in review: What's in a Name?

What’s in a Name?
by Ana Luísa Amaral
Publication Date: March 5, 2019
Publisher: New Directions

Ana Luísa Amaral opens her poetry collection What’s in a Name? by considering the forces that may exist inside of a name. The narrator comments on the way the world has been set up by racism and slavery and gives a melancholic but hopeful message that their story and name (or the names of the oppressed) will still be known later, even if “as some inert matter.” Amaral uses the idea of a rose to suggest the narrator and their lover can be as free as a rose’s scent, not physically tethered and attached to a specific life cycle, but able to linger and diffuse—to be preserved over time in a container, or let loose and, once loosened, never to be captured again. Amaral proves in this collection to be comfortable engaging with the ethereal forces of a name and its relationship to love and worth.

 The titular question “What’s in a Name?” also references a point of contention for the star-crossed lovers in Romeo and Juliet, wherein Juliet asks Romeo to shed his familial name, as she’ll shed hers, so that they can be together without bearing the consequences of such associations from their feuding families. As suggested by the reference to Romeo and Juliet’s love story, it is a life-and-death situation on which Amaral sets the base of her book of poetry,  explored in the text’s portrayals of immigration and refugee trials.

The collection is first comprised by musings on objects’ and animals’ identities, and then by the known and unknown identities of people. Worse fates always befall people who go unknown, especially refugees. The text speaks specifically to Mediterranean and Syrian refugees, possibly so that Amaral could take full advantage of alluding to biblical and mythical Greek written works that were also focused in the same geographic/climatic locations. At times, these allusions are plainly laid out. Throughout, physical and emotional movements are extremely important as Amaral explores how the act of naming imbues worth, acts of tenderness become perverted, and the relationship between parent and child broken or altered.

Amaral’s passion really shines when speaking about refugees, and unfortunately the poems that tackle this subject come late in the collection. However, her earlier poems can be seen to function as getting the audience to think about how they identify or name objects, pets, and descendants. Primed in that way, when they arrive at Amaral’s portrayals of refugees, the audience is ready to consider how they think of—and therefore dole out worth to—non-relatives or strangers. Consistently throughout the collection, but directly in the poem “What’s not in a name,” Amaral begs the reader to realize that the possession of a name or citizenship status does not equate potential worth, describing the touch from a newborn daughter’s hand: “those fingers as yet unnamed, / but of such unfettered / entire perfection.”

—Elizabeth Campos