A name is a prayer
Sometimes, when you're both mother and child, you must name yourself.
*note of care: this piece references childhood sexual abuse and its lasting impacts. it contains antidotes and prayers of gentleness for all survivors everywhere.
Every woman that I met had a name to her.
I fought for my name beneath
the one-legged kitchen table
in between the lies I constructed
out of partially-told histories.
Little by little, you learn to weave a life. Sometimes inheritance is buried and you cough it up praying in the darkness. Sometimes you catch it in the palm of your hand and use it to light a narrow corridor. Sometimes you just barely make it. Sometimes you forget but you never start from the beginning. Each moment you’ve ever remembered is a rung on a ladder. Sometimes you find that you’re higher up than you knew, and all it takes is conjuring one word to see the broad horizon, and that word is your name, and that name shapes your life.
The pregnant mother’s mind comes forward in the shape of the name Uta 歌, and rocks there, and lands there, and rests. Uta, meaning to sing, to chant, to praise. Uta 歌, understood in the backwoods of her mother’s culture as a kind of oral alchemy, a vibrational incantation, an utterance able to alter the air around the utterer. She imagines her child speaking their own name— introducing themself to other children, guiding others in pronunciation, showing them how the tongue flicks the back of the upper teeth, teaching them a new sound. She imagines speaking the name of her own child—rousing them from sleep, calling them back home. With each vocalization, she imagines that clusters of denser matter cascade up and out of the lungs and give way to music, reverberating through the cells of mother and child’s bodies and generating heat in their bellies. As all heat does, this heat disperses outward from the axis, unraveling tight knit coils of tension, giving rise to a sensation akin to joy.
The summer I became an aunt I clung to a childhood name. I missed its softness, its sweetness, its invitation. An open door for anyone to walk through, speaking childhood, spilling candy. Yoni is stuffed, overfed, saturated, foaming, caramelized, unwell. Something is inflamed you see, something is itchy. The summer I became an aunt I withdrew from this world. Memory awakened. I could no longer feign adult. Whose life could I possibly care for? Someone in me was screaming, someone in me was battling for her life.
I kneaded the pain and I kneaded the pain and I kneaded the pain until it broke into a collection of crystals. From those crystals I removed the names. I crossed off each word in the dictionary and replaced it with a sound made any place but the mouth. I returned to the forest where I first lost belonging and placed a small intention for every hundred paces. My liver slowed to the pace of the river which ran beside me. The death all around me was undeniable, as was the eternity. I promised not to betray you, whoever you are. You created me and I have not forgotten yet. I promised to bury the gold back in my earth from where it came.
Is it possible that we must unbecome the one who was hurt in order to help them heal? Nakatatanda ng balat, elder of shells. Reception, the one who holds so the held can access freedom. Image after image of big hands cradling little body, and I lean toward a big name that can hold a little name. How can I be big body when I am still living in the little body that ails? How can I nurture the one who was hurt when I am still the one hurting?
An abuser lives with you always, until the pilgrimage is made. Until support is sought. Not from anywhere, not from anyone. At the site of the wound, the antidote is administered. At the very site of the wound, the seed of all distortion. At the very center of that seed is planted a seed of restoration.
I’m beside the birth hole again but this time I’m holding mommy’s legs and blowing lavender smoke into her mouth. This time I’m watching my head squeeze out like the whole moon being born, covered in black moss. I’m cupping the skull, still so soft, and tracing symbols of undying love and protection into the crown. I’m that spirit at the bedside of my own birth, swimming back to live it all over again, this time as my own protector and guide. I don’t leave my own side, not for even one moment, as long long long as I’m alive.
With the spell of a name, I distinguished myself from you so that I will never betray you. By betrayal I mean, get lost with you, enmesh with you, believe the stories that crystallized in your mind to protect the heart from future pain. You is the younger self, the one with the hollow for a heart, the one who aches with her entire body. You is the one who clings, and the one who hides. You is the one with the clipped wing, the one no different from the owl who died of mysterious causes on the shoulder of the highway, feathers like toasted caramel, decadent in the softness of your flight, you who glides out of cages, you who escapes the pitbull, you who is still panting, rushing, evading, haunted by an inner predator, you who internalized danger, you who has never felt safe, even when alone. You with a maze for a mind, a place of tricks and mirrors.
When my body was born my eyes opened to three black haired women fanning the panic from me with the wide wings of a downy feathered bird. Fear was like salt on my skin or sugar from a slow-drying fruit and the gasping rushed out of me, frantic for a place to rest. I took stock of my body and felt horror at the responsibility of living among so much disorder. How would I do it? I longed to become formless again, to return to the shapeless energy of which I’d been constellated only a moment ago, quickly dissolving from my memory like a dream interrupted. I came into a human mind and assumed disaster. These women quickly swept me up before that program took hold, these women intervened at that tender moment between waking and remembering, and wrapped me up in their owl wings and the brown of their skin. I followed them with my eyes, learning how to be in this world. I found they were no different than the mothers I was born to, except that they had recalled the word ceremony from the recesses of their own genetics and lived into the word with a conscious knowing. But their movements, I knew them from the mothers that had raised me and the homes they kept. These mothers of mine woke with the sun, one cooking while another trailed closely behind her, washing every pot she used, wiping every surface, maintaining an unbroken hum of conversation or laughter or bickering. Though they had forgotten the word ceremony, they carried the motions of their mothers and grandmothers in their bodies and imparted those ways of being upon me in a place so fundamental it could never be wiped clean, for it could not be cleaned of its essential nature.
When I choose to be born again, my name is Uta. I hold the wing in my hand and I remember how the owl died without ceremony, fallen to earth with hundreds of her siblings, perished without impact wound, death by an invisible pollutant, an atmospheric predator. There’s no proof of harm, except for the stillness, the breathlessness, the loss of life. Teacher holds me by the wing and brings me to the moonlight. She tells me, “You and the owl, there’s no difference between you, is there? You heal yourself, and she receives a healing. You don’t need worry about whose healing is whose.”
Lunar being, whisperer of untold truths: whose song do you sing? Your mourning song is our triumph song. You play the drum and return to present time, you return to consciousness. That hollow in your heart, you know only you can fill it. Nothing outside of you can replace the parts of you that departed at the time the trauma struck you. With a name, you call your essence back, but a name is only the beginning. A name is a path to walk and a story to weave. Soon, your prayer will be solid in the palm of your hand. A clay figure you animate with your breath, your prayer becomes a plea you make with your voice to the ones who can help you. Where you spoke to god, you now speak to mother, and grandmother, who were always your gods. And you tell them your prayer. And their healing is your healing. And so the prayer becomes real. Fleshy, textured, and complicated. Real.
I wake up to the promise of another chance at life to the sound of this prayer:
In search of new sounds, I give us a new name
I adorn my baby with a sweet song, and sigh out the sorrow
I adorn my baby with a sweet song, and sigh out the sorrow
My name is Uta and I know where I’m going.
