Dear Reader,
I dedicate this letter to you. Yes you who have stumbled upon this post trying to find out about the empress of Russia. With this entry, I welcome you to the thoughts that I stumble upon in the last term I spend as a student of politics.
To first clear up any confusion, my name resonates with the title of the Russian Empress, meaning I am not the Empress herself nor am I a royal of any monarch. Why then is the blog named as such? As I have said earlier, my name is the title of the Empress. "Czarina Danielle" is my name where the first means the empress and the second is a variation of the name of Daniel from the Christian Bible. It's very odd don't you think that the words from which my name was taken from is quite contradictory? Well, it is not directly contradictory but the origins seem to me that they collide in more than one way-- but most of all, they collide in their political and cultural implications.
Now I don't wish to bore you with the history of both names, buy I think that a better understanding of me and my writings would show when these are laid out.
They say that we are named for certain reasons such as to hold the memory of a loved one, to be like that person you were named after, or to hold certain characteristics of the ones your name was taken from. In that idea, we are often named after great icons of history and religion or after people whom we see have such greatness in our perspectives.
I am not really sure why I was given such a first name, but from the way I see it I was named Czarina so that i may embody the strenght and subtleness of the empress. Danielle was a choice so that I would have the same courage and foresight that Daniel of the bible had. But even with that the question of why I was given such a first name still is in my head. The second name I can understand because many are being given Christtian names in the hope of having us be closer to the Lord.
Reflecting on this I realize something. Perhaps it may not be important why my first name is as such, but what I should be looking at is the bigger picture of why I am named after characters of foreign background. I begin to wonder then why it is that many of the people around my most especially my peers are named according to foreign narratives. Going to my own name, I find that the year I was born was the year that the Cold War had ended. I say to myself perhaps this is one link why I was given this first name. Because even as the Russian monarch had ended, they reign in their legacy. That was one perspective I kept my hopes on. I hoped that someday I would be able to leave a legacy to my country. But to the questions of having such foreign names be so rampant, I found a different answer.
Endocolonialism is a term that I have now just learned about. I found that one reason for having such a culture on names is a producct of having a nation subject itself to the dictates of a colonial culture therefore letting the latter dominate the ethnic culture that should be thriving in the said nation. Take for example that of the Philippines, it is no question that endocolonialism seems to be one that dominates its culture of social preference. I will not attempt to discuss anymore how this is in everyway. Let us just take the example of our country's obsession over whitening products. We obsess over white because we tell ourselves that it is better than our native skin color because it has been dictated upon us by our colonizers that what we are is less than what they are. To this extent then we degrade our culture and think that what we have is not to be had. Instead we think that what they have is what should be.
In that note, we see then a culture engulfed by the possession of colonial mentality in their midst. I understand that we are given names for the reason that our parents may have wanted us to be like who we were named after. But why is it that even with such a simple matter of choice, endocolonialism persists? Is it because when we give these foreign names, we also have this underlying desire to be what they are-- foreign and not native? Another answer is highly appreciated.
Respectfully yours,
Czarina
No comments:
Post a Comment