Sylvia Wynter's Dream

We’re not allowed to tell our little cousin stories: the lies you tell children for entertainment, the myths or superstitions. My aunt would say we’re not allowed to tell him “Foolishness”. 

Children believe everything. They believe that when you flush fish down the toilet they go to the ocean and that if you walk over them in uneven numbers they won’t grow. 

When she says “foolishness” she is thinking of when she was a small girl who grew up in Kingston and only visited Clarendon on the holidays. She is thinking of Uncle Felix and his donkey.  

Her Uncle Felix had a donkey he would walk down the road, day and night when she visited. There were some days, however, that he’d pass without it.  

She’d ask, “Uncle Felix where’s the donkey?”  

And he’d say, “The donkey gone a college.” 

“College?” 

“Yes, him gone a college in England.” 

And for the longest time whenever she didn’t see the donkey, she’d imagine him in the front row of the class, in a red scarf and round glasses.

When she says “foolishness” I am thinking of the reason I rarely eat pork.  

My father is the type of rastaman who adheres to his own doctrine. His pins of Haile Selassie are on his dresser, The Philosophy and Teachings of Marcus Garvey is on his bed side table, he used to walk with a blue bible in his back pocket.  

On the day he told me not to eat pork I can almost remember being on the way to church. He was on the phone, and it must have come up that I ate pork the day before. I don’t remember what he said exactly but I remember what I was left with after

there were demons in pigs and if I ate it I was in cahoots with the devil.

I was only about eight years old. I thought about the pork I’d had last week, the number of times I’d had it before. Was I going to hell for sweet and sour pork?

His explanation was the story of Jesus casting demons into some pigs who ran into the ocean.

Here is where we get to conflicting versions of the truth. The truth is that this story is in the bible. The truth is that my aunt who was in the car told me that those pigs also died. The truth is that my other aunts tried to explain to me that pork wasn’t the devil. I’ve heard a thousand versions of the truth, a biblical debate of whether or not pigs are unclean all with their own proof, but the only truth that matters is that I didn’t eat pork again for a very long time.

I don’t like the texture of most pork but I wonder if it was like that before.

by Jayda Pitter