I just found out that the protagonist of Inkle's upcoming game, Heaven's Vault, is named Aliya Elasra. It's the first time I've seen a character with the same name as me in a western fiction, or any fiction really, and it made me smile.
My name is Aliya. You will not believe how odd and difficult that sentence sound to me. I've never been very comfortable with the name, and it took me a long time to accept that, yeah, that's my name. My family called me by nicknames when I was a kid, and as a kid in a close-knitted family, I wasn't in a habit of introducing myself. So the first time, the first memory I have of "owning" the name was in grade school, when we first get to introduce myself.
I didn't know how. It felt weird to tell them the nickname my family used, so I just stick with the first word in my name. Aliya. It didn't feel particularly mine. I just grabbed it off the full name I was taught was mine. So, okay. That's what you call me, I guess.
Aliya is a ponderous name. It's not a rare name in Indonesia, but it's usually spelled different ways. Alia. Or Alya. Aliya is if you mash the two together, so people misspelled my name often ("Aliya with a Y. No, with an L too. Yes, both"). And it's a three syllable name, which, although only a syllable more than the average, does make it bit heavier. Longer names tend to get concatenated within close circles. My friends and relatives do this to mine (my mother calls me Ali, for instance. In conversations I'm just Al, or Li, or Ya), but as I'm not comfortable with the name itself, I never encourage anyone to do it off-the-bat. As such, "Aliya" always have a rigid, formal feel to it. It's the name strangers use to call me.
I also didn't like how feminine the name is, being a bit tomboyish myself. It made you think of a girl; and I wasn't pleased with being looked at first as a girl.
As much as Aliya didn't feel like me, my middle name, Nisa, was worse. In grade school there were two Ali(y)as in my class. Me, and the other one, Alia. I was shy and socially anxious, Alia was popular in class. The teachers didn't want to get us mixed up, so they decreed that she'll be the one called by her name, and I'll be called Nisa, and most of my classmates went along with it. I hated it. I fought it every way I could.
There was another reason why my name didn't sit well with me. I grew up with western works. Animations, mostly, but also books and video games. I grew up with the English language as well as Indonesian. No one in those western stories have my name. For that matter, not a lot of people in local stories have my name either; it's just not a name stories use. And the word feels odd sandwiched by English words. It doesn't feel like it belongs. I don't feel like I belong.
When I first went into online communities when I was nine years old or so, I ditched my name. I made up some weirder, cooler ones, as I suppose all kids on the internet do. It was great, and it worked, I suppose partially because all internet names are weird. I started to identify myself more with that name than I did with my real one.
But, you can't really stick with a weird internet nickname forever, especially not now that the internet and the real world are getting more and more intertwined. Without much alternative, I started going back to my old name, but this time, in between all the westernisation, my name feels, well, not mine really, but it has an identity in it. I don't have a western, English-friendly name, because, well, I'm not western! And I'm proud of my country and my culture and my language and whatever crazy turns of history made my Arabic name to go all the way here to Indonesia.
I guess that's also why seeing someone in fiction with my name made me feel oddly happy. Sometimes, amidst all the American cultural torrent, it feels like we don't exist, so it's good seeing someone that's even just a bit like us. Like meeting a friend in a party full of strangers (good, interesting strangers, but still). And yeah, I know El in Heaven's Vault is Egyptian, but I still feel like there's a connection there somewhere. I guess it helps that she looks cool and also look a bit like me, brown skin and messy black hair and a veil! and all.
I'm still having trouble connecting with my name even now, but, eh. It's mine. It's the name my parents gave to me. And nobody is going to take that away.
