How do you Say your Surname?

This week's Camino a Ítaca looks back to my childhood and then turns to the deadly present. A look at War. Click over to read the originally published version in Spanish in El Hoy or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The first day of school was always an anxious time for me. My biggest worry wasn’t necessarily regarding our new teacher or how difficult the material would be. What I constantly fretted about was how my new teacher was going to pronounce my surname. Were they going to mangle it and make it sound more ‘foreign’ than it actually was, or would they make it sound somehow ‘English’? I agonized over which way were they going to pronounce the ‘u’ and if they were going to place an emphasis on the ‘h’, which is pronounced in English. Those seven letters have raised a lot of questions throughout my life.

Being born and raised in Canada, I’ve had people read my surname and surmise I had some distant First Nations ancestry simply because of the way it sounded. Conversely, I’ve also had people believe that I was Japanese, at least until they met me in person. As someone from the ‘new world’, the possibilities were endless.

It wasn’t until I moved to Baku, Azerbaijan to teach that I encountered people who instantly knew where it came from. I would write my name up on the board for my mostly Russian speaking Azeri students and they would immediately say, ‘Were you born in the Ukraine?’

I would tell them that I hadn’t, my paternal grandfather was, but it was called Poland and the time. He had escaped the Ukraine somehow in the thirties and for a reason unknown to us, like many of his compatriots, ended up in Canada. The Canadians welcomed him to the country, if only briefly, and then asked him to join a different queue. One that involved enlisting in the Canadian army and heading back across the Atlantic to a Europe he had just escaped to fight in the Second World War.

Because of this family history, you would think that the recent tragic events might have affected me more than the normal news cycle. But I can’t say it has. Even if you add to the fact that my only brother lives in Poland, someone who is constantly checking the available flights and trains west the following day, I can’t say that this war is somehow different, somehow special.

What it is, is war.

My roots may run deep in the Ukraine, but in all of my travels, it’s a place that I have yet to see, one that I have yet to experience. I know no one there. That said, I have traveled, lived and worked in places like Yemen, Syria, Colombia, Ethiopia and Libya. I have former students, friends and colleagues who have also had to flee their homes, often at a moment’s notice in equally terrifying conditions.

Yet for some, this latest war is somehow more profound. For some reason it means more than others. The Russian aggressor is somehow more insidious and the cruelty somehow more evil than the others being fought in ‘barbarous’ lands.

And here is where the inherent racism lies. War is war and each one creates refugees. It’s equally as heinous in Libya as it is in Lviv and makes me realize more and more that a surname doesn’t matter. People do.