In My World. . .

I have always been infatuated with words: their sounds, their meanings, their origins, and connotations endlessly intrigue me.  Perhaps this obsession is best explained by the fact that the word selected to describe me has no innate meaning.     The consonants and vowels that compose the name LaShonda are a random assembly of letters combined purely for aesthetic and phonetic pleasure.

Of course, it is not that unique.  In elementary school alone, I shared classes with a LaShonda, Shavonda, Shalonda, DaShundra, among others.  In my neighborhood, names were ranked by creativity–and were routinely based on a mother’s latest invented concoction from the letters of the alphabet.

Our mothers shunned traditional American girl names like Ashley or Tiffany, opting instead for ones that defied the norm and in doing so, created their own tradition, one poet Rita Dove calls an “accepted custom of . . .black families.”

““[T]hey chose for their daughter a name that would stand out, a name suited for the special fate awaiting this child, their contribution to history. . .”

But for many years, instead of praising my contemporary name, I saw how it defined  me in the eyes of society.  Its familiar click of consonants and swirl of vowels immediately identified me as an African-American woman and bestowed upon me the honor and curses that such characterization implied.

Life taught me the true power of my name and showed me that its lack of meaning gave me the opportunity to define myself–it was a blank check that I would denote value for over the course of my lifetime.

Most importantly, it showed me that in seeking to defy the invisible limits surrounding me, I was still only limiting myself.