What’s in a Name?

Slava

I began adding Avramović, my mother’s maiden name, to my name after my grandfather died in 2007. As my favorite grandparent, and perhaps my favorite person, using his name connected me to him in his absence. He was born in 1919 on a sheep and plum farm in the mountains outside Belgrade in what is now Serbia, a place he left as a young man and I have never visited. 

I loved hearing the Avramović family names spoken aloud when I was a child. My grandfather’s given name, Proka; his brothers, Stojko and Gojko; his nephew and nieces, Milan and Milanka and Yela; his parents, Radivoj and Jedoksija. Somehow these names filled in the blanks of a family and a place to which I belonged. I paused on the pages of my mom’s photo albums that held pictures of the Avramović family–ruddy skinned, broad-faced, light-eyed, the women in babushkas. I saw my own features so clearly in theirs. 

The last Christmas my grandfather was alive, I asked him how the holiday was celebrated in his Eastern Orthodox upbringing. He didn’t have much to say about it. There was another holiday that eclipsed Christmas in its importance and in the festivities that marked it: Name Day. 

As it suggests, Name Day, Slava in Serbian, was a celebration of one’s name, family, and patron saint, observed in January. Opa’s gray eyes sparkled as he recounted Avramović family Slava celebrations. Relatives came from all over and crowded into the farmhouse. A pit was dug in the snow and frozen earth, and a pig was roasted whole–an annual decadence for a family that survived on mutton and potatoes. Sweet breads were made. Slivovitz–plum brandy distilled from the orchard’s harvest–flowed. 

My grandfather, Proka Avramović, housed in a small shrine in my dining room.

The one bit of ritual he named was the lighting of candles placed on a large tree branch–one for each ancestor whose name was retained in the family’s collective memory and records. Their spirits were invited back to the family’s land, to join in the feasting, to be honored for their role in making such a celebration possible, to act as guides throughout the coming year. 

The Slava celebrations lasted through the night into the wee hours of the morning, when the visiting family members would unfurl their bedrolls and, with their sleeping forms, cover every square inch of floor space in the humble farmhouse. The festivities resumed the next day, and perhaps longer, until the candles burned out, and the roasted pig had been entirely consumed along with every last drop of slivovitz, and the extended family returned home again.

Each January, in some small way, I recognize Slava. I make the Serbian foods my grandfather made for us when I was young–moussaka or stuffed cabbage or gibanica. I invite my closest friends–chosen family–to join me in feasting and observance. We light candles on a large madrona branch and thank our relatives, starting with my grandfather Proka, whose sacrifices have made our lives what they are. I sit with the branch until the candles burn out. 

My name, Avramović, is my tie to my ancestral homeland, and it is dear to me. It’s a reminder that language is tied to place, however distant, however otherwise unknown. 

The Land is in the Language

Right now, it would be an easy time to give up, but we have to be stronger than ever in holding up our languages and what they mean and holding up images that describe, that innervate, that express who we are as Native peoples because it’s directly related to how we, as human beings, might survive climate change shifts, cultural shifts, political shifts. In these lands here, the key to that is in what Native peoples are carrying and have carried from the beginning…the land is in the language.”

—Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee)

This place, the United States, the land to which my grandfather immigrated in the 1950s, is also filled with languages and names tied to place. And unlike our name, which is tied to a language tied to a place, but not a description of or otherwise emerging from that place (Avramović means “son of Abraham”), these names are rich in their descriptions of place itself. 

I’ve long wondered what the original names are for the plants and animals here, the geological formations, the waterways, the natural phenomena. I’ve imagined these beings and places to contain an animacy that eludes all but those who speak these languages and can call them by their ancient names. I imagine them waking to life upon hearing their true names whispered.

Suquamish, the name of the original peoples of the place I live, now called Bainbridge Island, means “people of the clear salt water.” Schel-chelb, the name of a former Suquamish winter village near my home from which shellfish and other seafoods were harvested, means “bringing it home.” Schel-chelb looks east across the Salish Sea, to where Tahoma (Mt. Rainier), “mother of all waters,” stands in the distance. 

Tahoma, “mother of all waters,” from Schel-chelb, “bringing it home.”

Likewise Denali, the Kuyokan Athabascan name for North America’s highest peak, carries in its name its eminence: Denali translates as “the high one.” The Kuyokan Athabascan people have lived as a people in Alaska for over 1,000 years with ancestral roots in that place that go back for thousands more. 

A slim volume from the University of Chicago Press came to be part of my library when I merged my book collection with my husband’s eleven years ago: Maps Are Territories: Science is an Atlas. Its author, David Turnbull, makes the point that it is easy to think of maps as objective, their contents, including the names used to identify places, scientific in nature. However, he argues, this is not the case:  “The mapmaker determines what is, and equally what is not included in the representation. This is the first important sense in which maps are conventional [based on what is generally believed]. What is on the map is determined not simply by what is in the environment but also by the human agent that produced it.”

Were maps to be more objective, and in that sense truer, the names would reflect the qualities of the places to which they were attached: people of the clear salt water; bringing it home; mother of all waters; the high one. To attach a name like McKinley to a mountain like Denali is to say nothing of the place itself, let alone of the people who have lived in its shadow and cast their gaze to its peak for millennia. 

What’s in a name? Place is, in short. Or it can be, if we can set aside our pride, our penchant for making places reflect us instead of letting them work on us, letting ourselves become reflections of them. 

Denali, Denali, Denali. Forever and ever, amen.