Interethnic relationships and the ''symbolism'' of the name
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In the first chapter of Houda Asal’s book Identifying as Arab in Canada, I discovered that similarly to the case of South Asian Farmers and Mexican workers and refugees in the US that was described in Elizabeth Buettner’s work, some Arab immigrants had commercial relationships with Natives and that sometimes it led to marriage between Cree women and Arab men (Asal,32). Asal explains that in the context of their commercial activities Arabs -or those she calls Syrians, even though they were not necessarily from actual Syria, but rather from Bilad ash-Sham, Greater Syria and other lands of the Mashreq- met Indigenous people and some of them like Bedouin Farran (Peter Baker) even lived amongst them (Asal, 31). I was also surprised to learn that some Arabs worked in the fur trade around the beginning of the 1900s (Asal, 31). I think that probably all youngsters who attend high school in Quebec have classes about the history of Quebec and Canada. There is even a ministry exam on this course. I had the course when I was in the fourth grade of high school and I have never heard about people from the Mashreq this early in Canada. I think that it might be because of the attempt to talk about Canada’s history with the ‘’white narrative’’ but also the fact that some Arab people changed and anglicized their names after they came to America might have made it difficult to identify ‘’ off-white’’ individuals as Arabs or other ethnic groups.
Furthermore, the terminology that official documents and census use is also an important aspect that can make an ethnical group ‘’invisible’’. Hence some individuals might have been racialized as white when in fact they were from Bilad as-Sham or other places in the world. I see this idea of changing the birth name to make it fit better in the host society as assimilation that comes from oneself. When someone has an ethnic name or a name that comes from his culture, it can be seen as a way that the parents use to express their melancholia about their culture, or rather their attempt to transmit melancholia of culture to their child. Changing one’s name is an act of detachment to familial history and to culture in a larger way.
Historically, some scholars like Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina, for example, had their names latinized (Averroes and Avicenna) in a way that some people with little knowledge about them might not know that they were European/white (in the ethnic sense) or they don’t even know that Averroes’ real name is Ibn Rushd. The example of the change of names of those scholars and the individuals discussed in Asal’s work is not about the same point, but reading about Arab immigrants anglicizing their names made me realise that changing a name can be impactful in many ways. It can be a way of ‘’erasing a culture’’ to assimilate to another or in the example of the scholars, it can be a way to appropriate certain individuals to a culture they did not necessarily identify with.