Authors: Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Shauna M. Morgan, James Smethurst, L. Lamar Wilson

Target Group: High School/Undergraduate

Description: These exercises will ask students to consider the power and dynamics of naming. We invite them to participate in the “Shedding the Shame, Claiming a Name” activity before exploring poems that engage notions of naming—including the wounds caused by names, whether they are personal names or violent epithets.  

Exercise One: Re-Portrait Your Name

Learning Objectives

Students will hone their analytical skills by engaging, interrogating, and examining poems to deepen their level of self awareness and comprehension. Using the poems as a foundation, students will research their own name and gather information to create their own poem (see Exercise Two), and expand their use of poetic devices as they make connections between self, poetry, and the world.

Poems

• F. Douglas. Brown, “Re-Portrait Your Name, Douglas.” (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 30-32)
• Shauna M. Morgan, “Resume Names.” (Furious Flower 2019, p. 300)

Instructions

Guide students through “Shedding the Shame, Claiming a Name”

• Ask students to call up language or name that wounds or has wounded them.
• Have students write that word on a piece of paper and take three minutes to reflect on what it feels like to see the word before them. Students may share if they feel comfortable doing so.
• Invite students to tear up the word, throw it away, and write down the name or word that they claim. Students can reflect and share that out loud.

Read poems, reflect on connections, and analyze poems using guiding questions.

• How do these poets reflect on the way one receives a name?
• How do these poets reflect on the way one chooses their name?
• How do names shape the way a person is perceived?
• What are the emotions conveyed in relationship to names?
• What are the thoughts attached to names?
• How do these poets convey thoughts as distinguished from emotions?
• How do these poets invite readers to think about the multiple meanings carried by names (historical, personal, individual, collective, cultural)?

Direct students to research their names (calling up oral histories and/or utilizing other research tools). This will be the content they use in Exercise Two.

Supplemental Activities

Watch Malcolm X Interview about names.

Listen to an album of your choice. (i.e. Earth, Wind, and Fire’s That’s the Way of the World, Pharaoh Sanders, Moon Child) and explore connections with the poems.

View Glenn Ligon’s “Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When Thrown Against a Sharp White Background)” and use it to discuss the African American tradition of rejecting unwanted names and claiming ones that affirm.

Exercise Two: Praise Poem (Claiming your name)

Learning Objectives

Students will hone their analytical skills by engaging, interrogating, and examining the poems to deepen their levels of self awareness and comprehension. Using the poems as a foundation, students will create one original praise poem and expand their use of poetic devices as they draw from the “Shedding the Shame, Claiming a Name” exercise and their name research.

Poems

F. Douglas. Brown, “Re-Portrait Your Name, Douglas.” (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 30-32)

JP Howard, “Praise Poem for My Leo Self.” (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 49-50)

Instructions

Invite students to reflect on and share something from the experience of researching their names.

Read poems, reflect on connections, and analyze poems using guiding questions below.

• How does one learn to feel pride in their name?
• How does a name make one feel powerful?
• How do these poems explore the distinction between the definition and connotation of a name? In what ways do definitions and connotations overlap?
• What are the images, thoughts, emotions, and sensibilities conveyed in these poems? How do they reflect the relationship between naming and identity?
• Are there lines from these poems that resonate with you as you research your name and seek to better understand its origins, history, and meaning?

Draft your own name praise poem with the following guidelines:

• Explore and identify the language of your community.
• Incorporate both the historical meaning and the personal meaning of your name.
• Consider the names that you were given and the names that you have chosen for yourself.
• What would you want someone to imagine or understand when they first hear your name?
• What would you want someone to remember most about your name?

Supplemental Activities

Watch Elizabeth Alexander read “Praise Song for the Day” and read Hafizah Augustus Geter’s “Praise Song.”

Listen to “New Name” by Jah 9 and explore connections with the poems.

View Elizabeth Catlett’s “In Sojourner Truth I Fought for the Rights of Women” and discuss the African American tradition of rejecting unwanted names and claiming ones that affirm.

Study the African origins of the praise song

Research your name. Here’s another source to research names.