Photo © Jón Óskar Ísleifsson

When my father moved to Iceland in 1965, his name was Ahmed Hafez Awad. When he died in 2015, his name was also Ahmed Hafez Awad. This statement would not be so interesting except as it holds true only because of a certain cycle that took place.

My father was born in Cairo in 1942 and was given the first name Ahmed (the one people praise). In Egypt, people also take their fathers names like in Iceland, although it’s different: neither -son nor -daughter is added to the end of the names. Icelandic naming traditions are patronymic. There are no family names, rather you get a last name comprised of your father’s first name and the suffix -son, -daughter or -child (for gender neutrality). A child of Friðrik can therefore be “Friðriksson”, “Friðriksdóttir” or “Friðriksbur”. My mother is Margrét Friðriksdóttir as my grandfather’s first name was Friðrik.

This practice does exist in some North African/West Asian countries, where the prefixes Ibn and Bint are added to names, but they mean son and daughter respectively.

According to Egyptian naming traditions however, my name should be Miriam Ahmed Awad. Miriam daughter of Ahmed Awad. My last name would be comprised of his first name and then family name.

My dad should accordingly have been called Ahmed Salah Awad, as Salah is the first name of his father, my grandfather. This is where the story also gets interesting. In the first years of my father's life, his name had become unusual. The family, or perhaps my grandfather on his own, changed from the usual naming traditions to be able to name his firstborn entirely after his own father, the revolutionary and journalist Ahmed Hafez Awad. As a result, Ahmed Hafez Awad, who later ended up in Iceland and became my dad, had an original name that caused a bit of confusion. Sometimes the IDs got him in trouble, as the his name indicated that he was the son of some Hafez Awad and not Salah Awad - which could make a difference in Egypt.

In 1969, my father received Icelandic citizenship and therefore had to adopt an Icelandic name, because that was the (ridiculous) law back then. He was not allowed to keep a single part of his name, neither first name, middle name nor family name. He told me that he had received a list of names from the Immigration Office, which he had to go through and choose from.

He finally chose two names that he recognized. Omar was the only Arabic name on the list, so Omar it was. Aron was a name he recognized from the multinational group of friends of his childhood in Cairo, where friends were domestic, foreign, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. "I guess there was someone, probably Jewish, who was called Aron and I liked this name", he once told me. So, from that moment he became Ómar Aronsson.

Ahmed Hafez Awad continued to exist in Egypt, but all the Icelandic IDs, passports and other things bore the name of the new man, Icelandic citizen Ómar Aronsson. Almost like the stuff of a spy novel. This was also going to get him into trouble, he was repeatedly stopped at the Cairo airport and interrogated. Why do you have an ID with one name from Iceland, but another name from here? It really depended on the mood and support of the border control staff whether there was an understanding of Icelandic naming conventions or whether dad was seen as a possible criminal who had changed his name for another purpose.

In Iceland, Ómar Aronsson had a daughter Ásrún Laila Ómarsdóttir, then a son Ómar who was named after his father (who was not really called Ómar...) and introduced himself to people as Ómar. I don't remember when the law changed again but by the time I was born he had apparently at some point been given permission to change his name slightly towards the original and was then called Ómar Hafez Awad. I was born and baptized Miriam Petra Ómarsdóttir. That's how I grew up knowing my name. I didn’t really reflect at all, as a child, that I could lay claim to the family name Awad.

Later, Omar Hafez Awad also had grandchildren who called him Grandpa Omar, but it wasn't until I became a bit older myself that the laws changed again and Omar got to be called Ahmed. Ahmed Hafez Awad, named after his grandfather, the man his dad wanted to honor by naming his firstborn after. As we know is often the case . The circle closes.

Then all of a sudden I got used to introducing my dad as Ahmed. By his real name. Kept correcting people who said Ak-med or A-med. The h is not silent and it is not a guttural sound. It's just h. This annoyed me - and him - so he often continued to use the name Ómar. The youngest grandchildren, however, learned to know him as Grandpa Ahmed, which may be confusing in a group of cousins, when it is the same man as Grandpa Omar..

At some point, we received a Christmas card addressed to Ómar Aronsson, after he had become Ahmed again. I told him we had received a Christmas card "for someone other Omar" and showed it to him. "Yeah, no, this is for me." In other words, I had lived quite a long time without having any idea that my father's name was Ómar Aronsson before he became Ómar Hafez Awad and again Ahmed Hafez Awad.

I decided to adopt the family name Awad around the age of 18. It was a simple matter, I presented my case to the National Register, pointing out that my father bore the name and I therefore had the right to it as well. I was successful and I became Miriam Petra Ómarsdóttir Awad.

However, it wasn't until 12 years later that I seriously started thinking about letting go of being Ómarsdóttir. Just be Miriam Petra Awad. In many ways, I think Miriam Petra Awad has a pleasant sound, kind of like what I could call myself if I were a famous artist - to the outside world. I recently removed Ómarsdóttir from Facebook and my work email signature, to see how I would feel without it.

n a way, I feel embarrassed that my dad's given name was taken from him. I often get angry at the thought. I rarely thought about this when I was younger, but after doing my master’s degree where one of my main focus points was the effect of prejudice on people's self-identities, I started to think about it more. Names are very important to most of us and are a big part of our self-image - few of us would want to give them up. But no, naming rules on an island in the middle of the North Atlantic ocean outweighed the identity of a foreign person. “The name does not conform to Icelandic language conventions.”

I also wondered if maybe I'd rather be Ahmedsdóttir Awad, because that would technically be more correct. Maybe get further ahead the alphabetical order when it goes by surnames. No, I didn’t connect to it. In my mind, my father's name was Ómar throughout my childhood (and to some extent, he was also just called “father”, actually...).

After looking at the name Miriam Petra Awad for a few weeks, I realized that I felt something was missing. Ómarsdóttir was a much stronger part of me than I thought. It's technically the most Icelandic thing about my name, and I'm Icelandic too - although names are no measure of nationality at all. The name also comes with this interesting story that I like to tell people. A reminder of how such laws and regulations affect people and individuals. How stupid it is to take people's names. Plus, I follow in my father's footsteps and have a last name that isn't my real father's name - thus effectively closing the circle again, with one extra loop.