One of the things that I find quite challenging in writing is choosing names. As a confession, the book in progress—and it’s in the throes of its final edits before I attempt submission now, mind—still has no name. I have titled the manuscript Those Without Voices, which may or may not be what I keep it as. Most likely it will not remain so, because I’m beginning to dislike it. I harbor grave doubts about my ability to name anything well, much less a book. Because I know my limitations, I simply labeled the file “Pomegranate” when I started writing it. No particular reason, except that I like both the fruit and the word, and it grows in southern Iberia. “Pomegranate” it remained almost entirely through its first 126,000-word draft. Eventually it became “The Voiceless Ones,” but that was less than optimal. Each iteration is smaller on the word count, too, as it should be.
The “voiceless” phrasing has to do with an Andalusi convention whereby it was common to call certain foreigners “voiceless” or “dumb ones”—i.e. they did not speak proper language. I’m not in love with the name; it works in the original but sounds a bit mawkish as a title in English. I hope I change it.
My first completed book manuscript was entitled A Bird in Exile, which is pretty phrasing, but in many ways did not fit it (I sometimes cringe when I think of that book; even though it was not poorly written, the plot was trite. Ultimately, it’s probably better that it found no publisher. “Do the best you can until you know better. Then do better.”) I can’t take credit for that pretty phrasing, though; it was from a line of Rumi. Which, in and of itself, is dangerous, as Rumi (or things that Rumi allegedly wrote but frequently did not, or “translations/interpretations” of his work that frequently bear little resemblance to the phrasing and meaning of the originals) has been overused as a font of rather commodified inspiration in a way that is sad to my inadequate Sufi heart.
Then there are the names of characters, which has been (and has always been) something of an effort. When one is writing historical fiction, there is a bit less latitude; the names have to be historically and culturally plausible. Writing a book set in al-Andalus in the 9th century gives one fairly narrow parameters for naming a given character, which should make it more straightforward, but it also gives one more opportunity to pick the wrong name. Why? Diversity.
Something that makes me impatient with much of the common understanding of al-Andalus is the highly limited narrative of it as a land of “Moors vs. Christians.” Which, beyond any acknowledgment of the way those lines blurred, completely dismisses the existence of Sephardic Jews, who were an integral and very influential part of Andalusi society from the very beginning right up until the bitter end. The erasure of Jews in that narrative was not accidental, and it would be good for people to challenge themselves on it when they reflexively break it down to “Moors and Christians.” It was a strikingly diverse society, and this was by no means a new thing: the Iberian Peninsula has seen waves of immigration and colonizing from very early times, from Greeks and Phoenicians to Celts and Carthaginians, Romans, Alans, Suebi, Visigoths. I would point out once more that Iberia had a significant Jewish population early, as well. Then there were the Tartessians, whose origins no one is exactly certain of (they may have been indigenous), although they were probably not aliens (there is an unfortunate line of modern occultist thought that this was the case. You should not be surprised.) On the other hand, they held their mythical progenitor to be Geryon, who had either several heads or extra limbs, so that’s not completely off the table. I digress; needless to say the Iberian Peninsula had seen the comings and goings (and stayings) of many peoples. This is not an exhaustive list, either.
All this, poured into a land of Iberians and Basques (Basques of course antedate everyone.) Add to this mixture the arrival in the 8th century of Arabs (who had their own subcultural group differences), Imazighen, African peoples from south of the Sahara to the north and east, and then people like the Saqaliba, Eastern Europeans brought in largely by the slave trade. Throw in less-repellent forms of trade and you have even more people coming in from even further-flung areas, because al-Andalus was pretty cosmopolitan despite getting sneered at as the backwater of the Islamic world, and it gets even more complex. Then again, Christian Iberians were hardly a monolithic collective; there was a cultural divide among Visigoths and the greater Celt-Iberian and longer-assimilated population, even in their Christianity. The Visigoths, who came in from central Europe as clients during the Roman period and filled the power vacuum after the Romans, converted to Christianity early—but their Christianity initially was Arianism, unlike most of the other Christians of Iberia, until the Visigoths changed course on Arianism in 589 with the Council of Toledo. ‘Twas the Visigoths (again, not an indigenous group; they were colonizers, too) who were in power when Tariq ibn Ziyad sallied forth and began the Umayyad conquest of Iberia.
