Nominal dispatch from the girl with the typo
My birthday cakes never knew how to spell my name. Sometimes they read ‘Happy Birthday Zaina’, other times ‘Happy Birthday Zeina’. It depended on which parent placed the order.
If it was mother, and it usually was, it came out Zaina. That was the name my friends scribbled into their diaries, the name that appeared in PowerPoint presentations, the name that I drew in the sand on holiday.
I wasn’t surprised my father misspelled it. He was a loving, devoted father who occasionally asked me what grade I was in and needed reminding not to smoke around my asthmatic brother. A misspelt name in a foreign language wasn’t a stretch.
Official documents, report cards and visa forms were just white sheets in manila folders. They never meant much to me. Zeina was just the name called out by men in uniform under fluorescent lights. It was bureaucratic and distant, like my grandmother’s Israeli-authorised Palestinian passport that forces her to carry my grandfather’s last name.
It wasn’t until I sat for my TOEFL exam at seventeen and was entrusted with my passport for the first time that I learned I’d been spelling my name wrong. My mother thought Zaina looked prettier. She taught me to spell it the way she liked and willed it into being.
Not long after learning that a single vowel was the anchor of my identity, I moved to London. My name became official in a way it never had before. There was no room for improvisation in a country where every official interaction required a passport number and a signature. Zeina became the system default.
Transliterating names isn’t just about getting the letters right, it’s about reducing social friction. In diaspora, I learned I wasn’t the only one living between names. Dania and Hadeel are Daniah and Hadil at border control. Ayan and Konstantina are Ana and Tina to the barista. If they call out Zoe, there’s my latte.
Our names are the first story we tell, or the first told about us. It’s a lullaby in the mouth of a lover and a weight in the mouth of someone who’s never heard it in a classroom or on a TV.
I met someone known for calling people by their full names, a musician with an ear for the rhythm of syllables. It was reserved for the people they were drawn to, they flirtatiously explained to one of the girls. I didn’t make the cut. My name wasn’t sexy like that, not even when I was, not even to someone who wanted to marry me.
There was a time when I tried to reclaim my name through usernames. A time when I expected the people who loved me to roleplay the past and call me Zaina. A time when I tried to pretend I only ever had one name.
Here’s what I know now: I will always live between two names. To my government, I am Zeina. To recruiters, colleagues, strangers: Zeina. On paperwork, on social media: Zeina. If you call me Zeina, you’re not wrong. But I am Zaina when I am alone. And when I am called Zaina with intention, the world shrinks like a hug.