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# "What's in a Name?" from Running to the Mountaintop
- URL: https://framboisearchives.net/whats-in-a-name-fro/
- Published: 2026-08-23T14:00:38.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-23T14:00:38.000Z
- Author: M. R. Framboise
- Tags: Runinng to the Mountaintop

In the many stories that will no-doubt make up this work, the subject of my own name seems to recur with great vitality. The stereotype often told about transgender people is that our names are often either elaborate, eclectic, heterodox, or some combination of the three. I suppose that there is truth in that statement. And truth be told, I have many names, but they are seldom said in totality. Each arrangement carries with it a specific purpose; each configuration of sounds works like a doorway into a specific level of my interior.

At the time of writing, the semester has just began, and with that a new cast of people are just now reaching for those doorknobs with a simple question: "What is your name?" However I choose to respond, my response will open a new door— to a new person— into whoever sits behind that collection of phonemes. Each name that I carry holds a specific meaning, and with those meanings, they will each unlock a particular pathway to climbing the mountaintop that lay behind these eyes.

The friendly “Rose” unlocks a different room than the somehow both more personal and more formal “Mikaylah.” The “Dukes” door is ignored with such frequency that even I am want to forget what lay beyond it. And even still, the most visible “Framboise” door doesn’t seem to capture the entirety of my personhood in the way that some might say it ought to.

All of this said, however, it seems quite strange to spend so much time dedicated to a name. Why would we discuss something as supposedly simple as the words used to represent a thing for such an extended length? Well firstly, it *is* fun to ponder on these matters, and secondly, as we climb this mountain, it will be exceptionally helpful to keep all doors open on our journey. So with that, I suppose that I should temper the suspense and move on to the core of the matter.

My full name is “Mikaylah-Rosalina Dukes Victorian Framboise,” and, when said in totality, I believe that that name is the construction that truly opens doors— at least those that can be opened through a name alone. 

## Mikaylah

Starting with this name is quite the challenge, for it is simultaneously the newest name and the name with the deepest roots. "What door opens when one hears 'Mikaylah,'" we may ask ourselves. "Mikaylah" is itself syncretic— almost contradictory in a sense. It is not my birth name, though it retains much of its sound. It is not an entirely new construction;— those are coming later. It is not the most common reference to me, but it is the one that the people newest to this story will hear first. 

"Mikaylah" is not contradictory in logical sense of being *A* and *not A*— itself and not itself— but it is contradictory in the sense that the name itself is an *engine of change*. It is contradictory in the sense of holding seemingly opposed components in productive tension. 

The name "Mikaylah" doesn't open the door to a new room or pathway *per se*, so much as it opens the door to an elevator. "Mikaylah" might be best described as a higher-order *synthesis* of my birth name. As various tensions within my personhood coalesce and synthesize into the person that I am constantly becoming, old names, old ideas, and even the constantly self-replacing matter within my body, sublate themselves into new being. The boy becomes the non-binary person; the curious autodidact becomes the revolutionary theorist, and "Michael" becomes— or perhaps *is becoming*— "Mikaylah."

## Rosalina

With the seemingly endless stream of "Rosas," "Rosies," and "Roses" spread across my family, it would be exceedingly easy to declare that I chose the name "Rosalina" to honor them. And while that claim would certainly be true, it would not be the entire truth. The claim that I picked the name after playing *Super Mario Galaxy* (2007) and liking the sound of the name would also be true— but again not the entire truth. 

The full truth— the door opened by "Rosalina"— is more complex than either one of those answers accounts for. Beginning with the *Super Mario Galaxy* answer, I genuinely love the game and find it to be one of the most beautiful pieces of interactive art ever crafted. While I am yet to complete it, and my Wii U lives with my siblings now, every second of the game that I have played has stuck with me— including the character of Rosalina. For a bit of necessary context, Rosalina is a time-traveling, space-faring, arguable demi-Goddess who watches over the galaxy and tends to her star-children, the Lumas. Taken solely in the context of the game, the doorway opened by "Rosalina" leads one down two paths. 

First is the path of raw unbridled power. To name oneself after a time-traveling space-princess is to almost unambiguously claim the power held by said princess for oneself and one's own ends. Worth noting is that when we say "power" here, a distinction must be made between "power," which itself is morally neutral and dependent on its wielder, and demagoguery which is quite the negative trait and is certainly not the door we intend to lead down. 

When describing the power possessed by Rosalina— the power that in naming myself after her I am attempting to seize from fiction into reality— we are describing a power that comes with one of man's most essential attributes: creativity. It is no secret that the *Juche* idea of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a core component of my personal and political philosophy. And it is in his book, *On the Juche Idea*, that the respected comrade Kim Jong Il describes creativity as, "an attribute of social man who transforms the world and shapes his destiny purposefully and consciously." He continues later that, "By virtue of his creativity, man transforms nature and society to be more useful and beneficial to him by changing the old and creating the new." It is that process, the naturally human ability to transform the world that describes the power that I attribute to Rosalina— or indeed that I hope the name "Rosalina" attributes to me.

The second path is that of a duty or a guardianship over this world and all of the creatures in it. I have never been of the opinion that we "don't owe anyone anything" contrary to the discourse that permeates the "therapy-speak" world online. In fact, I would go as far as to say that we owe everyone absolutely everything— that we owe our entire community of living beings all that we can possibly give so as to improve our collective existence. I believe that Princess Rosalina embodies this as well. In the game, her role is to watch over the galaxy and maintain peace and harmony over the various worlds. Furthermore, Rosalina is herself a maternal figure to her wards. In the same way that Rosalina is a steward and a protector of both the entire cosmos itself and her anthropomorphic star-children, I feel a similar drive to protect, strengthen, and exalt most high the peoples of this world— particularly those oppressed and downtrodden masses.

