Noury? Nourhan? — talking back to the enlightenment : practicing anti-racist teaching and learning in eighteenth-century British literature (Roundtable)

Abstract

Names are political. Dealing with coloniality is acknowledging that it functions in both covert and overt methods—that this violence is often internalized. My name is Nourhan. It means “the light of heaven”; my family gave me this name because they found it fitting to my personality. When we immigrated to the United States in 2005, no one besides my family said my name out loud, and when I started my first day of public school in 2008, my third-grade teacher told me, “Your name is really interesting. How do you like Noury?” I stuck with it. I liked that people would finally call me by something, and here’s how I rationalized it: Noury is who I am as an American, and Nourhan is who I am as an Egyptian. I lived with this distinction for a long time and continue to live with it today—dis-comfort, coloniality, and everything in between. Reading The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi has taught me that reclaiming one’s native name is a form of resistance to the dominant culture’s hegemonic control. By tracing Equiano and Ethe’s relationship to their names, I outline a mode of re-sistance that I hope to adopt one day.