What’s in a Name
Fiyola Hoosen-Steele
When I was born they shouted the Islamic call to prayer in my ears, sweetened my tongue with a paste made of honey, dates and almonds, and named me Nadiya. Then I became sick—coughing, wheezing, losing my breath. Frightened, my mother raced through the yellow-pages of doctors but none found a malady to treat until my grandmother, a sensible woman more accustomed to doing than praying, insisted I be taken to the local Imam who was known to dabble in the arts of the Hakims, medicine men. He said the name I was given was heavy. It was pressing on my chest. He said Nadiya means ‘the caller’ and that I would call people’s problems to my shoulders, to my chest. He suggested they name me something lighter and freer, so they called me Fiyola, which means snowflake. And I began to breathe.
From the time I was told this story, at the age of twelve, I lived a kind of duality—buying two of everything, eating two of everything, performing tasks twice, doing a double take before making decisions. A psychic once inquired if I was a twin, and puzzled that I was not, proclaimed that when we started out in the womb we were two then one consumed the other in order to live, in order to be born. Preposterous, but it stuck. Perhaps the duality was always there, and the story of my name was what I latched onto to make sense of my world, of myself. After all, from the beginning of time, man has named things, and in naming things we told stories of our worlds, of ourselves, and in naming things our stories allowed us to connect and even disconnect from one another.
What is mystifying about Fiyola’s story is that she never stopped being a Nadiya. In fact, she was Nadiya only by another name. Already labelled Problem Solver by her family and friends, she peddled in Nadiya’s craft inside the biggest Amphitheatre of man’s afflictions—the United Nations. Every time bombs decimated countries, or children got gunned down, girls sold into slavery, refugees drowned in seas, or a people erased because of their ethnicity, religion or race, Fiyola was behind the flag of her country or organization offering up solutions. Her breathing became shallow, her chest shrunk, but she stayed the course for was it not her destiny to call the world’s problems to her shoulders? After all, she was named for it. Could the Imam have foreseen that her body would not withstand the traumas of the world and was that why he suggested a name change? Even if he did not know it, she knew it. She knew it the minute she heard her baby’s heart beating on the sonogram at the fertility clinic. In that moment her chest expanded.
And now in this hospital bed with my baby girl reposing between my breasts, I have the responsibility of naming her. My husband, whose energy is one of calmness and strength, probably because his name Alexander, Defender of Men, imbues both qualities, picks up the registration form that the nurse had left hours before and says, “So, what’s it going to be? Does she look like a Sahara?” He then tenderly stares into her eyes and asks, “Are you a Sahara?” It would be wondrous if she nodded or shook her head, but she leaves it to me, only staring back at him with her big browns shaded by fluttering lashes.
The name Sahara comes from the Arabic root word suhr, which means a new dawn. The name, like Nadiya, has a heaviness to it, a promise of ushering in a new beginning, an obligation to make light what has been dark. I hesitate. Perhaps I should give her a name with a simpler meaning like beautiful or moonlight or even snowflake.
But I say, “Yes, she feels like a Sahara.”
For more than anyone, I am in need of a new beginning, a rebirth. And like many first-time mothers, I have put that charge on my baby’s shoulders.
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Fiyola Hoosen-Steele is a former South African diplomat to the United Nations (UN) and former UN Representative for Plan International, Independent Diplomat, and Save the Children. She holds a Bachelor of Laws Degree, a Bachelor of Arts Honors Degree and a Master of Arts Degree in International Relations. She honed her writing craft at Gotham Writers Workshop and most recently taught The Writer’s Manifestation Project at Art of Alignment Academy. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter.
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