Even among the people lumped together as Muslim “Moors” (n.b.: this word really isn’t a thing), Imazighen are not Arabs, even when Arabized, and even their take on Islam had some differences due to inherent cultural differences and social factors. Furthermore, there were the muwalladun, the people who converted. I could break it down further, but understand that each group had their own cultural context. Inherent cultural differences inform people’s choices, even (especially) in a pluralistic society, even with assimilation and cultural exchange and colonization.
So what has that to do with naming characters? Ah, see, there is a point to my rambling. That point being that it isn’t enough to pick “Muslim” names and early Spanish “Christian” names, because all of those various peoples had different names and naming conventions, and every group added something to the giant Iberian pot as they assimilated.
I knew better than to give everyone names in Arabic or Spanish to show the difference, because that’s the lazy dichotomy, and it’s not historically or culturally accurate. Half of the characters I use were real people, anyway, so I had fewer names to worry about; those characters had ready-made names of their own. But despite all of my reading and research, despite knowing the various ways that names in Arabic, for example, are put together, I often found myself drawing a blank when having to name a character. Far too often, as a placeholder, I’d give someone the first random name that popped in that was moderately appropriate. I’d change it later, I told myself. The net effect was that I had people with decent Arabic names (although I had to check frequently to make sure I wasn’t repeating or giving characters names that were too similar), and some with decent Amazigh names, and…well, heck, what were the Spaniards going to be? Who were they going to be?
There are lists of names found in old documents—al-Andalus was a society with a strong sense of the power of the written word, and a tendency for robust administration and record-keeping, fortunately; some of that even survived the zealous destruction of records and books after the fall of Granada—and seeing the lists reminds you of how very diverse the society was. Here are Visigothic names, which look distinctly Central European; here are names that are Hispanicized Arabic or Amazigh; here are names that are clearly Roman Latin evolving into Spanish and Portuguese (and languages like Catalan.) Some were very Roman, some almost anachronistic in how Spanish they appear. And over here, these are the Basque names, which no one else would have, but which Basques certainly would. Don’t forget that slaves were frequently given Arabic names that were diminutive, descriptive, or words for objects. I have one enslaved character who retains his original cultural name; that was a very deliberate choice, as it said something about the character of the person he served. This character is also an oblique nod to Bedr, the formidable Greek freedman of Abd ar’Rahman I, if not in naming convention.
For a while, many of the “placeholder” names I grabbed were Visigothic and few were appropriate, as few of the characters themselves were of Visigothic heritage. I confess that I was being lazy. I went back and devisigothified several names in the second run-through. I gave a character a soldier’s nickname, with the intent of introducing a backstory (I keep most character’s backstories in my head, from brief sketches to a full biography), and then realized that was not going to happen, and the name looked silly and wrong without that. So off I went to find a name appropriate for an aging soldier of Romanized Iberian family; I settled on one that had the same kind of rhythm as the nickname, and is completely in keeping with the character.
I had to change names for other reasons: a relatively minor character had a name that reads similar enough to a more major character’s name to cause confusion for two beta readers, so that had to be changed. And so on. As an aside, in that pretentiously-titled “Fragment” I posted a while back, two of the characters have since been renamed (of note also: I recognized that the formation of plurals in the Basque language does not use an “s” and am assuming that extends to earlier forms of the language; thus iainkoak, not iainkos. It still may not be correct, but I’ve done some due diligence in order to use that one word, which I honestly felt was important in context. If any Euskadi speakers correct me, I’d welcome it.)
What of the djinn in the book? Once again, I treated them as a diverse population, as they would be: some are native in their affinities and origin, some Roman or Romanized, some Muslim. Therefore, they got names that reflected that, although only a few are “real” as in human names; most are not quite human names, but they still had to reflect the particular djinn’s heritage (well, cultural affinity), so they’re mostly adaptations of human names from those cultures. I suppose I could have created entirely new, alien, djinn names, but these are the ones that took…and recall I am not good at naming, so if I’d created unique “djinn language” names, they would have probably been really silly.
I struggle with names, both remembering them and choosing apt ones, but I think the names for characters in this book now make sense. Mostly. Still, a risk in writing history is having a broken or inadequate understanding of the cultural mores and nuances, and I’ve possibly picked a wholly inappropriate name here or there. On the whole, though, I am satisfied and feel at the least I can defend my naming choices with some coherence.
I would still like to come up with a really bang-up name for the book, yes.
Maryam Payne, Writer & Editor 