For me, belonging in a space does not mean to exist with the absence of difference to others, but to do so with the feeling of freedom and confidence to carry all your differences into that space. To know that you are still fully accepted and respected by others. That your differences do not exclude you from that space.
A difference that I have had no choice but to carry into every single space, is my full name. Saba Ahmadzadeh Noughani made me visible in ways I did not always like, and consequently made me feel othered, especially at school and in front of teachers and peers with different ethnic backgrounds and different names to mine.
The last article in ‘Borders and Belonging’ focuses on names, identity, and not merely accepting, but taking pride in, one’s heritage.
Younger me always felt that my surname, Ahmadzadeh Noughani, looked less like a word and more like a keyboard accident, like a jumbled up spill of letters that didn’t make sense to others but me. Unsurprisingly, It has usually been shortened, either written as “Ahmadzadeh…”, “Ahmadzadeh-”, “Ahmadzadeh” or “Noughani”.
My surname never fits neatly, and sometimes even at all, on online forms, membership cards, and classroom registers. When it always stuck out longer than all other names on class registers and exam ranking tables, it looked like an interruption to the flow. Again, in primary school, when writing my name on school jumpers or my book bag, it simply didn’t fit, and certainly never on one line. On my Oxford Union membership card, it’s only half written. The lady at the office who was printing my card, told me it “doesn’t all fit”.
For years, I believed I didn’t quite fit either. I grew up believing my name was something to shrink, shorten, or explain. When people stumbled over my name, it was I who apologised, and it was I who laughed it off for them.
When people would ask me for my surname, be it when registering for something, collecting medication or borrowing a book at the library, I’d never say it. I’d automatically say “it’s too long, can I spell it?” or “It’s A-H-M-A…”. It was almost always received with uncertain pauses and strange looks.
Once in secondary school, I had to spell out my surname in front of everyone for the Deputy Head Teacher to write down on a register. It was the usual “A-H-M-A…and lastly H, then space, now N-O-U…”. He smirked throughout, and before he even let me finish, he laughed and joked to the class that “I guess we’ll have to wait here all day”, as he pretended to look at an imaginary watch on his wrist. I apologised. I was also a new student at this school.
Today, it infuriates me that a White senior member of staff, from a position of both racial and institutional privilege, felt comfortable and confident to mock a pupils ethnic name in front of their peers. That would have been the perfect moment to show respect, for him to teach me that my name should be taken seriously, and that I shouldn’t be made to feel apologetic, yet instead he mocked and bullied me for my name. I blame these teachers and others like them for alienating me and other people from my background.
Moments like these engrave themselves in your memory. There is a particular kind of otherness that you feel in hearing your teacher and peers laugh while you spell your own name. That feeling stays with you.
Sometimes, like when I first arrived at the Lodge in my college, I have been asked “where is this name from?”. While this question has always been asked innocently, mostly out of curiosity and interest, I still took offence to it. Instead, I’d feel that by asking this, others think that my surname marks me as someone they would never quite see as British. While it may not be true, it still hurt me at the time.
It hurt me that I felt British in every way except how people read my name and saw my face.
I felt a deep lack of belonging whenever someone older or White looked back at my name after typing it, and asked “where is this from?” or “and how do you say this?”.
I know people who have changed their surnames to typical English surnames, despite not having any connection to those names. Others I know who did so, did so as a resort to not be discriminated against and rejected from jobs they were perfectly qualified for. They did so to escape other’s racism and ill judgement. They did so because otherwise they wouldn’t be deemed trustworthy, qualified, or even professional.
I know of a real estate agent whose name is Yusuf, but at work his name is Adam. He’s said something along the lines of “because I work I have to go by Adam”. Unfortunately, this isn’t that surprising for me to hear. Not when we consider the many studies that indicate that South Asian, Arab, and Muslim-sounding names are discriminated against in job applications and that many perfectly qualified candidates with such names are less likely to be accepted compared to their under qualified counterparts with western names.
One of many studies is the BBC’s “Adam vs. Mohamed” Test. The inside out investigation found that CVs with the name “Adam” received significantly more callbacks than identical CVs named “Mohamed”.
