Last Name Politics

The thing I think about at least once a week - my last name.

MICHELLE RAMEN TO THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE, PLEASE!

Rah-men. Ray-men. Roman. Her-ahmin. Herr-omen. Hro-meen. Everything but the name itself, blasting through the intercom at my high school. As I left my seat in the classroom and headed to the office, the H and R consonant pairing magically materialised so deftly onto the lockers in the hallway that they grew hands and fingers to point and laugh at me.

What’s in a last name, a surname, the name I cringe at while vocally instructing people how to pronounce it after Michelle (which more often than not gets pronounced as “Michael”)? Mine is not apparently Croatian in heritage except it is, in a way. ‘HR’ is the country code of Croatia, or, in our mother tongue, Hrvatska. When I was a kid I thought it was so blatantly obvious that I was a Croat from that small detail, me and Croatia are the same, you know! I would say as I readied myself in front of the next person to tell the about the ‘humble villages’ where my family hails from, nearly breaking into a cold sweat to then explain how to pronounce H and R as one syllable, feeling a sense of responsibility to share my Croatianness, to prove that I was, beyond citizenship, beyond an extra passport, beyond how many weeks I was there a year and how much Dorina chocolate I would bring on the flight home, Croatian, at least in part.

I was reminded of this, the repeated butchering of my name over the loudspeaker at my high school over the years, during a concert I played in over the Christmas period. The conductor’s nerves were felt through the orchestra, but not so much through the audience. His shtick was rehearsed, polished, cracking measured jokes at the right moments to keep them engaged, all of which felt mildly admirable in trying to close the gap between classical music concert-goers and performers until this very moment; he introduced one of the soloists, messed up the pronunciation of her last name, and asked her in front of the audience how to say it correctly. But it goes further than this:

He introduced one of the soloists, messed up the pronunciation of her last name, asked her in front of the audience how to say it correctly, and made assumptions about where she was from. He introduced one of the soloists, messed up the pronunciation of her last name, asked her in front of the audience how to say it correctly, made assumptions about where she was from, and made fun of the spelling. He introduced one of the soloists, messed up the pronunciation of her last name, asked her in front of the audience how to say it correctly, made assumptions about where she was from, and made fun of the spelling, teasing her about her potential ethnicity, making puns about other career options in relation to her ‘funny’ last name. The list goes on.

The awkward 14 year old and slightly more angry but embarrassed 17 year old from W. T. Clarke High School rose up inside of me before she slumped back down into her seat, turning her head to the rest of the wind section to go, “What the fuck just happened?” She laughed it off, the soloist who this happened to, as we moved into another song on our setlist, but there was a mild tension for the rest of the evening, an air of stale embarrassment and no one in the orchestra knowing how to address the cringey thing that just happened in front of them. I ran to get my train back to London shortly afterward, nearly missing it after leaving from the wrong exit at the building. I sprinted, making it just as the doors were about to closed, and threw my bags and clarinet cases onto the chair next to me. Maybe last names aren’t that personal, I felt myself write down on my Notes app, but why does mine feel so personal to me?

There are approximately 390 Croatian people with the family name Ivanov living in Croatia right now. The name is indicative of people from Poljana and Lukoran, two smaller villages sat in quieter parts of the island of Ugljan. I wrote this down as a fact to tell my Baba Bložo, who passed away in 2008, as something she might find interesting posthumously. She was Ivanov and then became Latković in the late 60s. This meant many trips to Petrčane, a newfound home for me that I visited in an opposite capacity to my Baba, her spending the majority of trips seeing her husband’s family with the occasional trip down to the island to reconnect with her brothers and sisters, while I spent my weeks swimming around my local spots in Poljana, with a fleeting weekend visiting my Dido after she passed up in Petrčane. While being Hromin I am also Latković and Ivanov, and Jadrijev, too but that’s a story for another time. There is a deep connection to the names and faces and remnants of the Latkovićs and Ivanovs that I can see within myself, shadows that light up as I recount the stories of my family through the U.S. and Croatia, odes of cooking and quarreling and shapes of roofs with crooked coral edges, but which are the come through me as I tell you my name and where I am from, and how will you know the difference if I do not tell you?

I thought of Ivanov when I thought of Ivan, a name that rings as ‘ee-vahn’ in my head but is very much ‘eye-van’ in England and all that surrounds it, something I never really understood, but have come to terms with slightly. I asked my boyfriend a few months ago if he thought the ‘eye-vahn’ he knew was actually an ‘ee-vahn’, and he said probably but ‘ee-vahn’ is also probably an ‘eye-van now’ because it’s just easier, but what I can hear is phonetic spelling, going through each letter and seeing how they glue themselves against one another, ee, vuh, ah, neh, wrapped in a beautiful bow to say Ivan. Is it so important for people to know this way of pronunciation, to know that my last name is Croatian even if it doesn’t read at first glance, to hear huh-ro-oh-muh-ee-nuh the way I do in order to validate this part of my heritage? And will I always feel like a fraud pronouncing something Croatian Croatian-ly?

There are a plethora of tabs open on my computer about Croatian pronunciation, Croatian names, the histories and origins of Croatian surnames and our attachment to them in the modern age. In a similar way to Icelandic culture, the Croatian -ić that is commonly found at the end of last names was originally used in conjunction with paternal names to indicate lineage within a village, expanding to matronymic surnames and last names indicating occupational status, ‘Lončar’ meaning potter, ‘Kovač’ the blacksmith. What comes to mind is the imaginary painting of Poljana I’ve held in my mind since I was child, where families blossomed in pockets across town according to last name, only now starting to disperse slightly outside of to unchartered familial zones, or even other villages. I used to live for the gossip about land disputes like these, about which son had a house built for them and what land is left to be fought over savagely between bites of stale kruh. I still do, honestly, pondering, while grinding my coffee beans and pacing around the flat, about the fights over branches of olive trees hanging over onto a neighbour’s garden and parts of town to avoid walking along at noon shield oneself from the whispers of gossip. I see old people walking through town, I see a youth in a country slightly over 30 years old, a light nationalistic pride I bathe myself in while resenting it in the next breath, a sense of duty to explain, to educate, the little girl who would tell her classmates no, Croatia is not in Africa, or Asia, confronted with the mild annoyance with having to pronounce ‘Hro-min” again this week.

And so I do, I say, I explain. I move through the weeks normally, letting go of my anticipation of moments like these. I work at my desk and the round table in our living room except when I teach on Tuesdays like I did yesterday, the first lessons since Christmas, navigating students who didn’t practice over the break and were forthcoming about it, and students who didn’t practice over the break but desperately wanted me to think they did. My students have warmed to me in the few months of learning together, as I have with them, and we share tidbits about our lives and what we did over the Christmas break, chatting about tiredness and presents and how much chocolate we ate. I tell them about my mom who visited, my move northeast, and other small things, counting down the hours until I would transport myself to where I write this now, a desk out in the countryside. Toward the end of my day a student came in and apologized profusely for not practicing over the break.

“I was in Croatia” they said, “visiting family,”

“Are YOU Croatian?” I exclaimed.

‘I am’ they said, ‘well, at least half.’

I thought for a second to the emails with their parents, seeing the very English ‘surname’ in all the correspondence to then find an -ić in an email as their mother’s last name, which slowly began the chat I know, the one that doesn’t feel as scary, starting with what village is your family from, how often do you go in the summer, how wonderfully rare it is to meet Croatian people in the middle of North London.