what’s in my name?

I owe my first name to two dead men. One was my mother’s father, lost in a plane crash when she was two months old. The other was a French windsurfer who disappeared in the Taiwan Strait while trying to cross it in 1984. No, my mom wasn’t a fan, but she saw his daughter’s name, Alizé, in the newspaper around the time he went missing. “I made an unconscious connection,” she wrote to me when I wondered why, “between those men taken by wind and air.”

Alizé. Five letters. A common word you can find in any French dictionary to identify a weather phenomenon the English language dubs the trade winds. French people can’t spell it. All my life I had to correct them. No, there’s no e after the é. Someone once asked me if I was sure. “Pretty sure…” I said, “Had it all my life.”

Then some pop star called Alizée started her career in the early 2000s and I had to shoulder all the jokes about it and more bad spelling. A song can ruin your relationship to your name. Just ask all the Elsas who got told to let it go one time too many.

But by now, that’s wind in the mill. My first name and I are at peace. It’s not the only one I use, by a long shot. Some people who I consider my friends, who I’ve known for ten years and counting, don’t even know about Alizé. They call me by my usernames, by the name of the characters I play on forums or by some other titles they decided for themselves. The list is… very long. Few have anything to do with the five-letter word my mom chose for me. Still, it’s the one I always come back to when it matters.

what’s in my name by Alizé Gabaude is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0