Untitling
I. How to understand your name
When my parents found out they were pregnant with a girl, back in early 1991, they couldn’t agree on a name. My father always had one in mind, an old Arabic name, which was quite uncommon at the time. It was the name of an older family member that had always resonated with him, and a gut feeling told him it would become the name of his daughter one day. My mother, on the other hand, preferred more modern names like Karma or Sarah. As my mom would later do and advise me to do in situations of indecisiveness, she would perform a particular prayer, استخارة istikhara, which is meant to help you decide which choice will be best for you.
In Islam in general and with my family in particular, names carry a lot of significance. A child has the right to be حسن التسمية “well-named” by their parents as this will be the carrier of their personality. In Islam, it is believed that choosing a righteous name will descend blessings onto the bearer.
My mother had some ideas and so did my father. But just like many issues they could not agree on, naming their first child was one of them. تشاور (negotiations) with family members only brought more suggestions, and nothing seemed right. While my mother was in labor at the hospital, the quarrel was still unresolved. My dad paced up and down the waiting room outside, and most of our close relatives impatiently awaited my parents’ first child. It was quite significant for my father’s family as he was the only son among six sisters, making yours truly the first and long-awaited child to carry my father’s family name. Finally, a solution was proposed: a draw. My dad passed along small papers to everyone present. Each wrote a desired name, folded it twice, and placed it in his hat.
سوار Siwar was picked, the old Arabic name he always wanted.
Siwar is an ancient Arabic name, it is an encircling object or bracelet. Just recently, I met someone in Sweden, who had met many Siwars, and they told me of a new interpretation of the name: Siwar as a handcuff, turned bracelet—a somewhat liberatory and transformative meaning.
Why was my father, who had lived a huge part of his life abroad, more attached to this old Arabic name, while my mother who had lived all her life in Beirut, pulled towards a modern alternative? Perhaps she thought of me leaving the country one day—as all parents in Lebanon do—and that I would need a name that was easy to pronounce or to remember for non-Arab speakers. Etel Adnan, Lebanese writer and poet born in the 1920s, writes of growing up in Beirut in her essay ‘To Write in a Foreign Language,’ that she always heard her father say that she would travel to Germany to be a chemist one day, which became her excuse not to learn Arabic in school. It was quite easy to drop Arabic in a time when French missionaries ran many schools and enforced French as the first language. Adnan’s journey with languages feels all too relevant to my own reflections on the decision-making process of my parents.
- Thought: The journey of your name began long before you came into the world. Accept that journey as part of your platonic past—perhaps you can learn something about yourself, your parents, and who you will become through it.
II. How to name a revolution
Was it better to name it the “October revolution,”, although eminently “the October revolution” is a popular nomination for the “Great October Socialist Revolution,” also known as “The Bolshevik Coup,” “Bolshevik Revolution,” “Bolshevik Uprising,” or “Red October”?
In October 2019, the concept of “naming” preoccupied my thoughts once again, this time in a more overtly political fashion due to the “protests” in Beirut. It is something I still have no conviction of a name for. Most named it ثورة (revolution), in those first few weeks when hope and momentum had overfilled our cups. Others called it “uprising” or “intifada” in Arabic, in solidarity or nostalgia to the Palestinian انتفاضة . The politicians named it حراك. (“harak” or “movement”), which seemed to undermine what it actually was, reducing it to just another “political movement” or voice, rather than the collective uprising of a people.
Ghassan Kanafani, in his famous interview with Richard Carleton, engages in a “vocabulary battle” as Carleton attempts to find politically correct terms to describe the situation between Palestine and Israel. He first calls it “war,” followed by “civil war,” then “conflict.” In retaliation to Carleton’s reductive choice of words, Kanafani tries to offer a more descriptive and comprehensive account. He interjects Carleton’s attempts with: “It’s a people fighting for their rights,” and “a liberation movement fighting for justice,” after which Carleton, stumbling over his words, calls it “whatever it best be called.”, Kanafani replies “It’s not whatever, because this is where the problem starts.” What Kanafani meant was to highlight the weight that decisions about terminology bear. He also brings to light how vocabularies affect the way a people view their own fight, how it is perceived by others, and the imminent power structures that lie therein. It is that which determines and justifies acts of violence, disobedience, and war.
So, as the previous examples suggest, naming a sensitive political event was not a new struggle, historically. And yet, how did this language propaganda stunt also downplay the impact it had, discredit it. Did it slowly eat away the “belief,”, “conviction,” and “trust” of the people who poured down to the streets to protest?
