky.

Like them, I grew in the seed that was my mother's body.

I'm told that my mother was a few days overdue when she had me.

Apparently, there were still some things I needed to do.

So, my father said, in his native tongue, he's Ndebele, "What are we waiting for?

U-Meleni."

And thus, I had my given name.

And so my life-long mission has been to figure out how to answer that much-loaded question.

I was born in a small village in a small town called Leominster, Massachusetts.

(laughter) I don't know much about it at all.

All the things that I'm told are apparently I was really obsessed with "Sesame Street," my first words were, "Juice, mommy, juice," and I've seen pictures of myself in a pink snowsuit.

I was four years old when we moved back to Rhodesia.

Right in time to be on the frontlines of a revolution.

I was too young to know, but young enough to feel the fear.

The fear of gunshots in the night, the sound of gum boots and soldiers running through my grandmother's farm.

And at night, we would sleep in concentration camps.

I was told it was to keep us safe.

But we gained independence in 1980, and I grew in the new Zimbabwe, post-independence.

I was lucky enough to go private schools, and I loved school, particularly English, and drama, and music.

And my teachers nourished that creative longing in my soul.

And I also went to school in South Africa, and it was there I have one of my fondest memories of my high school teacher who coerced me into singing at a school variety show.

I admit, I was a little nervous.

I used to sing with a choir, in the safety of the cocoon of the choir, but this time, she wanted me to do a solo.

So I thought about, what would I sing?

And Tracy Chapman songs came in my mind.

So I wanted to sing "Last Night."

Oh, I remember that moment when I sang it on stage.

Everyone was quiet.

And in that moment, oh, my goodness.

A star was born in my mind!

And I remember dreaming of Mariah Carey songs and En Vogue, and I'd be on stage, and people would be screaming.

And my brother, he'd be there, I'd bind his restless legs and he would listen to my genius.

I had really grand visions then.

But isn't that what good teachers are supposed to inspire?

You see, I was the seed.

School was my soil, and my teachers, they were the water.

But the thing is, the arts weren't really-- the arts weren't really a thing then.

I needed to concentrate on more important things like math and physics.

And think about what I would do and be in the future.

But I wanted something different.

I wondered what would happen if I went into a new place, new soil.

What kind of flower would I bloom?

So I decided that I would do something different.

I decided to come back to America on my own.

I remember that long flight.

I remember it like yesterday.

I remember that time because I wasn't talking to my mom, although I did manage to coerce her to braid my hair in cornrows because I wanted to make doubly sure that people knew that I was African when I landed.

Yes, I did.

I remember the biting cold.

It was so cold, right down to my bones.

And my biological father picked me up that day, and I remember, as we were driving to Newton, he was telling me all the things I would expect in college, but all I could think of is, "I miss the sun."

I miss the sun!

I missed the sun like the soil must miss the rain, I miss the echo of my language.

I even missed my baby brother.

And he would unravel my cassette tapes.

I even missed that.

But this was new soil.

This was a new place for me to be.

You see, I wanted to carve out my own destiny.

You see, most people immigrate because they're running away from something, and in my case, I was running away from the oppressive regime that was my parents.

(laughter) They were stern, and strong, and brilliant, but I wanted to be somewhere different.

So I came to Boston and this became my new soil, my new land, where I could just be.

But I have to admit, that when I was in college, I was really annoyed at a couple of things.

First is, people would always question what kind of African I was.

Why did I speak English so well?

Who taught it to me?

Did I have a pet lion?

(laughter) Things like that.

And then they'd also want to touch my hair without permission, change my name to suit their palate.

I really didn't appreciate that, but, honestly, there were other times I really enjoyed myself.

I took part in jazz band, I learned a lot about music, and interestingly enough, it is only in America, when I came back, I was able to reclaim my name.

You see, no one in my family calls me U-Meleni.

My parents all call me Melanie or Mel or different variations, depending on their mood.

And it is only when I came to America, and I started performing, that I realized I need a stage name.

So I started thinking of all these interesting names, and then I took a step back and realized, wait a minute-- I have an interesting name.

U-Meleni.

"What are we waiting for?"

It's funny that it took me coming back to America to reclaim my name, but it makes sense, because this was my beginning, right?

This is the place of my birth.

You see, in Boston, I've been able to live out the dreams I had as a kid, the dreams of being a writer, of performing on stages.

And yes, I didn't quite get to the whole Mariah Carey status or En Vogue but I've had the privilege and pleasure of performing on many stages, and being warmly loved and received and acknowledged as an artist, here in Boston, in this soil.

You see, the seeds were planted in Africa, but the flower bloomed and continues to bloom here in Boston.

Boston has been the place of many firsts.

My first love, I met him here, I married him.

My child was born here.

My first job, so many things.

You see, I am a seed.

I am an immigrant.

I am Zimbabwean, I am American.

We are all seeds, aren't we?

Seeds that scatter, seeds that fall, seeds that are yearning to bloom, to grow, to evolve.

My mother tells me that plants have feelings, and flowers, too.

And that really, we are all seeds, just yearning to grow.

Thank you.

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