In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet it was suggested that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and the implication was that even though he’s a Montague, Romeo was still the object of Juliet’s affection, that if he had any other name it would be no problem for them to be in love. The message being that names of things do not affect what they really are.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet

I have contemplated this against the backdrop of the variety of names used for me as an outsider in other cultures: “gringa”, “mzungu”, “blan” and other words for foreigner, with varying levels of pejorative connotations attached.

The first time I lived abroad was in the late 80s in France where I was l‘étrangère, l’américaine. I lived in a 3^rd tier city where being an American was à la fois a novelty and an object of both derision and envy for our eating and drinking habits (fast food and Coca Cola), attire (Levi’s jeans) and movie stars and rock and roll. And I was often asked to justify our abominable treatment of native Americans and the HIV+ and AIDS sufferers, which felt like a heavy mantle to bear at age 16. I liked it better when my classmates asked me to translate popular song lyrics for them.

In Japan in the early aughts I was my department’s token gaijin, a culture carrier from the main office meant to ensure our American standards of rigor and productivity in a flat organization that prizes efficiency. Which was tricky in the Japanese professional culture of face time and devotion to hierarchy. Being called a gaijin didn’t come across as derisive to me, it felt pretty neutral. But that might be because Japanese culture is so impenetrable, especially as a short-term (one year) resident, so maybe I was just blissfully ignorant of the underlying méprise they might have really had for me and my ilk.

外人 = gaijin

In Haiti, and now in Senegal, I am frequently subjected to prix blanche and prix toubab, inflated tourist prices, among other distinctions. But it isn’t so much disdain as opportunism. I could be projecting some post-colonial guilt onto the words, but I sometimes feel a wash of resentment when I am addressed as such, and something ranging from curiosity to animosity, depending on the encounter.

Being a blan makes direct reference to the fact that you are a white foreigner. Blan literally means white in Haitian Kreyol, but even if you’re a brown or black foreigner you’re still a blan, so that’s some cultural whitewashing, some unsolicited reverse cultural, or at least color, appropriation. While gaijin is specifically applied to foreigners of non-Japanese ethnicity, it is sometimes even applied to Japanese diaspora who are not citizens, and in vernacular usage is broadly applied to non-East Asians in Japan. However there are discrete words and kanji, the Japanese characters, for white foreigners: 白人 hakujin, and black foreigners: 黒人 kokujin, which literally combines the words and kanji for the color white 白 + person 人, and the color black 黒 + person 人.

Words like the Swahili mzungu (East Africa) and the Wolof toubab (West Africa and specifically Senegal) are taken from words for travelers, wanderers, but have evolved to signify white foreigners. In Senegal, hearkening back to the French colonizers. So back in the day being called a toubab had a certain edge to it that is less cutting today, and even less so when applied to me as opposed to French expats here, where there are still some bad feelings that are exacerbated by perceptions of the current government being too beholden to France and French interests. Whereas the opposition party actively French-bashes, leading to French grocery stores being looted and burned during demonstrations, and protests and blockades of the toll road, built and operated by a French company, snarling the already mercurial Dakar traffic.

­­Opposition party to the French in Senegal. Inspiration below.

But as the meaning of the cliche suggests, when I am called toubab, I don’t feel any different. I’m still good ol’ me underneath, right? In Exodus 3:14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am,” which some theorize means something like his/her/its nature cannot be declared in words, cannot be conceived of by human thought. God exists in such sort that his/her/its whole inscrutable nature is implied by its mere existence.

So that sounds about right to me, we mere mortals have intellectual capacities that are far too puny to understand what is behind the miracle of the creation of the universe and Earth and nature. The proclamation “I am who I am” seems meant to be awe-inspiring and exudes immovability and eternalness. I’m not sure that any human’s sense of self is that fixed or permanent.

We have a work retreat coming up later this month, and our team has been assigned the task of taking the Meyers-Brigg. Again. For me this will be the third time. I took it when I was 17 and a freshman in college. Then my score indicated ENTP, with a borderline P/J score. When I took it again in my 30s, I was ENTJ, with a borderline E/I score. In the years between the first MBTI and the second, did I change, or did my recognition of who I really am change?

I still feel really in touch with my little kid self, who had to be pretty independent when I was being raised by a hands off single mom who was preoccupied trying to make ends meet. And had to become even more independent, in different ways, after she died when I was nine.

According to this recent article in the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/are-you-the-same-person-you-used-to-be-life-is-hard-the-origins-of-you, I’m a continuer.  One of the passages I liked in the article was this one:

“Sticking with any single account of your mutability may be limiting. The stories we’ve told may become too narrow for our needs. In the book ‘Life Is Hard,’ the philosopher Kieran Setiya argues that certain bracing challenges—loneliness, failure, ill health, grief, and so on—are essentially unavoidable; we tend to be educated, meanwhile, in a broadly redemptive tradition that ‘urges us to focus on the best in life.’ One of the benefits of asserting that we’ve always been who we are is that it helps us gloss over the disruptive developments that have upended our lives. But it’s good, the book shows, to acknowledge hard experiences and ask how they’ve helped us grow tougher, kinder, and wiser.”

I’d like to believe that the me that I have been and will continue to be is, most of the time, a fundamentally good, kind, funny person. But tell that to my colleague* who, several years ago now, submitted to me, for the nth time, after suggesting changes at each previous rejected submission, the identical incorrectly completed sole-source requisition form, leading me to stand up, angrily rip the offending form into small pieces and throw them in his face while ushering him out of my office. File under I am who I am when I’m sleep deprived, and best to avoid that version of me until she gets caught up on sleep. Which I hope we will all get to do this weekend.

* He’s pictured above actually in the “find the toubab” pic.