I watched as thousands flocked to the street, renewing the struggle every week with yet another issue that needed to be addressed—all relevant, all good reasons to refuel a revolution. As I struggled to name it, I resolved my dilemma by not naming it. Instead I decided to name it by descriptively recounting the mini-protests that took a new shape and a new theme every week in the heat of the moment, a “fill-in-the-blanks” revolution. For me, it was, in equal measure, an anti-capitalist revolution, a mental health revolution, a solidarity revolution, a feminist revolution, and perhaps most to the point: a linguistic revolution.
- Thought: Is a revolution only allowed to be called as such when it succeeds? These negotiations of language and terminology have laid the groundwork for reflecting on language and means of collective expression. Take ownership of your own terminologies, don’t be afraid to claim the term, own it. Language only transforms when we allow it to.
III. How to un-name a collective
I distinctly remember how I exhaled when I first read the name of the program. I had been looking for a master’s program for a few years. Something about the program named Disarming Design, dedicated to “design under oppressive systems” answered the urgencies I had been busy with just a few months following the protests in Beirut in late 2019. My blood was still boiling for a cause, and the word “arm” even with that prefix made total sense. To rid Hezbollah of their arms? The Israeli army flying over Marjeaoun? Is the army going to interfere in the protests today? It was, is, and always will be an awfully mundane word in a Beiruti’s urban dictionary.
After I got accepted, I waited impatiently for the list of other students admitted, of which two were already very familiar. Another eight were also Arab names. I was confused.
I remember calling Hatem, my friend and previous boss at Studio Safar, and asking him what he thought. Would it make sense for me to leave Beirut, and join a master’s program in Amsterdam where eleven Arab designers were taking part? Why go to Amsterdam then, why not Cairo, Tangier, or Tunis? Many questions rushed through my head. In due time, I made my peace with a certain reassurance that problems always exist and the chance to discuss them openly and honestly in such a group could prove cathartic—especially further away from home.
How else could we have been brought together? Although it is true that there were other initiatives, workshops, and summer schools in the region that were some shorter some longer in duration, none were master's programs. I say this with a certain level of criticality towards institutionalized programs and the framing of academic labels.
At times, especially later into the second year, I noticed how I avoided mentioning the name whenever someone asked me about the master’s program I was doing. Having this kind of controversial name just meant it would lead to endless conversations to which I wasn’t always ready to engage. It also meant that I had to have a clear explanation of what I did on the program and how it tied with the name. It often made me resort to shorter descriptions, or more general ones. A name also carries a trace, one that is there to stay. Does it need to remain relevant or does its relevance die with the urgency that brought it forward to begin with? What happens five years from now, what will the name and the frame it created bring us? Since it's not only a personal name, but also the name of a group, does staying loyal to the name mean staying loyal to the group? Although this name brought us together, its uniqueness also inscribed a pressure of being labeled as “a collective” as opposed to colleagues within a class. There was an undeniable difficulty in making collective decisions, and whenever we got together as a group to think of alternative names, we could almost never agree. In some discussions, we questioned whether the act of “renaming” was where our energy should be spent.
Finally, after two years of deliberation, negotiation, and sometimes acceptance, we acknowledged a lineage of lengthier conversations that emerged when naming events during our time on Disarming Design—such as Diasbura Radio (Dee-yas-bura: Diaspora, with an accent) and Disclosing Discomfort, the title of an exhibition we held at Mediamatic in Amsterdam in November 2021—we finally decided to change the name, opting for the initials DD. It exposed the frustration that came with collective decision-making, the energy that had to be bounced around in order to keep coming up with new ways of coming up with suggestions, on how to make collective decisions, and finally arriving at a name, or the lack-thereof. DD mostly made sense and sometimes it didn’t: Disclosing Discomforts, Design Department, Desired Discipline, Decentralized Depictions, Developing Discrepancy, Disassembling Details, Daily Decisions, Dismantling Discourses, Doubting Data, Double Displacement, Disorganized Drama, Daring Dance, Dazzling Days, Diaspora Dialogues, Decolonising Decolonisation, Dutch Design, Dodging Dogma, Depth Dwellers, Distance Decay, Dramatic Dinosaurs, Dear Deviants, Devoted Devices, Detailed Detours, Damned Dadaism, Deployed Desires, Divine Dialects, Dirty Dicks. . . .
Thought: Framing is just another thinking process. It allowed us to take more agency. Perhaps it’s our way of revolting against the very structures that frame us, the one that names us. In the end, the act of questioning itself is probably more worthwhile than the outcome, whether it does or doesn’t lead to a name.
- Siwar Kraitem is a multi-lingual designer and researcher based between Beirut and Amsterdam. Her practice moves between graphic design and research-based, self-directed design practice where she questions ‘language’ and multilingualism in times of transformation. She co-founded the language café, a discussion and installation forum for language, semantics, and translation. She recently completed her Masters at the D.D. department (Disarming Design) of the Sandberg Instituut where she is now assistant coordinator at the Design Department.