Hello, My Name Is

“Wow, your parents must be hippies, huh?”

It’s always the first question out of people’s mouths.

The second: “So, did you name yourself?”

My parents are not hippies. They’re that Boomer flavor of privileged enough to claim political apathy. Beyond their spotty, rightward-tilted voting records, they lack any real engagement in either direction—and particularly not in the direction of hippie.

When I moved from Virginia to Portland, Oregon, people stopped even bothering to ask if I chose my name. Self-selected names like Tree and River are as common as Katie and Joe around here. Love fits right in. But I can take no credit for it.

It’s a Greek tradition to name your children after their grandparents. The first child takes on the name of the dad’s parent, and the second takes on that of the mom’s. I’m named for my yiayia, or my grandmother, on my mom’s side. She was named Agapi. In Greece, many people walk around as Agapi, but here, its English twin is not a name.

When I was born, my parents chose English for my government name. Forty days later, though, a wizardly priest with tufts of white hairs curling out of his ears plunked me in and out of a golden chalice three times. He rinsed me with olive oil and holy water and bestowed upon me by baptismal name in Greek. In a sense, my full name is Αγάπη Πολυξένη Φρέσκος Γιάννες: Agapi Polixeni Freskos Giannes.
• • • • •

On the playground, I avoided telling kids my name in Greek until they pried it out of me, because they couldn’t say it. A guppy, a guppy! A fish. In the third grade, a boy named Xavier called me “Greek Freak” as he lumbered onto the monkey bars. I lobbed my foot swiftly into his private parts from behind. He fell with a satisfying clunk. (It turns out Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks doesn’t like this nickname either.)

In middle school, the boys on the bus discovered that Johnson (with an ‘h’) is an old-timey word for penis. “I Love Jonson!!!” they cried. (Joke’s on them: I’m a lesbian!)

In college, I worked at a running shoe store in Charlottesville, Virginia. At first, the beloved patriarch of the shop resisted calling me by my first name on the sales floor, lest the customers assume he lusted for a 20-year-old. He called me LJ for a while, but he eventually got used to Love. Sometimes he’d reassure customers with a twinkle that he was not calling out to me in romance. “It’s her name, really!”

I didn’t mind the fuss. I’m sure he was far from the only male boss of mine to feel this way, but he, as a product of the east coast and not of cloyingly passive Portland, was the only one to say something.

Back home, my own family didn’t call me Agapi much. When we were all together—dropping by for coffee, dinner, or no reason at all—they would differentiate my yiayia and me by calling to her in Greek and to me in English. Still, the license plate on my yYiayia’s shining taupe 1999 Buick Century paid homage to the both of us: 2AGAPIS. Now it hangs in my own garage, 3,000 miles away.

• • • • •

Since those middle school bus rides, my feelings about my name have bloomed. This strange, sticky identifier has helped me out when I’m interviewing for a job or joining a new community group. Where I might remain just a fish in an ocean of strangers, people remember my name. Whether they think I live up to it is another question.

The Greek language famously has words for at least six different types of love, depending on what you count: love for your neighbors; passionate, sexy love; love of strangers and guests; love between parents and children; love in the form of self-regard.

Agapi, though, is upheld as the most concentrated form, an elixir of unconditional love. When the Christians came along, they interpreted it as the kind of love Jesus had for his people.

I don’t know that unconditional love—love without regard for how one treats another—is healthy outside of a godly context. However, the Buddhist monk and activist Thích Nhất Hạnh describes unconditional love as loving in “such a way that the person you love feels free.”

Still, the phenomenon of nominative determinism haunts me. Nominative determinism suggests that people come to embody the names they are given, like cardiologists named Dr. Hart or the polar explorer Daniel Snowman.  I both feel pressured by it and aspire to it. Maybe it’s Freudian. Maybe it’s implicit egotism. Whatever it is, I am subsumed.

To love one other person already takes so much. To extend that love to others, beyond your own family and people, is another step altogether—another many steps.

