𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐚𝐭

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐚𝐭

We name the things we cannot bear to call by their first name.

— • —

The house gets an ancestor’s name, said softly at the threshold like a small prayer, and what we mean is: stay. What we mean is: I have not let you go, I have built a structure around your absence and now I live inside it. The car gets a name too, some affectionate diminutive that makes it sound like a person who might still answer if you called loud enough in the driveway.

This is not dishonesty. Or it is, but the kind we are permitted, the kind that doesn’t quite count, because surely grief has a right to wear a disguise sometimes. Surely loss is allowed to walk around in a borrowed coat.

But I think about how careful we are with our own tears. We call them tired. We call them hormonal, or emotional, or just a long week. We layer name over name over name until the original feeling is buried so deep under its euphemisms that we ourselves forget what we were actually crying about. A house named after the dead is at least honest in its architecture, anyone walking past can read what it’s for. But a woman who says she’s “just tired” when she means she is breaking is constructing something with no visible foundation. We are covetous of our own pain. We hoard it under polite words the way some people hoard money under floorboards, as if naming it plainly would be a kind of discounting, a kind of loss we cannot afford on top of the loss we’re already carrying.

Calling a spade a spade has never been popular in our households. We were taught, I think, that softness in speech is itself a virtue, and there is truth in that, the Quran does ask us to speak gently even to those who wrong us. But somewhere between gentleness and avoidance we lost the ability to tell the difference, and now an entire culture of people can sit in a room together knowing exactly what is wrong and agreeing, wordlessly, never to say it.

“إِنَّ الصِّدْقَ يَهْدِي إِلَى الْبِرِّ، وَإِنَّ الْبِرَّ يَهْدِي إِلَى الْجَنَّةِ، وَإِنَّ الرَّجُلَ لَيَصْدُقُ حَتَّى يَكُونَ صِدِّيقًا، وَإِنَّ الْكَذِبَ يَهْدِي إِلَى الْفُجُورِ، وَإِنَّ الْفُجُورَ يَهْدِي إِلَى النَّارِ، وَإِنَّ الرَّجُلَ لَيَكْذِبُ، حَتَّى يُكْتَبَ عِنْدَ اللَّهِ كَذَّابًا”

This hadith, narrated by Ibn Mas’ud and found in Bukhari and Muslim, where the Prophet, ﷺ , lays out something close to a map. Truthfulness leads to righteousness, and righteousness leads to Paradise, and a person keeps choosing truth until Allah writes him down as one of the truthful. Falsehood leads the other way, toward corruption, toward the Fire, and a person keeps choosing it until he is written down as a liar. A euphemism is still a small falsehood. A renamed grief is still an unnamed grief, just better dressed.

When the Prophet’s ﷺ. infant son Ibrahim died, he wept, openly, in front of companions who were startled, because they had heard him speak against excessive displays of mourning before. He didn’t reach for a euphemism. He didn’t call his tears something else to make them more presentable.

‏”‏إِنَّ الْعَيْنَ تَدْمَعُ، وَالْقَلْبَ يَحْزَنُ، وَلاَ نَقُولُ إِلاَّ مَا يَرْضَى رَبُّنَا، وَإِنَّا بِفِرَاقِكَ يَا إِبْرَاهِيمُ لَمَحْزُونُونَ”

He said, in essence, that the eye weeps and the heart grieves, and still we will not say anything except what is pleasing to our Lord. And then, without flinching from the word itself, he turned to his son and said plainly that he was grieved by his leaving.

He called his grief grief. He just didn’t let it author his speech beyond that.

There is a difference between dishonesty toward your own heart and discipline over your tongue, and most of us have those two things emulsioned together. We are disciplined liars to ourselves and undisciplined narrators of our pain to everyone else, scattering half truths into rooms that never asked.

I think this is why the people who insist on calling things by their real names are so rarely understood. The ferociously honest ones, the earthy ones who say grief when they mean grief and anger when they mean anger, who will not rename a house’s sorrow into nostalgia or a daughter’s name into mere tradition without admitting the ache underneath it, these people unsettle a room built on softer words. Their honesty reads as harshness because everyone else has been speaking in translation for so long they’ve forgotten what the original language sounds like. We call such people difficult. We call them too much. We rarely call them what they are, which is simply people who refuse to give their tears another name.

— • —

Maybe we name them honestly, as acknowledgment rather than disguise. To weep, and still say only what is true.