The Imprecise Science of Character Naming
Joanne C. Hillhouse in contemplative reflection over her journal
Photo by Annetta Jackson, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda
Having opted to make time and clear space for my several-years-in-progress short story collection, I have, during the first leg of this residency, undertaken edits and revisions of four stories: “Destiny”, “The Rumour”, “The Slow Process of Letting Go”, and “Who tief de Court Key?” At this stage, each pass is like taking the brush and shading, adding details and texture. Also, it’s understanding better what each story is trying to tell me. A recurring thought, so far, has been names/identity/labels as I navigate who these characters are, what they call themselves and, because we live in a social reality, what they are called by others.
Last week, a couple of people called me “Mammy”, a moniker I don’t wear comfortably; after all, I was barely beginning to make peace with “Auntie”. Today, now, I’m “Ronald daughter”. Ronald is my father. These were street encounters – of the more benign variety, frankly, for any girl or woman walking these Caribbean streets. But what people call us and what we call ourselves is not always an easy thing. A friend and I were recently discussing women being expected by default to give up their names and how those of us (I’m not married but if I was) who want to keep our names, who understand it as part of our identity, find it’s not that easy to do so in our systems. After all, as an immigration officer or maybe another woman or both said to me once, why would you get married if you don’t want to change your name? That’s wild because “why should marriage mean giving up your personhood but only if you’re a woman” seems the more obvious question to me. So, we navigate these identities…and because I’m a writer telling people’s stories, it comes up as I name and rename the people populating my stories.
“Destiny” started life many years ago as a screenplay that got shelved when pre-production stalled. More recently, usually with vintage Antiguan calypso as my musical accompaniment, I’ve revisited and adapted it for the page and find I’ve quite enjoyed the process of transforming it, fleshing out the scenes and especially the characters, beyond the visual. It is set in the world of calypso, the art form that along with the usual suspects – nursery rhymes, ring games, jumbie and Anansi stories etc. – first taught me about writing (shout out to, among others, Shelly Tobitt and Paul Richards). It was in calypso that I met characters like the Leggo-Tourist from Halifax, Lucinda who “wiining like if she insane”, Crazy Ellen and Big Foot Maude an’ de mêlée dat bruk out between them on Greenbay Hill over a man, “social” Jean brought low by her love for “narsy drunkin, limey Raycan”(1), among others. Calypso loves its characters and they were, especially in the years of my introduction to the art form (man or woman), a colourful bunch, often ripped from real life. But calypso is largely the world of men. Which is not to say there haven’t been female calypsonians – though framing it like that only underscores that men are the default since we never say male calypsonians – but it wasn’t until 2003 when Antigua got its first female winner of the calypso monarch crown in fiery Queen Ivena that the glass ceiling gave way enough to allow some women through. So, the calypso I grew up on and which will have me singing along still, made of these women a disreputable, indelible spectacle from the point of view of the male writers and singers who immortalized them.
The main character in “Destiny”, Dynasty, sings her own song.
Fun fact: the artist I listened to most when revising “Destiny” was oddly enough a man, Latumba. The hoarse-voiced singer knows a thing or two I suspect about being under-estimated; his “Hit Man”, which worked its way into the story, opens, “they thought I was easy/even went as far as to call me a clown/they say I can’t dance/they say I can’t sing/they wanted to push me ‘round/but just like a swarm of honey bee/sweet and stinging/I started singing.”
Set in the era when women were just starting to break through in Antiguan calypso, incidentally a period when I was in the tents reporting on calypso, “Destiny” was always an underdog rising story. The big picture details are still the same but the revision process has shifted some things: for one, the romances and male-female relationships are still there, graphically so (one of the scenes I added was a sex scene), but the important component to me has always been Dynasty’s complicated relationships with calypso, with herself, and with her daughter Sinali – more foregrounded after this revision.
Sinali’s mind flashes to her earliest memories, more feeling than memory; her, bedded down in a corner of some room, Tent, recording studio, sometimes even a mas camp, knocked out on burnt up energy and soursop bush. It shouldn’t be a fond memory but in this moment, it is. Though she’s always resented the space Calypso takes up in her mother’s life, especially since she grew old enough to understand what a joke her mother is.’
Drawn by its unusualness, and believing Dynasty would be too, hearing it in passing, as I did, I borrowed the name Sinali without meaning to from a friend who had it as her baby-name. She gave me permission after the fact.
Dynasty’s arc, meanwhile, is about no longer feeling like she has to ask permission to take up space in a world that was always hers.
