I needed a name for a character, I needed a name ironic to the character's situation. For many reasons I cannot begin to enumerate, my grandma's came to me like a cat enters through a cracks in the door. I have known this woman all my life until her death two years ago, we lived together in a six room bungalow, and later, in a six bedroom flat.
It surprised me now that in all of those years, I didn't hear anyone call her any other name but the one her parents gave her.
This is trivial unless you have some context. My grandma's generation welcomed Catholicism into Ìtasá, my home town. The Christian craze of that era is partially represented in Ẹ̀sìn Ìgbàgbọ́ Wọ Ìlú Ọ̀wọ, the 1975 book by T. A. Ladele.
In the book, three friends who were new convert got Christian names after baptism. One was Emmanuel, another Samuel, and the third, John. John was irked, how come his friends names ended with "uel" but not his. To pacify himself, he decided that everyone should call him Johnuel.
It was beyond absurd.
So it was that I grew up in a place where names like Julianah, Cecilia, Lucia, Rebecca rivalled Paul, Gabriel, Joseph, Felix etc. That my grandma retained her birth name was a small miracle. (Of course she was not alone, but she was in the minority.)
And so when her name popped in my head, a dike broke loose and the water swept me off like a ship. I thought, oh my world, what an original name!
Her name: Òòṣarínú. That's the short version. Every indigenous name in Africa is a sentence, the sentence is then contracted like an unspooled spring. It is still a spring, but you must stretch it to know its length, its full meaning. There lies weight of a word, in the meaning.
When I held my grandma's name by the edges and pulled it, it became Òòṣà òkè rínú mi. The God above sees my mind. The sort of name you give to your child when you prayed for a daughter and gave birth to a daughter. Or wanted a boy and have a boy. For God has seen your heart desire.
Such names ended after Christianity and consequently Islam entered my town. With that end also signals the sharp drop in creativity in the naming of children. This is a notable trend in the neighbouring towns too, and perhaps all over the country. We settled for the popular names of the Hebrews, Arabs, Jews, and European.
Now there is nothing wrong with such names, but, unlike my grandma's, when you take most of them out of the religion context, they lose their essence and become gnarled and unsightly, like the root of an old tree suffering from disease during a famine. Those names are weak and tired from overuse.
And I do not say this lightly. I once detest Chinua Achebe for refusing to represent Nigeria at the Common Wealth Games because they wanted to register him as Albert Achebe and he wanted nothing of such. It was Chinua Achebe or no representations at all. He gave up the games. I didn't get it, that force is the way you make people surrender their land and back, but language is the way you colonise their mind. I didn't get it that people are at their creative best in their own tongue.
Achebe knew all of that. And, like the sea reprises its shores that's been pushed back by human activities, it was a matter of time before we began to reclaim our brightness of spirit that we surrendered to the foreign religions in the waves of our excitement. And while we still have banal names like HisBannerOverMeIsLove, that pastors name their kids Moráràolúwa, Moyinolúwa instead of GodsGlory and IPraiseTheLord indicates the beginning of a return from an exile. We are going back to being brilliant of spirit and colourful of tongue again.
If we look inward and forward, we may yet get things right. In our own way.