Tomorrow (thursday 7 february 2012) this time I will be travelling to the city of Breda (a place I had sworn to never visit again, as it represents a lot of quite painful memories for me) to visit the court house for a hearing for my name change. The judge holding the hearing is Mr. E. van Noort and the site of the court case will be on the Sluissingel 20. My legal representative is Mrs Sanne van Beers of Blatt advocacy.
On this day I aspire to receive an answer to my request for a legal name change. So hopefully as of somewhen tomorrow I will be liberated from my ‘legacy name’ (which I shall not repeat here) and be legally known as Khannea Suntzu by my first names. Very sadly my last name can not be as casually changed in the same manner, and that procedure is quite a bit more persecutorial in nature; it costs over a 1200 euro, takes a year and is by no means guaranteed. I consider this a serious flaw in the Dutch legal system, but I will still have to find a way to shoulder that burden, eventually.
I had no choice but to seek a name change. Of course the name you are born with is a legal contrivance, and it is just the utterance of a phrase. Sadly my birth name has become nothing short of an insult, all my life constructed to demean and humiliate. Ironically precisely those few people that keep using my name at this time have consistently done so for precisely the reason to inflict intentional pain and humiliation. The reason I had my name altered was because of the legacy of having born from an emotionally and intellectually underdeveloped, barren mother, and a severely abusive, alcoholic, criminal and mentally handicapped father (and all the never-ending consequences of that). It is quite ironic that the two men who now insist on still uttering my ‘legacy name’ are quite similar to the sperm source that constituted my biological father – both men are alcoholists, emotionally quite damaged, cowards and born abusers. To hell with those two, as much as to hell with my father.
Let’s regard this continued humiliation as a birthing ritual to really make sure I know what I want. I sure as hell want this. I want to be me.
A word is but a sound, briefly uttered as a breeze of cold air, but a name is more than that. The name is the most intimate designator of identity, the label by which humans acknowledge the person-hood and personal history. Sadly a name can be a curse, an insult, and literally the vessel of torment. The decission to want to rid myself of this label, no matter how seemingly frivolous to some, is to me an near-ritual expurgation of what I sincerely do not want to be.
I sincerely hope the judge in this case has the wisdom, empathy and common sense to acknowledge both my pain, as well as my intense anger, as being force in to the historical matrice that is an extension of the line of parents that produced me. I ask of this judge – liberate me from this curse. To not do so you do nothing but perpetuate the same affliction and insult I had to live with.
Update
In about a month my name will be Khannea Suntzu. All what is needed are some fairly straightforward bits of documentation and I will be me, or at least in name 🙂