A Woman by Any Other Name
"Woman Writing Letter" by Henry O'Hara Clive
I’ve been married a year and a half and I still don’t know what my last name is. Technically, according to the State of New York, it is “Choucair-Joseph.” A clumsy compromise, I’m the first to admit. Depending on the day you call I might be going by Sariah Choucair, Sariah Joseph, Sariah Choucair-Joseph or, if I’m having a particularly bad day and don’t feel like correcting the chipper helper on the other end, Sarah Joseph.
This is a modern dilemma. When my mother and grandmothers married they traded Taha for Choucair, Edwards for Anderson, Anderson for Choucair. There’s a nice simplicity to the tradition, I admit. No one knows what to do with a hyphenated last name. They assume you are being difficult or are a mutant feminist who wants to punish the world with a mouthful of syllables hinged on the edges of a spear. Would you like to hear someone roll their eyes? I mean it. If you’d like to be able to hear the sound two eyeballs make as the arc against strained eyelids, make a dentist appointment and tell them your hyphenated last name.
The only people I can completely depend on to use the full hyphenated name are my father and the husband of my blonde alter-ego, A., the friend who I can call when I want to hide under the covers for two weeks because I can’t figure out how to begin a short story and she laughs a magical laugh and we go for a drive and suddenly the blankets look suffocating, not salvational. It figures, then, that her husband would appreciate the finer points of dealing with a woman on the verge of a hyphen. I don’t blame the rest, don’t blame the sweet guys at church who call me Sister Joseph, the friends who circumvent the minefield of envelope addressing by sending everything care of “Sariah and O,” the co-workers who pause after “Sariah” and then choose the last name they know they can pronounce correctly. I don’t blame them because I don’t really know what to name myself, either.
I thought a lot about just staying Sariah Choucair. I was a Choucair, full stop, for 29 years, one month and twenty-three days. That last name was really good to me. When we went to Beirut and I saw our last name on jewelry shops and heard it pronounced correctly I suddenly, for the first time in my life, knew what it felt like to belong somewhere. I was a Choucair, and that meant something. Of course, being half-Canadian and raised in America proved as displacing in Beirut as being half-Lebanese in a town of 20,000 in the middle of Wisconsin, last name notwithstanding.
Do our names define us? I think not. But they do signify who we are. When I say “Choucair” and you, being friendly, ask me where that name originates, I reply “Lebanon” and you understand, however topically, part of who I am. To me, the significance is my father, his wild jumble of fourteen brothers and sisters, my feisty grandmother and my golden-hearted grandfather. But it is also me – it is the person I was before I married, the person I was before I started thinking about having my own family and about the name our family would take. It is the girl who moved to New York without knowing a soul, who toppled over loneliness, stumbled into a career, found comfort in a family of friends, and made a home in the Brooklyn I read about as a child.*
I have my father’s last name and my husband’s last name and somewhere, out of this, I am trying to make my name. Trying to hold onto who I have been and who I want to be, trying to mold it into something that I can give my children, one word, one name, that will tell them the story of who they are. But at this point it gets ridiculous. I mean, what, are we going to give our children hyphenated names? And then, if we have daughters, will they hyphenate their names upon marriage? I can just imagine our family reunions- there will be enough hyphens to give even the most hard-core copyeditor a stroke.
My husband claims he doesn’t mind what last name I use but I know he prefers I use Joseph. It is assumed that our children’s last name will be Joseph and, as I will already be the only white person in our family, it would be nice to at least have the same last name as my children. I offered O. the options of Chouseph or Joscair, thinking he’d be as struck as I was at the good fortune that gave us each two syllable last names – such ease when it came to making a hybrid! He was not impressed. I can’t blame him. Chouseph sounds like a particularly nasty sneeze and Joscair sounds like a minor yet tragic, forgotten figure from the French Revolution.
So here I am. I am admitting my pride. I am admitting that there is a part of me that worries that my unwillingness to become Sariah Joseph, full stop, symbolizes an unwillingness to join my life, fully, with my husband’s. I am admitting that I don’t know if it is even important what my last name is – if it is even important to anyone other than me and the poor souls who mumble “cooChair” or “chow-care.” Mostly I am admitting my inability to decipher what I want from what I think I should want; who I am from who I think I should want to be.
Right now, I am sticking with the hybrid. Really, isn’t that what being married is? It’s a hybrid of who I was and who I am, who O was and who he is, and this new thing we’re still figuring out, five years in, called “us.” At the end of all of this, call me Choucair, call him Joseph, call us the Chosephs, but he is mine and I am, gladly, his.
*The neighbourhood I live in, Williamsburg, is portrayed in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
