Thursday, November 18, 2010

My Name (In the style of Sandra Cisneros)

Where I'm from my name means I'm surprised if you can pronounce it correctly. In Nigerian it means honor confers your crown.. It means chance, it means haphazard. It is like the number 3. A shade of fall. It is the jazz my mother plays every morning, songs that feel like triumph and failure, love and fear.
It is The British singer, Helen Folasade Adu's stage name and I feel like she and I are connected sort of like we, because she feels that "Sade'" is special. She is an ingratiating character in her music, smooth jazz, quiet storm, soul, bellowed like me. Like how easy going I wish I were. 
My parents. 17 and 18 didn't know that I would be Sade' until I arrived here. Everyone was expecting Aaron.
And the story goes, I wore boy's clothes for my first month or so. 
I wasn't planned for, like those babies born to trying, older parents who wished, and prepared yellow nurseries, and wished that they could until a doctor professed their miracle. I wonder if my mother made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be.
Sade'. I wonder if my mother was thinking of a sad song when she named me.
Almost everywhere they say my name funny. Sometimes I am "Say-dee," or "Sayd," and I get angry because They don't know how to announce my name like it is royal, like my mother does. I wish my mother would have named me something different. But I am always Sade'. I know some girls with names that sound like mine. But they're names are more revealing more loud. S-H-A-D-A-E, spelled more phonetically. With their snapping fingers and rolling necks and loud, revealing mothers. I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Sade' as Nicole or Alexandra or Tatum. Yes. Something like Tatum will do.

- Sade' Miller

No comments:

Post a Comment