Tending to Inherited Ground
Ground Notes - What’s in A Name?
While updating my website and interacting with its AI features, I found myself declaring that I am moving away from Jones—the birth surname I inherited through my father’s family—and towards Mensah-Maes. Because I am someone whose lived experience carries many contradictions, this felt like a subject worthy of exploration. And so this reflection enters the blog today.
Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali made name changes that brought questions of slavery, inheritance, faith and self-definition forcefully into public view. Their historical and religious circumstances were distinct from mine, but their choices make visible a question I am also encountering: what does it mean to continue carrying a name once its history no longer feels neutral?
The name Jones comes to me through my father’s family. My Jamaican ancestry brings a particular complexity to how I process and inhabit the world. My father was part of the Windrush generation, arriving in England with his parents as a child during the 1960s. My research into that lineage has raised difficult questions about possible connections to slave-owning histories. I do not yet hold every answer, but I no longer want to treat the name as culturally neutral simply because it is familiar—and, in some social circles, even prestigious.
I later married a Flemish man and, following English custom, decided to adopt his surname. This became something of a spectacle in Belgium, where many women retain their birth surnames after marriage.
And then there is Mensah: the birth surname of my Fante mother. As I consider the work and identity I have found myself claiming over the past twenty years of living in Belgium, Mensah increasingly resonates with the layers I want my name to carry. Maes holds something of the European adaptation that has also shaped my life. Joined together, Mensah-Maes offers more of the depth I recognise in myself and in the life I am living.
My movement towards this name has not been neat or linear. It has had its own cycle: returning, receding, asking and becoming clearer.
I share this not as a completed declaration about ancestry, but as part of an honest inquiry into names, inheritance and belonging. These questions are not separate from my work; they help tend the ground from which it grows.
