Sans Surname

Linguistic diversity is under threat around the world. Each challenge to a patriarchal binary system marks a step away from extinction of this richness.

This is Dialek :: Dialect, a new column by Khairani Barokka on language, culture, and power.

The online form is de rigueur, but for the first time I can remember, I take a beat before typing “Khairani” below “First Name,” “Barokka” below “Surname.” This time, I opt out of auto-complete and try typing both names under “First Name,” then hitting the Return key, screen switching as I’ve done so to one where the “Surname” field is ringed in red. I must enter something into this field to proceed with my transaction, says the website. There can be no correct form entry using the name that welcomed me into the world: Khairani Barokka, as recorded on my Indonesian birth certificate, with no surname.

That certificate’s single line after “Nama” (name) prompted my parents to decide on a moniker with no restrictions (apart from space) as to how many parts it could have; which part was what would be called a “surname” in Anglo-Western traditions, which “first.” Which, if any, “middle name(s).” Because, as all Indonesians know, many if not most of us (certainly many of us who are elder millennials and older) do not have “surnames,” and we have at least two kinds of names with regular usage.

The first is nama panjang (literally: “long name”): our formal name, which is on certificates, passports, and other documentation—the name we sign off on, and affix to homework assignments, work documents, whatever we may write. The second is the nickname(s), shorthand for who we are, name(s) we allow others to call us in conversation and in letters, including teachers and bosses. Hence why I ask people to call me “Okka,” because literally everyone does—this is not “formal” or “informal,” it just is. I have friends whose parents have lovingly given them four or more names (none of them surnames, for the most part), but will be called by a completely different nickname. These are “nama panggilan” (literally: “the name we’re called by”).

Many Indonesians do not have “surnames.”

To say “Ms. Barokka” is not inaccurate. “Ms. Khairani” is also not inaccurate; I’ll answer to it, but I do not ask people to use this. When teaching in Indonesia, my students would call me “Mbak [or Kak, or another term of respect for a woman] Okka” or “Ibu Okka” (Ms. Okka, despite Google Translate’s misogynist insistence that “Ibu” is automatically “Mrs.”). I relish in the confusion non-Indonesians have been known to profess. I was once asked in the UK if my second name is my first name, as would be the practice for many East Asian people; though of course there are people of East Asian heritage in Southeast Asia, the region is a different kettle of fish, also enormously diverse, but in different ways. I don’t mind explaining my name to people—it would harm my sense of self more to have assimilated.

Because Indonesia is comprised of vast territories and hundreds of cultures, each with their own naming practices and variations, the two simple distinctions of nama panjang and nama panggilan are meant to encompass all. Yet to simply say acknowledging this is a form of decolonization masks the forms of colonialism inherent in this practice: using Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) instead of hundreds of other languages found in Indonesia, in an era of accelerating language extinction. Enforcing the written form, using the Latinized alphabet that European colonization brought with it and brutally enforced (which is also, all too often, in a form inaccessible to blind or sight-impaired people). Using the written form, so universally and consistently, influenced by how our oral cultures have been and continue to be decimated.

The diversity of names in Indonesia reflects various cultural influences, from religion to the figures our guardians looked up to. My own name is Arabic, while “Okka” is a nickname I made up as a toddler. My mother has an Arabic surname—she is the only one in my nuclear family with a proper surname—and Malay names that come before it; while my father has two names, neither surnames, both heavily influenced by Sanskrit’s role in forming modern Javanese naming practices. My sibling was given a mononym derived from Sanskrit. Not long ago, an uncle of mine wrote to the family mailing list, marveling at how the children, grandchildren, great- and great-great-grandchildren of our branch of the family have been so differently named, influences from myriad linguistic cultures often contained within one name. With each name chosen, we elide and propel forward different parts of our cultural heritages.

