People change their names, or the names they call themselves.
Its a fact.
I have changed the name i call myself numerous times. and numerous times i have contemplated the sound.
i can blame it on a couple of things i sorta adhere to, that propagate this strange phenomenon. But right now i'm just going to focus on the environment, if you will, of the change.
1989: when i was thirteen i adopted the tag "Shadow/spelled Seadow" tho..'doh'. I don't know why I felt the need to give myself a "street name" but every body...and well...and i would scrawl this tag on notebooks tables, etc and more, sign my stories n poetry with it.
1991 I was writing for a teen news publication, "New Expression" this is when i adopted dub: Ninti. This is also the year I became familiar with Islam, (my family is christian and so was i) I studied with a bredren who also wrote for the paper, then converted to Islam. No, we didn't have anything going on. Yes, i believed. But it was hard being a muslim as a dependent...on some christians...HA! (just joshin)...
my learning at times presented conflict with the "way" my family thought about some things, practiced some things... i questioned the things we believed. and conflict ensued...as in hearing "you going to hell" or the one time di bredren and my mother argued over the phone about which religion was better, and who was right or wrong...(i think there is where i started to doubt) and then...
1992-3 I called myself Earth. It's important to note that these names are what i called myself and people in close prox would agree or disagree...again, primarily tags at the bottom of my poems n shorts.. I was a Junior at Curie H.S. on Chi's south side, hip hop was the shyt, cross colours was da shyt, knowledge of self was on the table...well, i'd call it that..jewels dropping from the music i listened to...making me read. I was reading The Book of the 5 percent, still studying sects of Islam...my home girl's tag was "Life". We were the living image of those t-shirts with hoods, and the caricature bgirls on the front. one with braids, one with a perm. hahahha!
1994-2000 Mickey was the case that they gave me....its what the hood called me, after hearing my family say it once. by the hood i mean the children i went to grammar school with, who lived on my block or the next, whom i kicked it with outside of school, who i grew up with. nosey asses, love my niggas! but up til then it had been a secret sound...confined within the safety of my home. So on any random afternoon in spring through many summers i'd hear "Mickey" no, more like "Mickaaay" which eventually graduated to Mickey Fickey after i'd been overheard over blunts soaked in orange juice drying and lemonade, mocking the way public television had started censoring curse words.
2002-2006
Nothing...in fact i hadn't written...or expressed very much.
2007 MindSyte (sight) the other half of the year it was StarNine...i dumbed it down to Syte. I had gotten back to writing, started battling my son's father, my friend B-love. who now calls himsef Sharif Allah.
2008 StormSerene was what i used to sign my attempted prose, while Classic Anomaly is what i used in my journal. i'd heard if you want something to happen write it down . Later in the year, MadPeace came to mind.
i had by this time, been witness to a 2 year hood war, which was wild because, like i said, we all grew up together...so if u know me, you know i loved everybody. and i was quite taken aback.
That oxymoron came to mind because it described me at the time...it described how i felt about myself at the time. how i felt about my environment. it described my internal processes, the questioning, the doubt, the needing justification, worth, values, systems, desires
That oxymoron came to mind, as i was searching for another oxymoron to pen these changes i was dealing with..
i remembered 1995: the bredren Madpeace who spit fire poetics at LitEx. I remember why I even know he existed: my homegirl "life" aka Tia said i should check it out, get out the house...after losing a friend to gun violence. He called himself Bone.
Met folks there that I'm still cool with. Got in touch with people who called each other "brother/sister"...talked about justice and equality and beautiful things like that, with a lil bit of asshole...which makes it real...remembered how chillin at the book store on the six corners was like a healing for my soul. So i decided to roll with the name. I was estranged from some good friends that were in the basement of the book store with me...carried on life's winds...then i ran into a bredren who didn't know I called myself Madpeace, whom i met at Lit Ex, who happened to once be married to my homegirl "Life", who I hadn't spoken to in years...who linked me with this one and that one... amazing.
sound.
in 2009 i added Koren D. to the MadPeace. Now the funny thing is, when i stopped hearing MadPeace as an oxymoron but more like "mad peace" like how bboys and girls say "mad" like "that joint is mad tight" - i gained more clarity on the way to express myself. and so, it's what I sign my work with.
This is about as vain as i wanna get...k peace out!
