All photos by the author.
My birth name, given to me on a Good Friday in the late ’80s, is I’Nasah Kiam Crockett. It’s pronounced eye-NAH-sah KEE-ahm Crockett, though growing up in Georgia in a blended Midwest/Deep South family it also got regularly pronounced as uh-NAH-suh. But more than the sound of my name itself, over time I began to respond to the sound that regularly preceded my name: a silence. A very specific kind of silence at that, one weighted with bemusement and a mighty struggle with unseen forces located on the speaker’s tongue. Whether the speaker be a nurse in the pediatrician’s waiting room, a middle-school dance teacher reading through the registration form, or the announcer at the graduation ceremony for my Master’s degree, the silence would follow similar paths of embodiment: an inhalation, then a pause, then the physicality of eyebrows drawing together, lips pursing, fingertips pausing over the page, then the inevitable bungled attempt at pronunciation, perhaps followed by a casual exoticism: “That’s so pretty, where is that name from? Is that where you’re from, like, really from?” As I moved through the world, this loaded silence around my name echoed in numerous ways, like in the persistent jagged red underlines signaling a misspelling in digital documents, or in the gas stations stuffed full of novelty personalized items for seemingly every name under the sun, save mine. The message I received was clear: you do not belong here. You are not of this place, you are not of this world. My name became an incantation of displacement, a description of a fitful embodiment.
Unsurprisingly, given this history, I’ve been obsessed with names since childhood, and more specifically, I’ve been obsessed with renaming myself. “Call me Lisa,” I said around age 6, surrounded by the day-glo high femme styles of the early ’90s. “Call me J.J.,” I said around age 9, after a summer camp pal noted how much I liked Jell-O, and after I noted how you couldn’t tell if the name belonged to a boy or a girl. “Call me Aaron,” I said around age 11, when my daily choices of clothing were so baggy and earth-toned my friends regularly mistook me for a guy from a distance, which secretly thrilled me. But by the time I was a teenager, I’d settled into I’Nasah, or, maybe more accurately, I’d given up on trying to do anything about the vague discomfort my name kicked up when anyone spoke it. Kinda similar to how I stopped trying to push back on the increasingly high stakes of femininity — which, the older I got, I was given less and less choice about adhering to. After all, I’Nasah was a pretty name, right? And I was a pretty girl, right? So why waste time trying to change any of it? So, by the time senior year in high school rolled around, I was laughing with my friends about how I used to “walk like a dude,” and I considered my “tomboy period” to have been nothing more than an unserious and temporary phase, or so I told myself.
Still, even with the persistent discomfort that accompanied my name, I didn’t completely hate it. I quietly agreed with those who thought it pretty. But what was more, I always liked my name’s creation story. Although my first and middle names place me outside of the imperialist white supremacist capitalist cispatriarchal world I was born into, they simultaneously place me within a genealogy of my people, both blood and Black.
My birth middle name, Kiam, takes my mother’s name — Kimberly — and shortens it, but then flips it adding an extra “A” along the way. The ultimate origin of “I’Nasah” is West African, though the spelling was deliberately modified, and it means “first born” – which, as I was an only child, is technically accurate. But it is the story behind the spelling that’s held an immovable significance for me, even while I’ve been unsure whether my name accurately described who I am. My first name adds an “I” at the end of my father’s name — Hasan — and reverses it. However, it should be noted that my father’s name is not his birth name. Growing up in the segregated Midwest and coming to adulthood in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my father gravitated towards the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and like many of his Black contemporaries, he decided to adopt a new name that better reflected his growing consciousness and changing sense of Black subjectivity. He and his contemporaries were birthing themselves anew, articulating a Blackness that looked to itself, its past, and its community for legitimacy and legibility. In a world built upon the enslavement, displacement, and erasure of Black diasporic peoples and histories, for a Black person to choose their own name is to choose life in the face of nearly overwhelming death. It is not just an act of defiance, it is a testament to how Black folks have made and remade ourselves across space and time; it is an acknowledgement of an inevitability, a ritual of rebirth.