My name is sprinkled throughout many quotes about these steps. Cornel West said that justice is what love looks like in public. Bernice A. King said that social justice is love applied to systems, policies, and cultures.

When I read my name in these contexts, there’s a clear, shining line between “love” and “Love.” I am not so bold as to conflate the two. But my Greek descent, as reflected in my name, does nudge me to reach toward a more expansive love.

• • • •

The family lore, relayed through my father’s ancient uncles and third cousins twice removed, says that our last name, Giannes, got transmuted into Jonson by U.S. immigration officials at Ellis Island. Jonson is, of course, Johnson spelled wrong and with a Swedish inflection, which has confused people for a century since.

My father’s side of the family lived in a tiny village on the Peloponnese, one of the multiple Greek villages named for a hawk. In this village, Giannes was a common name, so they simply picked another. Plucked like an orange off the tree in the backyard of our ancestral home, they selected Freskos to go by instead. It means, as one might guess, fresh. Deterministically, perhaps, one branch of this family tree landed in Alabama and opened a fruit-vending business that still operates today.

When Greek people came to the U.S. in the early 20th century, they—we—were not considered white. Seeking jobs, we found discrimination, and redlining kept from us the financing needed to purchase our homes. Racial covenants restricted Greek people from buying or living in houses–, as they did to Black people, people from multiple Asian countries, and other types of people–, except as domestic laborers.

In Portland’s leafy neighborhoods, where I live today, the covenants excluded us each by name: “No part of said premises shall be used or occupied in any manner by any Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Greek, Mexican, Hindo [sic], Armenian, or Indian, except that persons of said races may be employed thereon as servants.”

But Greek people are doing well today, and many of the other peoples on those lists are not. We became restaurant owners, car salesmen, then doctors and lawyers. We’re generally financially stable. We own our homes. We could assimilate into whiteness, and many could not—cannot.

When KKK rioters came for the Greeks in the 1910s, we did not turn toward the other targets of the KKK and band together. Instead, we chose to “Americanize” and formed the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association, which helped us become (more) white by leaning hard into the mythological archetype of the fair-skinned, stoic, marble-statue Greek.

We shed the richly layered history of ancient Greece and its deep inflows and outflows of people from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. We ignored the cultural and phenotypical similarities we shared and some of us still share today.

There are some counterexamples, some blips, when we stood together. An Oregon Public Broadcasting documentary features an older Black man recounting growing up on Chinese food because none of the white restaurants would serve them. “The Greeks down on Second,” he said, “they had ice cream parlors, they would cater to you.” But for the most part, rather than act in solidarity with people facing the discrimination we once did, we accepted the warm embrace of white supremacy and assimilated into power instead of organizing against it.

This original construction of whiteness has, of course, hardened into factual reality, a social creation with economic and visceral consequences. Because of our light skin, we are one of the few who got to keep our culture and assimilate, to maintain our insular community and find our financial footing.

Greek Americans today—at least the ones I grew up with in Virginia—lean Republican or politically disengaged, a privilege afforded by the ability to forget the hard parts of our community’s history.

• • • • •

From the 3rd grade through the 12th grade, I performed traditional folk dances at the Richmond Greek Festival every summer. Virginia’s swampy 95-degree heat and full humidity doused us in sweat. It trickled down our necks beneath our four-layered wool costumes, handmade in Greece and authentically paired to the region each dance came from.

After 13 years away, I visited the festival this summer, for the first time as an adult and as a spectator. When I got back to my parents’ house, I pulled out a crusty photo album to show my girlfriend the costumes of my youth. In one photo, I hug my yiayia, my namesake, towering over her shrunken frame. She wears her Greek cross around her neck. I wear the traditional garb of the Pontus region, a long dress of indigo and red with a flat black hat and white fabric draping around my neck.

This northern region was once Greece and is now Turkey. Greeks there underwent a genocide and eventually a forced “population exchange” in 1923. Some threads of my family are from this region.

