safeword — By Naa Asheley Ashitey
artwork by Brian McCafferty
My high school chemistry teacher pretended to not remember my name and instead referred to me as “the other one.” My name means princess or queen. It’s why my mother says my first and middle name together. My name is unconventional in the land of the free. The first time I heard my name spoken with disgust I was five. The last time I heard my name spoken with disgust was yesterday. I don’t hate my name anymore. But alas, I still tell people the name I wish I had; the Christian name my parents never gave me. But it’s pointless. No one actually hates my name. Well, some probably do, I know I did for a while. No, they hate the woman who wears my face.
When I was in 7th grade, one of my classmates told me that it would’ve been better for me to have been aborted so he didn’t have to say my name.
Don’t say my name the rest of the night. I’m not asking. But I know it’s kind of an easy thing to forget when you’re fucking my brains out. So, if you happen to say my name tonight, say it like I’m a stranger. Say it knowing it isn't really mine, just the nearest sound a stranger found centuries after I stopped answering.
Fuck it baby.
Just say it anyway.
Naa Asheley Ashitey is a Chicago-born writer and MD–PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A first-generation, low-income Ghanaian-American and University of Chicago alumna, she writes at the intersection of race, medicine, and belonging.
Her creative and editorial writing examines how policy, media, and academia reproduce structural violence—and what it means to resist with truth.
Her creative work appears or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Brittle Paper, Heavy Feather Review, BULL and editorials for The Xylom, Live Science, The Scientist, MedPage Today and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction and a finalist for the Claire Keyes Poetry Award and Subnivean Awards in Poetry, and is working on her first poetry collection.
More at NaaAshitey.com.
Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social