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.