Applicants with Pakistani names or surnames had to submit 70% more applications in order to receive the same response rate as white British applicants. For Nigerian and all South Asian names, this was 80% more, and those with Middle Eastern or North African names needed to submit 90% more applications in order to have the same response rate as their white British counterparts.
In a separate study in Wales, applicants with English-sounding names received three times the number of interviews compared to those with Muslim names. Other research by the BBC has found that ethnic minority women face discrimination at every stage of the recruitment process. I do not need the BBC to confirm this for me, not when I have seen this happen time and time again to my own mother.
My mother’s surname is Ahmadi Moghaddam, but at work she has always been Ms Moghaddam. Just like that, half her name disappears.
Knowing that my mother, despite working in multicultural London, never introduced herself as who she really was, which is Ms. Ahmadi Moghaddam, reinforced to me that our names need to be broken, palatable, and shrunk. That we need to chip away at our identity in hopes of appearing professional, credible, and trustworthy. And yet still this does not suffice.
Taking all these studies into account however, it’s clear that job seekers are forced to “whiten” or Anglicise their names to avoid automatic rejections for jobs that they are perfectly qualified for.
In the well known case of Bangladeshi applicant, Mr. Miah, an employment tribunal found that a recruitment agency had discriminated against him by not even considering his application, yet they responded to a false English-sounding name. In fact, the agency failed to consider Mr. Miah’s application when submitted in his real name, but went as far as to make at least five attempts to follow up when he reapplied using a false, English-sounding name.
Our names carry so much of our identity and heritage. Our names carry so much power, strength and weight, and yet time and time again I have witnessed people with similar backgrounds to mine simplify their names to make interactions with new people or in professional settings smoother. For many, they are told it’s a must if they want to break the glass ceiling. We witness this in all areas of popular culture.
Shahed Ezaydi, author of The Othered Woman, noted that a couple of years ago, a major publisher offered a very bad deal for her book. As a result, Ezaydi and her agent decided to decline. However, last year, she found out that in an internal meeting, a senior member of staff at this publishing house told his team that a book with her ‘kind of name’ attached to it wouldn’t sell. So, he pushed for a bad deal and for the project to instead be given to a white author, which it has.
While the publisher has since apologised, Eyzadi noted that “it’s an experience that stayed with me for a while. How the perceived ‘foreignness’ and ‘otheredness’ of my name was a barrier to opportunity. How a name like mine would apparently be a risk to marketability and sales. How my name couldn’t possibly be on the cover of books. But there’s also strength and power to a name. It contains love, family, ancestors, heritage. So, I’m proud that I get to prove people like him wrong and show that a book with my ‘kind of name’ on it will be published and on bookshelves up and down the country.”
We see this attitude everywhere, including in film and TV. In the 2019 live action Aladdin, based on the Middle Eastern folk tale 101 Arabian Nights, white actors were given roles representing Middle Easterners, with some extras even having their skins darkened during filming, rather than Middle Eastern actors being cast. When producer Ridley Scott was questioned regarding this, he infamously replied that he “can’t say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed”. His statement directly affirms the multiple studies reported by the BBC regarding the discrimination against Muslim sounding names. In both the 1992 and 2019 Aladdin versions, the genie abbreviates Aladdin’s name to ‘Al’ and the anglicised version of the name Yasmeen or Yasmin is given to Princess Jasmine. This is despite Disney taking its inspiration from a Middle Eastern folktale.
I am reminded of Harman Kaur’s poem, They want pieces of my culture in their country. It reads:
They want pieces of my culture in their country,
but not me.
My food, my fabric, my labour,
but not me.
They will wear the embroidery of my people, a borrowed story,
but turn away when my father’s turban appears in their taxi cab.
They savor our spices,
but what of the hands that carry their scent, from sink to sleep?
What of the taunts and threats that steal sleep from our eyes?
Our dishes are palatable
but our existence is not.
Our music is sweet,
but our accents are not.
They love our culture in fragments,
but not the people who carry it every single day.
Their aesthetic,
our burden.
So I quietly gather what is mine: every thread, every scent, every song, every single name they tried to shrink – and I carry it.