Dynasty is 18 when she hit the stage herself for the first time.
…
It is that scared 18-year-old Dynasty sees behind her eyes on nights like this, Tent night, first of the season, as she stares at her naked face.
She picks up a puff and begins powdering her face and neck, heavily. Then she applies lipstick, eye shadow, rouge, eyeliner, false eyelashes. The green Sheila wig follows. Finally, long dangly earrings that match lipstick, wig, and eye shadow.
And the stage-struck 18-year-old disappears behind the masquerade.
A calypso story is a great world for exploring identities as every calypsonian has a sobriquet, a masquerade they put on for the stage, and so too does Dynasty. What she calls herself despite how others see her is a big part of the journey of this story for me. And there are other discoveries. Learning that green is Dynasty’s signature colour opened up the story, especially since how she presents is so much a part of her world. And so it is, that after long hours on this final (please, God) revision, I find her more transformed than I anticipated at the start of the process.
I like when my characters surprise me.
I heard a rumour about myself. It involved a fisherman and his wife, and the thing in my belly. The rumour was true.
The main character in “The Rumour” did. I knew her story, but not her, nor the marine world she worked in, so this story has required a lot of research, right down to what she might wear on the job.
…waterproof sneakers or velcroed sandals with sand in the crevices of my toes… a broad, round, cricket, cloth hat, my hair sticking out the back in two sensible plaits. Sunscreen and lip balm on my face instead of proper make-up, flattered every time someone told me I didn’t need it. Waterproof fanny pack around my waist or diagonal across my chest. Loose tee, lived in, often with long-sleeves, the ends stretched out from my habit of rolling my fists up into them. I was the type of boney that ran cold even in hot Antigua weather. I might wear a flannel button-down or windbreaker when it wasn’t even chilly. Sometimes one of those utility vests with a million pockets. A tank or one of a million swimsuits under everything in case I needed to strip down. Jeans, shorts, leggings; depending.
She used to be called Reina King but I changed that, though she’s still as she describes herself royalty twice over. She is Rani King. Her background – Guyanese mother, Antiguan father – emerged with that. In her present, some life changing things are happening.
The fisherman wasn’t a part of my plan, wife or no wife, because no man was. No child, either.
“ I also found it interesting how when a character insists on her name, other things settle...”
She navigates the upending of her life with a little help from her friends including Dr. Fancy Walter. I borrowed the name Fancy from another work in progress; I like how oxymoronic it feels. But it also feels like her and I also found it interesting how when a character insists on her name, other things settle, such as Fancy and Rani’s dynamic – as doctor-patient but also as sister-friends.
There’s more to them than those labels, of course, and unearthing that is one of the things you hope for: getting to know your characters better, as they get to know themselves.
I didn’t think of myself as the type of person who would be mixed up in dem kinda story; ‘de one ‘bout de woman wi’chile for odda woman man’. But I heard this rumour about myself and it was true.
When I call my characters messy, I don’t mean in the way of spectacle necessarily. I mean, just human – and me digging into who they are isn’t meant to seek justification from judgement at how they navigate the world. One challenge with this story, especially during this turn, as I found the character to be flintier than I realized, was to not over-explain.
If “Destiny” is the ballad of a failed calypso writer, with me being the failed calypso writer, not Dynasty, then “The Slow Process of Letting Go” is a dirge, the first thing I wrote after a sister-friend’s death. This pass didn’t feel as sad as I anticipated. It wasn’t joyful exactly, but it was fun.
“You can’t call it that [Dog],” I’d said when Tammy had brought the wolf-looking pup home. “Too on the nose.”
And she’d petted the pup’s wet nose as she replied, “No more so than calling your son Junior.”
Tammy is the main character Lola’s sister-friend. Actually, she is Tammy to Lola, who is also the narrator, Tamm when Lola’s feeling particularly soft, and Tamra to everybody else, including Lola’s husband Carlong, who struggles to understand the depth of her grief. In fact, with what I learned of the spirit of Tamra, I imagine there are rooms she walked into announcing herself as “Ze Tamra Lyonne” with her full chest.
A character’s name can unlock so much, and it was during the revision of “The Slow Process of Letting Go” that I realized name/identity was what I was going to be writing about and not only sickness, sisterhood, and passings.
‘“Don’t be scared,” the tech croons in English, a coaxing smile on her face. Maybe she understands the fear that sits low in my belly, like a bad period cramp. She is a woman first, after all. She rubs the surface of the machine, at first I think to clean it, but then I realize she is warming it up, and I feel oddly comforted. “Frio,” says Linda. I call her Linda in my mind because she is pretty and she is being kind. Her one word confirms she is human, and humans come with names.