This is a complexity I, too, revel in, particularly as a surnameless person. Talk about not accepting given binaries—the first name-surname binary is certainly an imposed system we don’t talk about enough. Knowing internally that Barokka is not a surname, despite having used it as such in numerous forms for lack of other options, is a form of knowing the self as separate from the ways we are made more palatable, more digestible to bureaucracies. Our names wrap our selves, a thick societal layer on the body. Not using a patrimonial surname reminds me that my Minang culture is matrilineal, and to honor the nonbinary system of naming I come from.

Yet there are ways in which surname-as-patriarchy has influenced my thinking, apart from the ways writing “Barokka” as surname in forms throughout my life has done subconsciously. In high school, I used “Okka [Father’s Second Name]” as my name, prompting confusion when friends from that time wanted to friend me on Facebook, and didn’t know who Khairani Barokka was. At some point, I considered using “Khairani Barokka [Father’s Second Name] [Mother’s Last Name]”—which actually rolls off the tongue—but decided against it. Ultimately, using my government name, a name separate from anyone else in my family, reinforces both uniqueness of self and how proclaiming myself in relation to family has always been a daily choice, an active love.

Not using a patrimonial surname reminds me that my Minang culture is matrilineal, and to honor the nonbinary system of naming I come from.

It seems like an impossible task to go against bureaucracies that reinstate patriarchy in our very names, re-inscribing colonial norms on which contemporary nation-states are built. Think about all the areas of life in Western countries affected by this patriarchal first name-surname primacy: visas and immigration, property deeds, medical records, death records, other areas of law, schooling, academic citations—every area of public life I can think of. The forms that require “First Name,” “Surname” are not as blatantly patriarchal as the medical forms I refused to sign as an adult woman in a Jakarta clinic, requesting my father’s or husband’s name and contact details—but they are still patriarchal, I argue, in origin, and are certainly colonial vestiges.

Of course, as someone who primarily writes in English these days, from London’s heart of empire, far be it from me to judge anyone else’s choices as insufficiently anti-colonial. From the first time I traveled internationally, Barokka has been the name I use as a “surname,” though it is not. The fact is that complying with the first name-surname binary will absolutely make international travel less fraught, while also easing other dealings in the patriarchal colonial world we have to live and survive in. I completely understand why my Indonesian peers’ children are almost universally given surnames now.

I won’t say having a surname is a privilege, as though those of us sans surnames should all want to clamor for one. However, those with patrimonial surnames are absolutely privileged—which is a different concept—by the Westernized bureaucracies we live in. Someone recently told me that at a previous job, when he served clientele who were mononymic South Asian migrant workers in England, their mononyms would not be accepted by banks and other bureaucratic systems, which meant they had to place an asterisk after their names in the “Surname” bracket. This asterisk represents, for me, a beautiful marker of not fitting in the face of systems that want to control through homogenization. I know many mononymic Indonesians choose to double up their names, and this kind of name alteration also signals to me a point of fissure in the binary-name fabric.

It seems like an impossible task to go against bureaucracies that reinstate patriarchy in our very names, re-inscribing colonial norms.

Our bureaucratic names don’t have to be how we solely define ourselves; our nicknames and other names are also sources of self and community—though I do wish mothers and matrilines, women and nonbinary people, were honored through our surnames more often. There are many subversions, large and small, in the ways we change or refuse to change the way the world addresses us: hyphenating and establishing double-barreled last names; using the mother’s name as a surname; creating new surnames altogether that reflect the family lineage of both members of a couple, or simply a new beginning.

Linguistic diversity is under extreme threat around the world, and each time a patriarchal binary system is challenged marks a step away from extinction of this richness. Having never had a surname, having only one parent with a surname, sparks in me a feeling of incredible liberation—I don’t have to choose between parents’ surnames, or believe that I have to adopt any other surname in my lifetime. While some parents want their children to assimilate to avoid difficulty and friction, I’d ask people to consider the incredible resilience and self-pride that taking ownership of a “difficult” name creates—the power of possessing a name that, perhaps, does not subscribe to the patriarchal first name-patronymic surname binary and hegemony. And I’d ask more of us to reflect on and honor the value of understanding who would find such a name “difficult,” and assert that, in the face of any perceived difficulty, the feelings of the named matter, too.