There are two ways to do it and many families do both. I did it, too. One name is given while the midwife cuts the baby's umbilical cord. This is why in Turkish middle names are also called belly names. The second one, the given name, is a major tradition and also very important religiously.Usually the oldest person in the family -- in my daughter's case, he was my uncle -- says the Azan, the call for prayer, into the right ear of the baby. Then he repeats the baby's name three times. Remembering the face of my daughter in this ceremony always makes me happy. While she was listening the Azan she became calm and when she heard her name, Hazal, she smiled.
I have to admit, I had never thought about how important our names are until I observed her from one country and international school to another. The first thing that she does is make her new teachers, friends and neighbors repeat her name until their pronunciation is just right. I thought that this little girl who was a little confused about her identity was sticking to her name since it was the only clear tool for her to form an identity. Once when we were in a ferry on the way to Italy from Greece, she was talking to an old man who was telling her that she was a Turk and she was answering that she was Hazal. The old man was saying, “Yes, you are a Turk, aren't you?” Hazal broke into tears, ran to me and complained about the old man: “Mom, this man is telling me that I am Turk. Tell him that I am Hazal.”
We have many things to learn from children, especially if we are living in a country in which more than the 35 percent of the villages' names have been changed by people sitting in Ankara.
It was a move by the governments of the time aimed at strengthening the nation building process under the influence of World War II. The people who made this decision thought that changing the names of these villages would make people forget the past and the diversity of this beautiful land. An “expert committee” worked very hard and found 78,000 new names for villages, significant geographical locations, rivers and hills. For example, a village that did not have even one single pine tree in it began to be called “Great Pine Tree Village,” but only on paper.
It happened to me many times when I was talking to villagers in southeastern and eastern Anatolia. When I asked the name of their villages, they usually told me names that do not exist on map, at least not the official ones. When they saw my lack of recognition then, usually with a little bit of embarrassment, they whispered the new names of their villages. Once an old lady almost begged me that if I wrote anything about her I would write the former name of her village.
The government took a very important step by starting a Kurdish broadcasting channel, TRT 6. I am not only talking about the benefits of it for Kurdish-speaking citizens, but also for the Turkish speaking ones. Just a few years ago in this country there were racist campaigns urging people to not interact with Kurdish speakers -- not to buy from them and not to work with them. These campaigns were against the sprit of this country and did not work, but for them to have existed at all was a great shame. However, opening up a Kurdish channel has helped legitimize the Kurdish language in the eyes of the whole nation, even for those whose ears are not used to hearing it.
Now reversing the names of towns and villages is on the agenda as a first step in the “historic opportunity” for solving the longstanding Kurdish question. If the names are reversed, the Kurdish people of this country will feel even more legitimized. They will feel that their identity is respected.
Anyway, no one wants to use only the former names after all these years, but also to use the new and the old together. In the end we have the tradition of the belly name and the given name and both make us what we are on the way to maturity.