I closed the photo album. Later that night, I opened my laptop and found a database of traditional folk dances across the world. Surrounded by news of Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people, I zoomed in on the only Palestinian dance in the catalog, the Palestinian Dabke. The dance—its sound, its rhythm, its feeling—fits right in with all the Greek dances I grew up learning.

Perhaps the musical similarities reveal something shared in our bones, for the Greek people have long held a certain alliance with Palestinians. Only twenty percent of Greeks say they feel closer to Israel than Palestine. Similarly, just 32 percent U.S. Americans support Israel’s military affront in Palestine, which the U.S. government abets materially and financially. However, the Greek government, like that of the U.S., has betrayed the will of its populace. Greece, to the ire of many Greek people, has sent Israel unmanned aircrafts and other weaponry with which to attack Palestinian people.

• • • • •

Dig toward the roots of my middle name, Polixeni, and you’ll find two mirror-image meanings: first, many foreigners, or many strangers. And second, many guests, or one who welcomes guests into their home.

Foreigners and guests are near opposites—near complements on the color wheel. They start out the same, but the way you behold them changes their meaning, and their trajectory, entirely.

My middle name comes from my mother’s sister. She heads a branch of the family whose politics is to resent foreigners, even though we were—we are—them. The first meaning of her name, many strangers, befits her. But I aspire to the second meaning: one who invites them home.

I feel a pull, a wish, to extend our solidarity beyond U.S. borders, woefully unequipped as I may be to do so. Greece has seen and perpetuated a refugee crisis of historic proportions. Its government has turned people away on sinking rafts in the middle of the sea, captured people in unmarked vans and imprisoned them for the crime of being, and corralled people into camps so dangerous that they burn. People fleeing hellish conditions in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Eritrea come to Greece expecting hospitality—philoxenia—but finding purgatory, or worse.

Last year I visited Lesvos, my paternal grandfather’s home island and the epicenter of this crisis, for the first time. Like “Love” and “love,” “Lesvos” and “lesbian” share a relation. The latter is named for the former because the famed homoerotic poet Sappho lived on the island. I climbed inside Sappho’s glistening cave in the sea at the edge of my grandfather’s village.

When I got back, I read Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, which explains how the myths Greece tells about itself led it to draw lines of whiteness that don’t make sense in historical context. These fabricated lines then drove Greece to turn away the people coming from the east in the current catastrophe (from the Greek καταστροφή: “to overturn”).

Markham tells us how Greece was never the West, the supposed birthplace of Western Civilization, until it was: until it needed independence from the Ottoman Empire of the east, and again when it needed the bailout from Western Europe during the financial crisis.

She tells us how Greek history was never whitewashed until the paint fell off. When the vibrant colors eroded off our ubiquitous statues, leaving nothing but a pearly void, people chose to keep them that way. Today, neo-Nazis have been all too happy to co-opt our imagery.

Nia Vardalos tried to show us the way. In her third installment of the iconic My Big Fat Greek Wedding franchise—the pinnacle of our representation in American film—the requisite wedding took place between an out-of-wedlock grandson of the late patriarch Gus Portokalos and a Syrian refugee named Qamar. After some skepticism, the village blooms, awash in light, multicultural song, and mirth.

Only recently have Greeks started to repaint the statues in their original palettes, which represented the multiplicity of peoples that made a life there, and those who, against all odds, continue to do so.

• • • • •

I feel a separation between the everyday and the world we want to see, between my name and what it means in its most far-reaching sense. We each need to make meaning of our identities and ourselves, because we are each making history everyday. I want to create a different history than my predecessors have.

The long-term nature of my particular avenue for change discourages me. As a city planner, I change policies and laws about housing that may, if the conditions are just right, make a stable home a reality for more people in ten, 20, or 50 years. At best, I try to remediate the harms that racial covenants and redlining still hold over people of color in our cities today.

Sometimes, the distant, imaginary prospect of changing the future from within longstanding, structurally unjust institutions feels like nothing more than a wish. But that distance, and that space for possibility, stares me in the face every time I see those four letters that give me life—my name. For that, I can only thank my ancestors. Efharisto.