OLORITANA: The Story behind The Name

This is the not-so-much-a-problem with being a properly raised Yoruba woman. I was about to greet you "Welcome" again. Ha! We too greet. But frankly speaking, Courtesy has paid my bills a couple of times and opened doors to me in some medium-high places. (E be like say high don get grade now. 😎)

OloriTana!

That name was not pre-planned.

Final year students in the university that I attended usually celebrate a week-long range of activities, on a department by department basis, where we come together to celebrate the four or five or six years, as the case might have been, that we have spent going through the thrills, rigours and tremors of studentship. We call it “Final Year Week”.

We celebrate culture as we adorn ourselves in indigenous attires. It does not matter if the only affiliation some of us have to our tribes is just our native names. On another set day, we give to our Colonial Master, the English Man, what is due to him by giving up a day for corporate wear, leaving the sports enthusiasts to engage in sporting activities while the rest of us rock yet another day as “Jersey Day”.

The week is supposed to be fun, right? Therefore, we show up in our various ridiculous, very serious, incoherent, baseless, badass and flavourless costumes. (Just pick the one that applies to you and pass. See mine in the image below.) Some departments have more rich kids and classy guys and babes than some others. This is portrayed in their choices of Merch designs, styles and fabrics, which is then customised with the logo of the department, faculty name, and the appellation each person chooses. It was at this point I had to come up with a name for my own customised Merch.

Final Year Costume Day (I’m the old woman in the middle.)

Being students of Linguistics, we agreed to put our professional title first. Proudly. Why not? After all, we were the only Arts students grouped under science cohort, consequently reflecting in our fees. Never mind that we never had a laboratory, until a computer-room-kind-of-classroom in the name of laboratory was eventually created in our final year.

Back to the Merch... One part of the customisation has been sorted. Finishing it up with “Christianah” felt unnecessarily lengthy and plain drab. The “Christy” option was just as worse. I tried “Kreastea”, “Yemmy”, and “Yemmie”. They came off as childish. “Yem-yem” wasn’t an option either, because it reminded me of the shopping complex in New Hall. Just as I fiddled with choices of names, including nicknames from secondary school, a name dropped. Guess, guess!

TANA.

Èmi Tana fúnra mi. Oh, did it feel cute!

“Linguist Tana.”

It stuck and spread as far as the religious fellowship I belonged to, and since then, in 2014, I have been graciously called Tana. By the time I was serving under the National Youth Service Corps, the “Linguist” title was beginning to lose its flavour and relevance. Hence, I stuck to “Tana”.

Come the year 2018, I was making plans for my birthday. Amongst the other outfits I was planning to wear for my photo session was a customised t-shirt. The design I sketched was simple – TANA with a slanted crown on the top of the last “A”. I showed my boyfriend at the time the design and he presented me with the beautiful black T-shirt in the image below.

My first “Tana” T-shirt

Voila! That was how the name, OloriTana, was birthed.

“Olori”, because I am Queen.

Tana, on the other hand, has come to mean so deeply to me. It depicts the Me that is driven by simplicity with an exuberant and open-minded attitude to life. The Me that wants to live unbound, unfettered, unashamed, enjoying life to the maximum.

Just as the name, Tana, has now carried depths, I have dug into depths heretofore never known. The real Me has left the surface of some things and is on a journey in search of the truths and roots in the deepest depths beneath.

OloriTana is fierce and cool; minds her business unless invited to pokenose 😛; fun to be with, with a great sense of humour. I talk. A lot. Even when I an writing. I am two sides of a coin too.🙂🙃 And ICYMI in the tagline, I am a freak, that is, dynamic, authentic, and different, but it's the dynamism mostly for me.

I prefer to underpromise and overdeliver, and considering my personality, I choose to not say much now and let the Haven have the honours of doing more of the talking.

If you wouldn't consider it asking for too much, briefly tell me about yourself in the comment section or via email or the contact form. I'd love to read from you.

So, pleased to meet you, in advance.

OloriTana 👸🏾🧚