Dancing as Debbie…what’s in a name?
My name is Debbie Smith- full name, Debra Sue Smith. All the components of this name are extremely common, and I grew up wincing during every roll call, from as early as I can remember. Something about the names Debra and Sue and Smith just seemed to me like the ugliest sounding name (I have always had a sensitivity to the way words sound) as a child. Debra had a dull and blunt sound, Sue was too short and round, and Smith was sibilant and boring. It just seemed to embody how I saw myself- a shy, awkward girl with a round, freckled face (and after sixth grade- with glasses on top of that). I always felt slightly embarrassed when I heard it spoken out loud. I daydreamed about a more beautiful, more melodious, more special name. The nickname “Debbie” was a slight leavening to the whole heaviness I heard in my name, but just barely tolerable. My poor mother bore the brunt of my years of complaining about my name and me professing my hatred of it by saying “well, someday you can change your name to whatever you want to’- and I toyed with this idea in my mind occasionally, imagining all sorts of possible, more beautiful names.
But once I was old enough to change my name legally, I could not go through with it. Anything I thought of sounded “wrong” and gave me an uncomfortable feeling. The idea of starting over with everyone who knew me as Debbie seemed impossible anyway, and so I never really did anything. As I moved into adulthood with the attendant need to register for things, college, appointments, etcetera- I discovered the true ubiquity of my name. At the local vet clinic alone, there were so many Debra and Debbie Smiths- even Debbie Sue Smiths. So many in the phone book. So many at the doctor’s office. I just grew to accept that I would have to differentiate myself by my middle name, or birthdate, or social security number each time.
Once I entered the digital world, my name really became a problem. I may have been a slightly late adopter to getting an email address, which is probably why when I signed up for my first yahoo account in the early aughts almost all the permutations of my given name were “not available” and I was presented with an alternative like DebbieS100@ or something like that, and so I became debrasuesf (for San Francisco). When I moved to Egypt and took the opportunity to move to gmail, I had to settle on debbie.cairo as a solution. Fast forward to the era where handles are required for any number of social media platforms, and consistency is recommended across platforms for “branding”, and the situation for a Debbie Smith is even more dire.
While marriage is an occasion for many women to acquire a new name, I personally had mixed results with it. When I embarked on my blessedly brief first marriage and moved to San Francisco, I did take my husband’s last name, which was unusual and very well known in the dance and music community. I was happy to have to have to spell my last name every time and to not carry the most common surname in the Anglophone world. Unfortunately, it still failed to differentiate me, because one of his brothers had also married a Debbie who was a dancer and taken the last name, so I was constantly having to explain that I was not “that Debbie.” Cursed again by the common first name. When that marriage failed in relatively short order, I eventually divested myself of it legally and was relieved to be back to my own name.
Years later when I met and married my wonderful second husband (who I consider a more-than-adequate heavenly reward for the terrible first one) and moved to Egypt, I didn’t have to think about it, because in the Arab world, by naming convention a woman keeps her father’s name and any children take the husband’s name, so it would have been strange if I had taken his family name.
Because for the last 4 years I have been in the US more than in Egypt, I have been asked regularly about why I didn’t take my husband’s last name- and in my somewhat conservative small southern town people often assume that my Egyptian husband’s name must be “Yasser Smith” since I am a Smith. I would love to have his last name, but I have finally come to accept mine. In fact, now that my father and all his brothers but one, my Uncle Andy, are gone, it feels honest and correct to be carrying on this particular Smith name, at least through my lifetime.
I neglected to take advantage of another chance to “change my name” which came up in my early 20’s. When I started dancing in 1998, it was a time when most people either adopted a “dance name” or exoticized their own name- I am not sure if it is as common now. I did not really think about it until the night I was to do my very first solo performance as a student, at a local showcase. I was standing in the back of the room in my cover up, with a dance friend who was also going to do her first solo, when someone in the audience approached us and asked about our dance names- he was Lebanese- and when we told him we didn’t have one he said “You have to! I will give you one! You are Nejmi (to me- nejma means star in Arabic and is pronounced nejmi in the Lebanese dialect) and you are Almaaza (to my friend- al maasa means diamond-it is really an s not a z sound, but that’s how she went on to spell it). When it was time to go on we went backstage and told the MC how to introduce us. But when it came time for me, and I heard them call Nejmi, I was flooded with a burning feeling (above and beyond the performance nerves) and felt that the name was not right at all and fake, and not me, and ridiculous, but I went out and danced anyway.
After that night I never again thought about adopting a dance name (although Almaaza kept hers), and over the years as I was performing and traveling my name appeared as “Debbie Smith” on programs amidst a litany of single or multi-hyphenate Arabic names, or ersatz creations based on the mythology or Sumerian history. Periodically I would be told that I “had to” have a dance name and various options were offered to me (once in Dallas a guy proudly said “I’ve got it! You should be Yasmina Al Nar!”) but I held out and became something of a contrarian about it. Although this did not by any means indicate that I that liked my name any more than before. I just felt that having a name that wasn’t mine, or was adopted from another culture that was not mine, was worse (worse for me, that is- this is not to cast aspersions on dancers who have happily adopted and used a dance name. There are many reasons people might want to adopt a different name for dance, and I’m not judging other people’s choices. Even most of the great Egyptian dancers did not perform under their birth names).
After all, I was not a different person when I danced, I was still myself, and I was not fulfilling some kind of “I dream of Jeannie” fantasy by doing it. Once I had occasion to read Orientalism by Edward Said a few years later for a college course, I started to get a glimmer of how problematic the exotification of the “other”/harem fantasy projection that that pervaded (and still pervades to some extent, although consciousness has now been raised about that) was in the field of Middle Eastern dance in the US. I felt that I had made the right choice to dance under my own name. Over the years, I sometimes still inwardly cringed when I had to put my name on a flyer or a program as my old childhood dislike of my name flared up but not enough to stop using it.
Ironically, the name has come to differentiate me in the dance world, because there are no other Debbies currently out there using their own names - at least that I am aware of. And the fact that Debbie, Debra, and Deborah have most definitely not been in vogue since the height of their popularity in the 50’s and 60’s (apparently their use as baby names flatlined in the 90’s), there may not be many Debbies among up and coming generations of dancers.
The more revolutions I make around the sun, the more I am accepting of myself, and of things as they are- including the name that I hated for so long when I was young. My parents gave it to me, and since they are now both departed from this earth, I appreciate that my name ties me to them. Even though it doesn’t seem at first blush a fitting name for someone who’s primary (actually, only) artistic avocation for the last 30 years has been Egyptian dance- it is ok. It’s me, it’s my name, and this dance has become a fundamental part of who I am. So in the end, there is nothing more appropriate than dancing as Debbie Smith.
On stage with the National Arab Orchestra in 2021