In an age of prejudice, reclaiming your name can be the most revolutionary act of all.
When Mohamed Hammoud arrived in Canada as a child refugee from Lebanon, his family renamed him Mike, a gesture meant to shield him from prejudice but one that erased elements of his history, faith, and roots. At home, he was still Mohamed or, more intimately, Hamoudi. In public, he became someone else. That fracture between identities bred silence, impostor syndrome, and a restless search for belonging.
My Name Is Mohamed is not only a story of exile and assimilation. It is a vessel of memory, of remembrance. A weaving of wounds into wisdom. Within these pages, Hammoud gathers fragments once buried, not to dwell in the past but to honor it, because memory is not where we get stuck; it is where we begin to understand.
Through scenes of war and migration, classrooms and prayer tablets, Hammoud shows that losing a name is never just personal. It mirrors the rifts in our world: racism, Islamophobia, intolerance, and the politics of otherness that divide societies and corrode confidence. What begins as a child's fracture grows into a meditation on faith, resilience, and belonging for anyone who has led to believe they are too much, not enough, or unseen.
From his idyllic childhood in Beirut to the violence of civil war, from the quiet erasure of assimilation to a TEDx Talk that catalyzed healing, Hammoud illustrates that remembrance is at the heart of faith and shows how reclaiming a name can become a radical act of love for self, community, and truth. Urgent and lyrical, My Name Is Mohamed is personal and universal: a love letter to a homeland, to a mother, and to every soul struggling to fit into a world that was never built for them.