Every time that I shortened my name out of necessity, I felt myself shrinking with it. Every time I shortened my name, I felt I was losing important parts of myself.
I hated minimising a powerful name that belonged to me and that pointed to such a rich history, culture and civilisation, only to make others comfortable. Upon studying at Oxford, I became more insistent on keeping my full name. My two part surname is one of the few reminders that I belong to two cultures, no matter which one has always dominated.
When I first received my Oxford University email, the first part being “saba.ahmadzadehnoughani”, I was asked if I’d like to shorten it in the email. I refused. It was the first time that I refused these requests to shorten my name for the convenience of others. It took me eighteen years too late to unapologetically keep my full name, to refuse to trim it away for anyone. Eighteen years too late to choose my identity over other people’s convenience, and to honour my ancestors by saying my name with certainty and confidence, and by writing it fully. To refuse to erase my Iranian identity, dare I say take pride in it.
I am reminded of a widely shared clip from a Jeremy Vine on 5 episode in 2020, Cambridge graduate Lawyer, Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, refused to continue an interview with presenter Dawn Neesom until she correctly pronounced her name, stating, “No, you will say my name”.
A presenter’s main job is to research the guest that they have invited and learn how to address them correctly ahead of the interview, yet Dawn Neesom struggled to say Mos-Shogbamimu many times and it seemed to me that she was expecting and relying on her guest to do what I always did, which was to explain, apologise, laugh it off or say what I used to say, which was “its a long name” or “its a difficult name”. Dawn Neesom even said “Oh, come on! I got the Shola right!”, as if dismissing her entire surname is not a problem, and that trimming our names down and only saying half or just our first name is ‘good enough’. She evwn rolled her eyes when she noticed that Shola Mos-Shogbamimu wasn’t giving in, and that, as a presenter, she will have to actually say her guests name. When Shola patiently waited, allowed many chances, and then said “This is terrible”, another guest on the show said “It’s not exactly easy Shola, give her a break,” and later regarding her own name said “I’m easy” with a shrug.
I think of those two words, “I’m easy”, and to this day it hurts in ways I still do not know how to articulate. It implies that those without “easy” or western names are difficult, a nuisance, a bother and so on. Mos-Shogbamimu later discussed this moment as an assertion of self-worth and a refusal to accept the dismissal of her identity, noting that mispronouncing names, in particular for women of color, is a form of demeaning power dynamic.
I am lucky to know my surname. Many people of colour, specifically descendants of slaves, do not know their last names. Malcolm X explained that the “X” represented his original African surname, which was lost, stolen, and replaced by the slaveholder name “Little”. In various interviews, he clarified that X as his last name was not merely a pseudonym, but a symbol of his lost identity, history, and culture.
Therefore, given that I do know my surname, the last thing I will do is to conform to pressure in erasing parts of it. Nothing is worth self erasure, no job, no smooth interaction, not even if it means I may feel a greater sense of “belonging”. I do not seek conditional belonging.
It’s not only about teaching others to say my name, to write my name – every single one of the 22 letters – to see my name, to look at it in print below a published piece of work, and give credit to me, and that full name. Most importantly it’s about reclaiming my name, and teaching myself, before anyone else, that my name belongs.
When I first wrote for the Oxford Blue, the first part of my surname was naturally mistaken for being my middle name. When I first wrote for The Oxford Student, eager to show my great-grandmother my name in print, I realised they too thought the first part was my middle name and hence didn’t write my full name. When I eventually did see my full name in print in Cherwell, and pointed this out to my grandfather, he commented that it’s very long for them to write Ahmadzadeh Noughani. Needless to say, my name was one that databases rejected, membership cards truncated, and people edited down to only one half, almost as if tampering with it in attempts to make it neater and easier.
I’ve written for all three Oxford University newspapers. What motivates me to keep on writing is seeing my full name, because I write for every Ahmadzadeh Noughani and every Ahmadi Moghaddam before me who never had the chance to see their names written in Oxford University newspapers.
Writing my full name is an act of resistance. It’s my way of asserting My name belongs here, and I am here in full.