You Will Be Complicit

My name has always been a decision to make.

There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution, of course is “silence.” But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two. — Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Magical Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Borders and Fantasy.

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To name something is to know it intimately – to bring it into the world a second time, or maybe even a first time, a precursor to birth in its own right. Like a baby in utero, a name is not here in the physical realm quite yet, it is felt, it is imagined, it is known but not yet seen. To be named is to be called into presence, to be claimed by love or memory or desire before the body arrives. But naming is never innocent. It binds the name and the namer in quiet complicity – a history, a memory, a shared script or a story already unfolding, whether freely chosen or inherited.  

The baby is two weeks early, she is ready, she is unwilling to wait. She is impertinent – already at odds with her mother, defying the rhythm of a body that should be hers to follow. 

She is far from home, in the matrixial borderspace of her mother’s womb in Tlaquepaque, Mexico, not Jalisco, where their family’s roots begin. 

My parents are on vacation when labor begins. My mother says that my impatience cost us our own doctor in a private hospital in Jalisco, and I can feel the twinge of her anxiety turned bitterness some thirty years later. In 1995 men were not allowed to be in the labor and delivery room with the mother of their child. They were to wait outside while their wives entered this liminal space between life and death, rupture and genesis. My mother gives birth in Tlaquepaque, not Jalisco. I am born – just the two of us, alone, without the welcoming presence of our matriarch. We do not know yet that this is how our life will be from then on: just the two of us, in co-emergence, in becoming, alongside one another. 

When one of her sisters visits her in the hospital, she asks for the baby’s name. “Kimberly,” my mother says. I imagine my tia holding me in her arms, tracing the lineage of women on my face – I look like my mother, like my tias, like my grandmother. “I thought you were going to name her Christián?” I wonder what about me fits the name. Christian means of christ. I have never been such a thing. My battle with a father sky god began at the ripe age of seven. I contested my Catholic upbringing, always questioning the church, its teachings and its oppressive hierarchy meant to place men at the top. My demands for answers frightened my mother, created a divide between mother and daughter. I refused to be complicit in the claims of any man. But that became my name. 

 Our family began calling me Cristi, a nickname they had called my mother before I came into being. When they would call me “Cristi!” my mother would respond, only for her family to say “Not you, the baby.” My mother’s initiation into motherhood was her complicity in self-erasure. Our names—my mother, Cristina; me, her daughter, Christian—so similar, so closely entwined, the thread that bound us grew so tight she had to loosen it or lose herself entirely.

My mother changed my name after that. “Thania” – a shortened version of my middle name Thaniari, named after my mother’s favorite actress. It was a gentle cut, like scissors to the thread that bound us by just a few letters in our names. 

When I entered kindergarten, my name changed again. I wore a navy blue dress over a white collared button up uniform shirt and little black mary janes with white socks. My straight jet black hair was up in a half-up ponytail tied together by a cherry red scrunchie. We arrived just as everyone was lining up. I knew a little English that I taught myself by watching Sesame Street and plopping down in front of my mother’s bedroom tv to watch Ingles Sin Barreras while she cleaned and half-listened. I still remember the smell of the VHS boxes, the glossy workbooks that went along with it, and the sound of the giant plastic box being opened to reveal each volume and lesson. I walked up to my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Troy,  whose perfume remains so ingrained in my memory that years later, in my mid twenties I stumbled onto a candle that smelled just like her—ylang ylang and jasmine—and flickered with the warm comfort that she brought into my life those early years. 

She asked me my name. I formed my mouth to speak, knowing exactly what to say, as this was one of the first lessons in learning English – a greeting followed by this question. “What is your name?” – ¿cómo te llamas?  But my mother interrupted me. “Christián.” And I was left with “Thania” as a lingering taste on my tongue. 

I looked back at my mother, then at my teacher, thinking that maybe everyone got a new name when they started school. Thinking that there was a version of myself that was kept from me, like a secret. A part of me that only my mother knew, that my teacher got to claim before I did. I was not given enough time to try this new name—to fill my mouth with it, loose baby teeth and sensitive gums still aching from the new ones —before I heard Mrs. Troy declare, “Christian.” she held my hand as we walked back to class. 

In school for the next twelve years, I will be asked if I am a boy. Why is my name a boy’s name? “Cristina?” “With a K, a C or Ch?” There will be jokes: “Christian, are you a Christian?” To which I will reply, “No I am Catholic.” Until I come to my senses in teenhood. 

Teenhood is when I read William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In Act II, Scene II Juliet says: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Romeo is from the Montague family, sworn enemies of her own family, the Capulets. His name came with a history she was willing to ignore. She says in the beginning of this scene “Tis but thy name that is my enemy.” Not the man she was falling in love with, but simply his name, a name he did not choose. In response Romeo says, “I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized. Henceforth I never will be Romeo.” If his name is her enemy, he will refuse to be called that, to be associated with a lineage of people that began this rivalry before he came into existence. He is reclaiming his personhood in the name of love. As a teen I had warped ideas of love as something that could save you, but I saw in this play a love that could transform you, could be a decision and a choice to make. 

I was obsessed with this play, and tried to decode every line.What’s in a name? Everything – history, risk, belonging, defiance, my matrilineal lineage. Even love.

I defended my name and also yearned for the day that I would turn 18 and be able to change it. I faintly remember an effort to try other names on for size, but nothing ever fit. There was nothing more unique or complicated than my given name. In wanting to let go of it, I realized that there is a history and a thread that links me to my mother and to my tia in that hospital room in Tlaquepaque, Mexico, that I was unwilling to lose. My name became something to endure and eventually something to accept. And my choice not to change it was a refusal to be complicit in the script and expectations others had for me.

I was in my early twenties and rapidly slipping into some dark pit of mental illness when my name was transformed again. I was grappling with my identity, my lineage, my childhood, so I sought a therapist. On our consultation call, she answered the phone by asking “Christián?” I formed my mouth to speak, to correct her. Before me, rapidly a world cracked open, and a lost version of myself emerged. Yes, I am a Mexican woman, my first language is Spanish, my mother only speaks Spanish. “Yes, this is she.” 

And here I am again, weighing the implications of my name. Weighing the dangers of putting it on work that could potentially put me at risk—not just me, but my family, my own children. Weighing the cost of being an immigrant in this country. Will you take my name in your mouth and change its shape, its form? Will you use it against me? Will you place it in spaces that are unsafe for me? If I write my name on my truth, will I be stalked, watched, put on some terrorist watch list by the government of the United States? Will you still read my work, my art? Will you be complicit? 

My name has always been a decision to make. A question, an accusation, an interruption. But now the decision is wholly my own. Writing and creating as an immigrant woman in the US is a sacred practice against the complicity of my own erasure in this country. A refusal to be further robbed of my humanity, my history, my memory. In the conversations I had with community members in search of advice in making this decision, I have had to face both the real and imagined dangers of writing under my government name. In one of the very first phone calls I had, the first question I was asked was, “Do you really want to do this—do you want to write at all?” There was a sinking feeling in my belly followed by an immediate answer. 

Yes. Absolutely. I could never stop writing. I could never let them take that from me. I could never let them take my name from me.  

My name is Christián Thaniari. You are now complicit. I have decided to expose myself as a writer, an eldest daughter of immigrants, a mother, and an immigrant myself. You know my name. You are complicit in my disobedience, in my insistence on saying this is who I am. You share the cost of this voice. Because I cannot speak without risk, and you cannot listen without responsibility. You are complicit, because now you know. And knowing, in this context, is not neutral.