What’s in a Name? My Real Last Name Is Maraj

As I alluded to in the previous section, Nicki Minaj’s fluidity is not only facilitated by her extraordinary position as a celebrity entertainer. I argue that her renaming casts her as even more ambiguous, erasing the one unambiguous signal to her douglaness, her Indian last name. Her Indian surname Maraj leaves less open to interpretation than phenotypical features like hair texture, facial features, and face structure. Onika Tanya Maraj, her name given at birth, does not connote the same meaning as Nicki Minaj, her name created for marketing purposes. “Maraj” signals her Indo-Trinidadian (in the Caribbean context) or South Asian (in the US context) ethnic inheritance which blurs understandings of her phenotypical markers of blackness (as Africanness) as well as her performance of blackness as a celebrity hip-hop artist. Ali Ahmed (2010) and Wilhelm Van der Merwe and Justine Burns (2008) establish that surnames convey information about ethnic or racial identity, and Jonathan Herring (2013) explains that the surname signals “we-identity” or group identity and also establishes, based on the power of patronymy, the link to the father, who Minaj acknowledges as the source of her Indian ethnic heritage—“my father is half Indian yes” (Sanjay 2011, 1).

The moniker Nicki Minaj was created by her first producer, Big Fendi, and retained to reflect her skills as a rapper and to appeal to her then local market, the USA, and with growing celebrity, global consumers of US popular culture products. She is quoted as saying, “I was known as Nicki Maraj but my first producer did not like Maraj and thought Minaj sounded better” (Samuel 2010). She also gives another explanation for the change, “Fendi flipped my name when he met me because I had such a nasty flow! I eat bitches!” (Grigoriadis 2015). Big Fendi confirms that he encouraged her to change her rap name from Nicki Maraj to Nicki Minaj for “marketing purposes” confirming the relevance of the shift with other industry professionals, “I actually called Jadakiss up. I called Busta up. I was like ‘How’ y’all feel about Nicki Minaj?’ They was like ‘Oh, that’s hard’”⁵ (Hiblen 2014; Harling 2014, 2). While “marketing purposes” and the reason it “sounded better” has yet to be clarified publicly, one can deduce that Minaj sounded cool and in style while Maraj did not. This follows if the excluding effect of foreign-sounding names as examined by Ahmed (2010) and Van Der Merwe and Burnes (2008) is accepted. Within the hip-hop American space, racialized as black (African descended), Nicki Minaj’s Indian-sounding surname is not typical and Big Fendi’s marketing strategy may be read as an “onomastic destigmatization strategy” which involves changing or modifying names to those shared with the majority community or using alternative names in public to avoid discrimination (Rahman 2014).

The name change was accepted very reluctantly by Minaj and her family however. Big Fendi recounts that he had arguments with her family because the artiste did not like Minaj because she felt it was “degrading” to have to give up her given surname and that it was taking her in the wrong direction (Hiblen 2014; Harling 2014). Though Big Fendi was able to convince her that it was part of the image he was crafting for her (Hiblen 2014), Minaj has said repeatedly that she hates the name, a play on menage from menage a trois, but spelled to compliment her original surname, and would change it back to Maraj if her team had not reinforced that it is needed to satisfy her fans (Samuel 2010; Ganz 2010). She explains, “I fought him tooth and nail. But he convinced me. I’ve always hated it” (Hattenstone 2012). Minaj does not elaborate on the reasons for her contempt of her moniker, for feeling degraded by it, or for her concerns about it taking her in the wrong direction. However, I speculate that accepting Herring’s (2013) explanation of the function of surnames and her reluctance and contempt could be due to a sense of a loss of ties to her group identity at the micro level, that is, her family group, and her group identity at the macro level, her Trinidadian heritage in general and her Indo-Trinidadian heritage in particular. Her first rap name Nicki Maraj makes her otherness within her adopted US home more apparent as it connotes foreignness in that space, unlike in her homeland Trinidad and Tobago, which, as we see above, she relies on for her national identity and where the name Maraj is common and its ethnic significance understood.

Nicki Minaj’s branding created a less foreign persona and a more ambiguous individual. Its effect was to make invisible the Indianness that disrupts her presumed blackness in the context of US society and in hip- hop culture. Nicki Minaj, through her multiple personalities mentioned above, plays with race, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities. But as a hip- hop artist, she is still required to perform blackness as it is understood in the USA in spite of her mixed, Trinidadian heritage. Her heritage adds another dimension to understandings of mixedness in Western metro - politan spaces like the USA where the black/white binary dominates. Evaluating her public performance, McMillan (2014) explains that Minaj enacts “a form of black performance art, centered on her body as art object and herself as representation” (80).

As I pointed out in the previous section, the production, marketing, and cultural forces at play in Nicki Minaj’s reality hardly extend to the non-celebrity dougla. Surnames tend to be an inheritance with some lasting relevance to the individual though they are not impossible to change through legal procedures or typically for the female, marriage. What the Nicki Minaj example makes significant is the power of names to clarify group membership where phenotypical features can leave the ambiguous-looking dougla or the African-looking dougla unable to identify as dougla confidently because the markers of Indianness that support their identifications are not as apparent. The question for dougla feminism is who would be the dougla represented by dougla feminism? The individual whose paternal inheritance, as it rests in surname, signals membership in spite of looks? The individual that becomes ambiguous or fluid because of looks? The individual that resides in a space of racelessness because of an inability to fit easily into ethnic categories? The individual that claims a monoracial identity in spite of biological inheritance? The clearly apparent dougla who identifies as such?