She, of course, doesn’t know the tech’s name or gender or if the tech even has periods, for that matter; it’s about her own anxiety in the moment and trying to put herself at ease by connecting in a way that makes sense for the character (hopefully that’s understood in the larger context of the story, if and when the book is published).
There’s a teen pregnancy storyline, in addition to the main plot, and the moment it becomes real also involves putting a name to the person involved.
“The girl – her name is Angela, I need to stop thinking of her as the girl, though she is nothing more than a girl, big bodied though she may be. I find myself staring at her.”
The final story I worked on during this first leg of the residency, “Who tief de Court Key?”, took mi life. Set in the world of steel pan and, again, mothers and daughters and community, it is written wholly in Dialect. Apart from the female pannists I played (shout out to Joy Lapps and Maurisha Potter), this revision process involved listening to the sound of my voice a lot – a lot of reading out loud, recording, and listening back, because Dialect, what we in Antigua call our language, is oral for me. I have to hear it just as I learned it before they taught us how to speak and write “properly” – speaking of naming things, our Dialect is not “bad English.” And maybe that’s why I am insisting on writing this wholly in Dialect, not just the dialogue as I normally would. It’s involved a lot of writing and re-writing, listening and re-listening, reading and re-reading just for the language.
Inez gyal pickney, Lisa, min one of the hangabouts an’ Inez na min please when she firs’ fiin out. Jack reassure she, “na worry, mammy, me’ll look out for she” an’ he a man ah he word. If de bwoi an’ dem so much as suuut or he sniff out dat dem a fish roun’ fuh anything other than punging pan, he shoo dem like fowl.
Inez wan gyal chile, Lisa, min wan ah de hangabouts an’ Inez na min please when she firs’ fiin out. Jack reassure she, “na worry, Mammy, me’ll look out for she” an’ he a man ah he word. If de bwoi an’ dem so much as suuut or he sniff out dat dem a fish roun’ fuh anything other than punging pan, he shoo dem lakka fowl.
Inez wan gyal chile, Lisa, min wan ah de hangabouts an’ Inez na min please when she fus fiin out. Jack reassure she, “na worry, Mammy, me’ll look out for she” an’ he a man ah he word. If de bwoi an’ dem so much as suuut or he sniff out dat dem a fish roun’ fuh anyt’ing other than fu pung pan, he shoo dem lakka fowl.
Why Inez? Why Lisa?
“But Lisa,” Inez say. “Me never know you can play pan.”
And Lisa, shy-shy, never before hearing dat mix ah pride and surprise in she mudda voice. She voice squeak when she mumble, “Jack teach me.””
‘“But Lisa,” Inez say. “Me na min know you could play pan.”
An’ Lisa, shy-shy, never before hearing dat mix ah pride an’ surprise in she mudda voice. She voice squeak when she mumble, “Jack teach me.”’
“But Lisa,” Inez say. “Me na min know yuh coulda play pan.”
An’ Lisa, shy-shy, neva before hear dat mix ah pride an’ surprise in she mudda voice. She voice squeak when she mumble, “Jack teach me.”
Names can be of a time, of a place, of a culture, traditional, invented, social signifiers, symbolic… and some names come with the story. That was the case here. Meaning that you’re writing and don’t have to stop and think about the name as it just reveals itself without interrupting your flow. Though thinking of Inez reminds me of a radio segment on Observer Radio one time where the host said, if your name is X, you’re over this age, because people aren’t naming their children that anymore. Inez felt like one of those older names and Lisa felt like a name Inez might give her daughter. Sometimes, it’s as simple as that.
So, no, there is no science to the naming of characters – at least, not in my experience; sometimes it’s instinctive, at least in the first instance; sometimes it’s careful and deliberate and heavily-researched, usually after the fact. Either way, in fiction as in life, I’ve found that it almost always matters. Because characters (yes, even and especially women characters) are people too, and they care what you call them. Say their name right and they’re sure to reveal more about themselves.
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(1) Referenced songs (King Short Shirt’s “Tourist Leggo”, “Lucinda”, and “Raycan”, King Obstinate’s “Wet yuh han’”, Latumba’s “Hit Man”, as well as performances by referenced artists), and other songs relevant to this leg of the residency period can be found on the RESIDENCY 1 playlist on my AntiguanWriter YouTube channel.
