Vowels

I take half-measured comfort in the truth that my mother named me after a prophet, Ahmad.

However, in truth, I couldn’t care less what my name is, I just wish it didn’t have to start with a vowel.

Though, even with that supposed blessing, I wish my mom had the foresight to spare me so much disguised misfortune to know that while the name is great, even a prophet couldn’t cure my vocal difficulties.

I think I was around three years old when I started stuttering, my big brother rubbed off on me. He used to stutter too, but he found a way to get rid of it before it got out of hand.
He kept on chasing me with this theory for as long as I can remember.

Apparently, tomatoes held the secret to my salvation. And to a kid, it made all the sense. I was a picky eater growing up, still am, but I absolutely hated anything that wasn’t a cucumber or a chicken leg.
My mom even adopted this nonconventional treatment, but she was only interested in getting me to eat better. She knew it would take more than a red gooey ball to stop me from tic-tac-toeing through the alphabet every time I wanted to speak.

My remedy was more short-pressed and effective, but equally detrimental as I will come to find out later on in life. It involved adopting another name, a word that didn’t start with a show-stopper, Ralph, for all intents and purposes as a temporary measure to bypass my stammer, most of all, when I get my coffee at the Starbucks downstairs.

Ralph came to be my name-in-distress in the most preemptively anti-Semitic of ways. My sister and I had planned a spa resort stay in Ehden, Lebanon. We made our way to Tripoli, then to Ehden via road-side buses and vans.

The farthest we could get to, according to the veteran van pilot, was the village entrance, from there, especially since it was Easter, we’d have to make our way to the resort on foot. The whole village had evacuated to a nearby church to celebrate Jesus’s resurrection and his triumph over death.

To our luck, though, as we were hiking up a hill, a car drives by, stops a few steps ahead, and waits for us to reach it. My sister and I then lower our heads to the car’s window level, the driver tells us to jump in.

As he was getting us to where we needed to be, a car-ride conversation ensued.

With the grocery list of questions usually asked in Lebanon, the guy manifests a question based solely on credible, kind-hearted assumptions, ‘Did you guys have a chance to go to mass this morning?’

My sister sat up straight and promptly said, ‘No, not yet, we want to get to the resort first.’

The conversation kept going for a while, nothing of worth came up, though.

He extended some hometown courtesy by asking us to take his number if we wanted to go around town. And since my sister didn’t have a local number, I was the man in-charge of dialing in his number.

The next question came up almost immediately, ‘What’s your name?’, he asked.
Joana replied with hers and then looked at me as if to say, ‘Oh, shit, A-hmad.’

And I knew, instinctively, that my name was treading too close to the forgotten green line.

I took a second to think, using my stutter as a diversion to keep him mesmerized.

Ralph quickly placed itself on the tip of my tongue, forcefully convincing me to blurt it out; and I did.

Even with my stammer, Ahmad wasn’t going to cut it. You never know with us muslims roaming in Jesus-fearing lands.

Ralph seemed easy to say as well as convenient, given our predicament.

The man seemed okay with it, which begs the question of whether or not he could’ve weathered my real name.

In a way, I’ve come to embrace the embarrassment my impairment has forced upon me, and rather than fight back, I’ve let myself be weighed down and cornered.
Some would flinch at the notion of being called a different name, but not me, I’d rather be called a random name every day than be subject to my own torment.

I’d sometimes muster the mettle to ignore all my ensuing facial expressions and say my name out loud, as to prove something to myself, only to be misheard for Anwar or customer #1.

For a time, I had hoped the Ahmad’s religious mysticism would seep into my being every time I was on the phone with an operator. At least then, they wouldn’t be compelled to think I was having a stroke whenever they asked for my name.

It’s a weird feeling, embracing a name that’s not yours just because you can’t say your own.

It’s a pity that I find myself envying everyone around me, disabled or otherwise, the former because there’s a global consensus that they required assistance when navigating society, the latter because they can simply speak their name.

All I get is a mathematics high school teacher laughing at a student trying his hardest to imitate me.

I don’t care about all the other letters I can’t pronounce, the English language has plenty of synonyms to get me through my days.

My name is my own, and yet, I can’t say it without looking like a fool who’s forgotten his name or an even bigger fool who has to plug in ‘my name is’ before actually saying his name to push it out of his mouth.

The self-loathing didn’t start then, though, neither had it hit its all-time low. My first and only speech therapist takes that honor with high praise, a person who was supposed to save me from my impairment. This supposed doctor pointed at all the children coming into his office as reason enough for me to stop stuttering. To him, shame was my best catalyst.

For as long as I can recall, my name’s been bullying me way before any idiot child crowned themselves the first to mock a kid with a stutter.

With that, I had tons of room to experiment, to discover where I stand in the hierarchy of an all-boy classroom; the spectrum stretched from class clown to class mute, both didn’t do me any favor in digging me out of my social destiny of being ridiculed for a muppet who couldn’t ask for a toilet break.
Even then, I didn’t realize the damage he had done up until much later. And during that timespan, I’d wake up every single day hoping that my stammer would no longer latch on to my tongue, throat, and brain, obligating every word to pay the troll’s toll. Looking back, I was a muslim kid who desperately wished Santa Claus, tooth fairies, and birthday wishes were true.

I’ve been chased around my whole life with the misconception that taking a breath would relieve me from my vocal woes.

Thinking, rather than knowing, that that might be a universal fix is relieving; realizing it doesn’t work on you, no matter how many times you try, at different points in your life, is agonizing.

My stutter and I have been in each other’s lives for the last 26 years.

It’s been an unending game of tug of war, some days, it has the upper hand, others, I do.

But I’ve made peace with the reality that this might be a life-long fellowship.

Glorifying it for something that isn’t certainly helps, giving it a narrative that allows me to be lionized in my own head goes a long way, but I’m no master wordsmith or regal poet, I’m a man trying to outrun a sombre stammer.

For now, I look ahead, towards my maybe-children.

Will my stutter be unapologetically genetic?