I’ll start with a digression: I am Jajman. That is one of my surviving baby nicknames that has embarrassingly followed me into adulthood. My mom still refers to me by this name, which does not have a phonetic spelling in English. Both j’s are soft, pronounced like the French would pronounce it; like the J in “Jacques Cousteau,” for example. The a between the j’s makes an open-mouth “ah” sound. The “man” follows in Jewish tradition, making the same “min” sound in names like “Goldman.” Despite my monoglot, English-speaking family and our Catholicism, this mishmash of a nickname is the one my mother settled on for me. 

Its etymology is as interesting as its makeup, emerging after my mother saw Star Wars in the early 2000s. Her ears latched onto the name of a side character: Jar Jar Binks. She liked the name “Binks” because it sounded like binky, which is a common word to a new mother of two. I, a growing baby, was apparently very fond of the binky, which was especially effective in pacifying me. So, I became Jar Jar Binky, which quickly lost its hard J’s and R’s in baby talk, evolving into a soft Jah Jah Binky. Eventually, I grew out of the binky, and naturally, that part of the name dropped off. Jah Jah persisted incomplete for a time until my mother came up with Jajman and there it remains. 

So, I am Jajman. I still answer to this cute little nickname that got its life from Star Wars, and I hadn’t thought deeply about it until reading “Alone at the Movies” from Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist.

In his rather short essay, Lethem concisely details how and why he saw Star Wars twenty-one times in 1977. He starts off by  introducing that plot point of his life before casually descending into a deeper realm, answering why he rewatched the film in the theater so many times. Spoiler alert: He was distracting himself from his mother’s impending death. However, he avoids melodrama for the most part and kind of just bears the facts of his life as he had come to know them. He does not embellish his ideas or deepen them further than they needed to be. As he remarks how he was subconsciously trying to replace family with pop culture as a defense mechanism, he quickly, yet delicately tosses it out. As the essay progresses, and as he talks more about his mother, he inches closer to the threshold of deeper contemplative thought. 

He finally reaches it at the end when he discusses one of his mother’s last outings before she lost her strength; the one time his mother went to see Star Wars with him. After revealing that his mother did not particularly enjoy the film and almost certainly went solely for his sake, Lethem concludes,

I was saying, in effect, Come and see my future, Mom. Enact with me your parting from it. Here’s the world of cinema and stories I’m using to survive your going—now go. How generous of her to play in this masquerade, if she knew.¹

It is a powerful ending to an honest essay with emotion that sneaks up on you. This made me think of my own life, my own mother, and my own relationship with Star Wars. And then I thought of my nickname.

Jajman is, in many ways, a stowaway from another life. The simple, happy life that my mom and dad had built in the Rockaways of Queens. In this portion of my life that I have no memory of, I was the baby in this young, quaint family of four. My mom was a nurse, my dad was a firefighter, and my older brother was just budding. This is the life that birthed Jah Jah Binks, Jah Jah Binky, and eventually Jajman. This life died with my father when he lost his life on September 11, 2001, a day when his tardiness could have saved his life. (Maybe that is why I am always at least five minutes late anywhere I go.) Unfortunately, he clocked in on time, and the rest is literally history. I never got to live that life. I grew up in the wake of that life. Everything had changed, but somehow, perhaps through habit on my mother’s part, I was still Jajman. 

Funnily enough, I was actually introduced to Star Wars from inquiring about the nickname when I got a little older. My mother gave me the same spiel I provided earlier, and I learned of Jar Jar Binks and the Star Wars franchise and it immediately intrigued me. I quickly got into Star Wars—the prequels, and it became one of my favorite things as a kid. It also became something I could bond with people over, specifically boys, whom I always had a harder time making friends with than girls. Though I had friends, I always felt like an outsider with the boys, never fully cementing my position among them. I was too young to recognize the school yard structures for their pointlessness; I just wanted to fit into them. Yet, I was somehow keen enough to blame my misfit status on not having a father.  In hindsight, though my fatherlessness might have been a large contributing factor, it was not the whole picture, but I was certain it was back then. I was an outsider, but not an outcast,very much in the middle of the social hierarchy; that was not good enough for me. I wanted to be in with the main group of boys, and oddly enough, Star Wars was one of the things that pushed me toward my goal. However, Star Wars might have been a fad in second or third grade for the main boys, as it did not last forever. Though fleeting at times, it is amazing how movies can act as cultural connective tissue and bring people together. 

Even more amazing, though, is how healing movies can be. Culturally, they can be used to reflect large themes and be cathartic for a nation on a large scale, like Godzilla for Japan, but they can also have immense meaning for individuals. The individuals of my family are no exception. I think my mom and I would have a weekly viewing of Practical Magic (1998) when I was very young. The movie, which came out the year my older brother was born, during my mother’s old life, may have gained new meaning for her when her new life began. Magic is a delightful and criminally underrated movie about witches who are cursed to be widows, starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman when they could still play themselves as teenagers in flashbacks. My mother, a new widow, would watch this movie over and over again with me, and it only now strikes me that perhaps she watched it just to see the curse be broken and the main widow find lasting love again. Regardless of why we watched it so many times, it helped to distract and heal some of my mother’s relatively fresh wounds, while also giving us a chance to bond and create a shared reference bank of quotes.

I’ll also never forget the night my mom showed my brother and me The Sound Of Music (1965) for the first time, when I was around six years old. I hazily remember my brother and I opposing watching a three-hour movie and my mom insisting. Then, my memory becomes crystal clear as the overture plays, giving previews of every song of the film, and watching my mom dance around the apartment. I remember exactly where I was sitting, the light levels in the room, and my confusion and amusement at my mom’s unexpected, enthusiastic dancing. I also remember the slight embarrassment I felt, even though it was just the three of us. Seeing my mom so excited over this movie carried me through the long sweeping shots of the Austrian Alps, which I remember taking forever and being bored by. Then I remember being enthralled by the film once it started. I remember asking my mother what an “intermission” was, and then I remember how much my brother and I loved the film when it finally ended, well past our bedtime.

 It is one of my fondest memories and it is tied together by a movie, The Sound Of Music. That night was one instance of healing. Maybe it was isolated, but it was a night where the death of my father was not the main focus. Though his absence was probably felt by mom that night, as it was an overcrowding absence, it did not loom as heavy. That night was about the new love my brother and I were developing for this film; a new commonality between a mother and her kids. Because of the unifying and healing force of movies, it was a night when Jajman, Bootsy, and their mom felt like a family; bittersweetly, a whole family. 

1. Jonathan Lethem, “Alone at the Movies,” The Disappointment Artist (Vintage Contemporaries, 2006).