So I suppose it tracks that when I began my gender transition, not only did I choose a new name, I chose a name that quite literally invokes death. Transitioning is a kind of death anyway. You are born, you are raised with particular understandings of who you are, then you come to understand that this person you’ve become isn’t who you are at all, and so that version of yourself is laid to rest, and a new you emerges from the tomb. For me, the steady drumbeat of discomfort I’d felt around my supposed “girlhood” and “womanhood” finally peaked into a crashing realization that not only am I bisexual (which I’d struggled through and eventually accepted during the high school and college years), but I am not cisgender, a word that wasn’t available to me during the “Aaron” years. I’m definitely not a man, and I’m certainly not a woman; non-binary is the term that best describes the shape my gender takes. This realization has brought a sense of belonging, of finally being at home in my body and my subjectivity, which is so complete that, to quote the spiritual, I know I been changed. So why not take an angel’s name?
The Angel of Death’s name does not actually appear in the Qur’an. In that holy book, they are named only by their function to carry mortal souls into the afterlife; it is only in later sources that their name appears: Azra’il. Some traditions describe him as being so vast in size that the world rests between his feet; other traditions describe him as having four faces and four wings; many say he is covered in hundreds, thousands, innumerable sets of eyes. When God first created him, He placed veils over Azra’il’s eyes and called the other angels forth. God then removed the veils, and when the angels held an unfiltered Azra’il in all their totality, they became so overwhelmed at the sight that they collapsed before him. That story particularly struck me: Azra’il is a being that brings angels — agents tasked with maintaining a celestial hierarchy — to the brink of complete disorder. Azra’il is too vast to be fully perceived. His very existence provokes fear. At the same time, his inevitability is beyond resistance, and in his role as psychopomp, he facilitates the emergence of a new state of being.1
Thus I have become Ra’il I’Nasah Kiam. I’ve dropped the last name, a.k.a. slave name, but I’ve kept my first two given names. Through them I am marked as a member of my family, and a member of a people who have created names in response to the unnaming of oppression. Similarly, my gender is a response to histories of displacement and suppression, to living in a world where the very notion of gender is built on a foundation of antiblackness. Even “non-binary” isn’t a term without its limitations, personally – there are days where my gender feels more like the glint of a thousand celestial eyes, a shipwreck of the indigenous African gender formations my ancestors ascribed to, or waves of sound and light.2 Though I am still very much in the earlier stages of my transition, there are already days where I am bone-weary of Western society’s deepening transphobia. But it is in these moments that I can turn to the talisman that is my name and be reminded: I can be reborn from any manner of death. I may not belong in this world, but I belong to my people. The world may not be able to perceive me, but I can perceive myself.
- Roberto Tottoli, “ʿIzrāʾīl (ʿAzrāʾīl),” in Kate Fleet, eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2007– ), accessed via BrillOnline Reference Works; Ali A. Olomi (@aaolomi), Twitter thread on Azra’il, March 25, 2020; S. R. Burge, Angels in Islam: Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī’s al-Ḥabā’ik fī akhbār al-malā’ik (London: Routledge, 2012), 36–39, 63, 73, 77–80, 132–45, and passim. Also see Beiruter Texte und Studien 114, The Intermediate Worlds of Angels: Islamic Representations of Celestial Beings in Transcultural Contexts (2019), ed. Sara Kuehn, Stefan Leder, and Hans-Peter Pökel.
- Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (Summer 1987): 64–81; Kravitz M., “Are Pre-Colonial Genders Inherently ‘Nonbinary’ or ‘Transgender’?,” An Injustice!, Oct. 9, 2021; Mohammed Elnaiem, “The ‘Deviant’ African Genders That Colonialism Condemned,” JSTOR Daily, April 29, 2021.