While it would be presumptuous to claim that I am some paragon of those virtues, with those paths opened up by the character, and the aforementioned knowledge that my familial line produces variations on "Rose" with quite great a frequency, the name Rosalina seems to map cleanly onto the person that I am actively struggling for and trying to become. It is my position that every effort must be made to live up to that name— that the lines from which I am descended, from the familial to the fictional, must be presented with their most upright character as "Rosalina."

## Dukes

Following the rather dense exploration of "Rosalina," it would seem that we have quite the task ahead of us for "Dukes." It is such a task that a truly rigorous discussion of the name will have to be postponed for a later date. With this said, we may still (if briefly) inquire: "What door does 'Dukes' open?" Dukes is the surname that my grandfather, Ofield, carried with him for his entire life— a life so filled with triumph and intrigue that it is worthy of it's own piece here and is discussed at length in *his* autobiography. 

My grandfather was a public relations man and made great strides for many people over the course of his career. In fact, he is the person from which our the titular "mountaintop" phrasing is derived. He used the phrase sparingly— with reference to only three events across his life. The first came in 1981 when my mother, Dr. Roxi A. Victorian, was born. The second in 2001 when he was awarded the Public Relations Society of America's Gold Anvil award for his outstanding work in the field— being the first Black American to do so. His third mountaintop experience, my own birth on May 2nd, 2007, is the one that understandably have the most thoughts about. Like was said with "Rosalina" there is much to live up to in a name, and I have come a great distance since I was most known as "Michael Dukes Victorian," but there is also no doubt in my mind that to omit "Dukes" from my full name would be a grave error. 

As we will see in forthcoming works, my familial line is full of many trials, tribulations, and tensions internal and external, but it is incontestable that I try to strive every day to live up to being my grandfather's third mountaintop experience. 

## Victorian

The name "Victorian" has a similar historical character— not in the sense of a relative that I never got to truly know but in the sense of every ancestor that I *have* known. So when we ask, "What door does 'Victorian' open?" it may be more poignant to ask, "To whom does 'Victorian' lead." 

The name "Victorian" leads to my father and the line of Michaels Victorian in which I once sat— and potentially still do. It leads to my paternal grandfather— a man who for all of his idiosyncrasies is a genuinely inspiring figure. The name "Victorian" connects me to my siblings— to Kingston-Marie and Nasir, to the people to whom all of my work is dedicated. 

It is quite the interesting experience to share a name with an era of history. I used to be quite annoyed with the observation that I share phonic space with the "Victorian era"— the birth of capitalism itself. It was during that era that Marx and Engels first wrote their analyses on capitalism, dialectical materialism, and fundamentally altered the course of history as we know it. And it is that era that is embedded in my name— even if only through coincidence.

The name "Victorian" holds the historical and the contemporary in a productive tension. The future— my siblings, and the past— the historical sound and the hundreds of years of Louisianais who held the name before me, all of it is condensed into a single word. When I was in the processes of deciding on a name, I struggled with the notion that I was erasing that history. But it is now that I realize that the name didn't need to be *erased,* it needed to be elevated and exalted most high. So with that, "Victorian" stays. 

## Framboise

For the last four names, we've asked ourselves "What door opens with this name?" And we will ask that again, but first I must say this: we will spend tens of thousands of words in this text wondering what door opens with "Framboise," or— to be more accurate— what lay behind that door. The first four names mostly communicate something about the past. Whether it be lineage, a historical era, or a nearly twenty-year-old video game for the Nintendo Wii; "Mikaylah," "Rosalina," "Dukes," and "Victorian" have largely already been written. "Framboise," however, still remains to be seen.

The simple answer would be that I gave myself the surname "Framboise," to honor the character Raspberry in my currently unstaged play, *Mental*. I have spoken at length about *Mental* before, but as a refresher, I wrote *Mental* while hospitalized at Cedar Ridge Behavioral Hospital just outside of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. We will discuss that experience more later, but know now that it was quite a frustrating and traumatizing one. I wrote *Mental* to express what I felt was going on in my world to try and metabolize that negativity. The main character of the show is a girl named *Raspberry* who progresses through dissociation and depression, and I suppose that I named myself "Framboise" (literally French for raspberry) to honor her. This is indeed the answer that I provided in *Mental*'s appendix (written much later). But even if that is *true*, we know to dig deeper than just that. 

It would be equally true to say that I adopted the name because one of my long-term partners, Simon, broke contact with many of his relatives (including his parents) and wanted a new surname. He asked me to pick one and I after going through a few more comedic options, we settled on "Framboise" and adopted them both.

As true as both of those stories are, I would posit that they don't really tell us what lay behind the "Framboise" door, and I think that that may be the point. "Framboise" is a name that entirely of my own creation. I tacked it on to the end of my personal symposium of names; it wouldn't have been there had I not actively willed it to be, and even its origin is of a character and a relationship that I actively decide. I would say that the door opened by "Framboise" is not something particular about me *per se.* It's something more general. It is the character of man as a social being— an independent desire to shape one's conditions for a better life, a creative capacity to transform the world (including oneself), and a conscious understanding of the conditions of doing so. 

The "Framboise" door doesn't open back to another layer of my interior; it opens the door to the future, to becoming, and to the mountaintop. So as we continue on our journey, let us find Framboise!