A Loving Reclamation of the Unutterable: Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense J. Spillers, and Nina Simone as Excellent Performers of Nomenclature

And I will show you still a more excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. . . . [L]ove is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

—I Corinthians 12:31b–13:1; 4b–7

There is something to be said for the unadulterated agency of a person who is preoccupied with changing her name. Sans biological features, a name, one’s name, is the initial marker of identity at the very moment of nascence. And yet, names are given painstakingly; they are labored over and put through a series of permutations, with other names, in order to find the proper timbre for optimal acoustic quality. People are often given this identif ier in order to live into something, for better or worse, that may signify their progenitors’ current circumstance, or even as a response to occasions of intrauterine vicissitudes prior to in-breaking. An example of this would be African cultures such as that of the Zulus in South Africa. In Zulu culture, one’s name is not chosen—the name chooses her.¹

For perhaps a more local example of this methodology, we need only to look to Audre Lorde:

I did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey, and would always forget to put it on, which used to disturb my mother greatly. I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE at four years of age, but I remembered to put on the Y because it pleased my mother, and because, as she always insisted to me, that was the way it had to be because that was the way it was. No deviation was allowed from her interpretations of correct.²

“Y” as a linearly dangling modifier literally wears on Lorde inasmuch as she “puts it on” in order to oblige her maternal piety. And yet even with the eventual correction, or better yet deletion, of her nomenclatural y-chromosome, we find that Zami becomes the new spelling of her name, that is, that which was once unutterable by Lorde’s fellow mortals is lovingly (re)claimed by Lorde so that she can become herself: an ordinary, brown braided woman.³ And should the reclamation of a name, in its most basic actualization, be nothing more than an act of love?

From our earliest African predisposition toward naming to our recently historic proclamation as African Americans, black peoples’ status as American citizens is bound up in what we are called by others and ourselves. A sociolinguistic retrospective on the transformation of black bodies from nigras to niggas may itself suggest that comprehending the chasm existent between our African ancestry and our acclimatized Americanity is as abecedary as the differentiation of what an “r” is from a “g.” Nevertheless, though these preoccupations permeate the black American existence, unloving gongs and cymbals, who have throughout time attempted to haphazardly coin terms and phrases that remain costly to said black Americans, still stand to be shown a more excellent way of performing nomenclature. And these excellent performances are most certainly exemplified in aspects of the African American intellectual tradition. Hence, I assert that the contributions of black women, specifically Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense J. Spillers, and Nina Simone, provide a glimpse into realms of excellence that impart the inherent failures of naming systems that are deficient in rudimentary iterations of love. As such, their respective intellectual milieus allow for the deployment of the proverbial name-it-and-claim-it ideology that pervades (post)modern culture. These women merge the cerebral with the ontological in order to illumine both the importance of naming as well as the methods by which proper names were and are sullied by improper pronouncements from within and without. Thus, whether through the utility of scholarly research or...